MIDI Controlled Animation in After Effects - Part 2
In the second part of our MIDI controlled Animation in After Effects series we'll finish creating our audio-controlled animation.
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Partial, Auto-Generated Transcript Below
Music (00:00:00): [Toto - Africa],
Joey Korenman (00:00:29): This is up Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day six of 30 days of after effects. This is part two of the tutorial series where we take MIDI information and we bring it into after effects. And then we use it to trigger animations. Now I have to warn you that this might be the geekiest tutorial I've ever made in my entire life it's expression city. We're really going to get our hands dirty. And at the end, we're all just going to feel really filthy. But if you can hang with it, if you can just bear with me, let your brain absorb it by the end of this, hopefully you'll have a pretty good understanding of how this thing is actually set up. And that'll give you some really cool ideas about what you can do with this knowledge later. Now don't forget to sign up for a free student account so you can grab the project files and expressions from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. All right. Let's hop into after effects and check it out. All right, here we go. Down the rabbit hole. So we are in logic and, um, this is the track that I recorded for the demo for this video. So I'll just play a little bit of it. You can see the MIDI information down here,
Joey Korenman (00:01:36): And then, uh, I did find Backing tracks for this song.
Joey Korenman (00:01:48): You know, one of the things I hope this tutorial does, is it, it, you know, I want it to give you guys ideas, um, and kind of create, you know, there's, this is kind of something that hasn't been done a whole lot, and it would be really sweet to see, you know, what some really, really creative, amazing designer person could do with this technique. You know, uh, you know, programming MIDI that goes along with a cool song and then using that to trigger animations, um, I'm really excited that it's working and sort of, so anyway, so we've got the media information here and obviously this is a lot more complicated than what we had in the first example. Okay. I mean, you know, Hey, I recorded, you know, the first, third of the song, there's just a ton of data here. Um, and on top of that, there's a whole lot of different instruments, right? There's high hats, kick snare, um, there's different symbols, there's Toms, you know, there's probably eight or 10 different instruments actually, um, being played in here, you know, if we go to like something like this, right. There's a little drum fill in there. Um, let's see what else we got, like sort of over here in the chorus.
Joey Korenman (00:03:05): All right. So if you want to be able to have each instrument sort of trigger a different thing, you kind of need access to that instrument independently. Okay. By default, you're not really getting that out of your MIDI file. So, uh, let me show you what happens. Um, if I just select this MITIE and I say export selection as mini file. Um, there, I'm getting that error again. So, uh, let me first come down here and say, delete mini events outside locators. All right. And then I'm going to make sure I don't have any, any drum hits happening too early. That all looks good. And now export that mini file.
Joey Korenman (00:03:49): All right. Cool. Um, and let me just make a new folder here. We'll call it demo too. And this is called Africa raw. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the, uh, the audio file, just the, uh, the bounced audio. Okay. And then I'm going to grab that mini file that we just made. So let's grab Africa raw mini file. Make sure I have something selected in here and I'm just going to rename. So this is the old, this is the actual MIDI file, um, from the demo. So I'm just going to rename that old for a minute and let's import this one we just made. Okay. It takes a little longer than in the last tutorial, because there's a lot more going on. And if I hit you, you can see, wow. There's a ton of data in there. Now, here is the problem. Um, let's look at channel zero velocity and let's go into the graph editor and let's kind of jump in there. Okay. And you can see there's peaks and there's hard hits and then weaker hits and let's play the audio and see how it syncs up.
