by chromafresh » Sat Nov 05, 2005 11:51 am
We use audio reaction constantly. At first I was grabbing an audio signal from the PA until I remembered that the mike picks up the sound as well. I imagine if frequency-isolated audio is supported eventually I'll have to line it in again as the mike input tends to be a bit "clunky".
Whats it good for? Well our style is very collage-based with about 95% of our footage having alpha. So its easy to set up an item to "bounce" with the audio signal using the scale's "sound in" but the recent preset idea of using "patch" to create an audio waveform gave me the idea to use patch with 2X2 polys, facing the camera, and making it audio reactive. This gives an object a bounce that also gives it a perky little Y-rotation. Its also good because its a patch, and therefore can be set and available as a preset (and therefore assigned to a key, etc), unlike auto scale which has to be tweaked every time one needs it on a new layer. (presets please guys...)
Boris's recent contribution of the "MOVIE TIME" module also allows for audio to control movie position, so that say you had for example, a clip of a glass falling and breaking, the glass would break when the audio peaked out. This is just an obvious example, but naturally you can use this with any clip. I like the way it looks with time lapse of plants growing, etc.
Audio reaction is also available with Auto Move, Scale and Color, although I get the impression that the audio level for my stuff is all set too high, because if I try to use these, I don't always get results that I can use. For example, when I try to use my bouncy patch setting and things are nice and bouncy, and then try to apply "auto color" with "sound in," just turning on a little color, actually makes things ultra- colorized! So an audio level that seems great for the patch setting, seems like too much for auto color, I'm going to try to use a lower overall sound input level next time I think.
Oh yes, theres also quartz composer with its own audio reactive abilities. I have a couple quartz movies, like dots that expand on different frequency levels, that I use in M8 with particles, or just as an item to frame something in the center.
Anyway, thats us with our particular style.
Give it a try, you can get some pretty unprecedented "syncing" effects!
Last edited by
chromafresh on Sun Nov 06, 2005 3:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.