Creating a Music Visualizer In Apple Motion

You can use Apple Motion to create motion graphics that react to audio. In this example I'll show you how to have a circle scale to the beat, a visual equalizer effect, and a waveform effect. You can take these and export them to use in iMovie and other video editors.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to make a music visualizer in Apple Motion.
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So Apple Motion is a tool that Apple sells for $50 in The App Store. It's usually thought of as an add-on to Final Cut Pro but you could also actually use it to create transparent video and use it in iMovie as well. A really cool thing that you can do in Motion is create music visualizers. So graphic elements that react to the sounds of an audio track. It's actually pretty simple to do if you're just a little bit familiar with Motion. This probably isn't the video to get you into Motion in the first place but if you know a little bit this will show you how to create a music visualizer pretty easily and then you can export that and use that in some video projects.
Let's create a Motion project. Let's just create a video and then maybe, you know, if you wanted to go pretty far you could make that semi-transparent or make it green screen and bring it into iMovie or something. I'm going to create a motion project and if you're not familiar with Motion it's really a cool app. But this probably isn't the tutorial that's going to bring you into it because it's very complex. This will give you an idea of what's possible. If you are into Motion this will give you an idea of like how do you do this audio thing. Actually have an item react to audio. All I'm going to do here is I'm going to take the default group and I'm going to add a shape to it. I'm going to add a circle and think of this like a speaker or something on the screen. 
I'm going to draw a circle in the video and I've got my group with a circle in it. So, so far so good. So with the circle selected I'm going to go to the Inspector here. Let's add the music here. So I'll drag and drop a music file in, just stick it in here and then you'll see its got the music sample. If I now play this it's just my music with a circle that just sits there and does nothing. So let's go back to the beginning here and with the circle selected I can go to the Inspector and then there are different properties like the Shape properties. Properties here like the Scale. It will be neat, you know, if instead of 100% this kind of like got bigger and smaller as the music played. 
To do that I can control this number using something like this. If I click here there's a parameter and I can add a behavior parameter and sure enough the very first one is Audio. So I'll set audio. Then it's going to go to this behavior's thing. So I still have properties and behaviors and filters and shape and all of that. But under Behavior's now I've got this audio behavior and the first thing I need to do is  assign a source. So you could see music sample is the only source that's there. So it's going to tie it in and then it's going to give me these audio graph here. There's an equalizer and as I move the timeline you could see the equalizer change. I can get an idea of what parts of the audio are changing. I know I've got this bass track. It would be nice to have this bounce to the bass track. So I'm going to just say, you know, just an area right around here. Pay attention to that area. Then I can also do a vertical area too so it's not really going up that high. I can have this react to something a little bit more in there. 
Now if I move this along you can see the scale is going to change based on the music that's playing in this part at these frequencies. That's exactly what I want. Let's rewind and play. (Music playing) So there you can see in just a couple of minutes I showed you how to do something really cool. Let's duplicate this. I'll go here, Duplicate, and this one has got the same thing. There's two of them. Let's actually move this away. This one here for audio I'm going to change the frequency and let's say go up something high like that. Maybe like here because eventually it starts to play a little bit of keyboard. So you could see this isn't moving here. (Music Playing) So you could see this is reacting more to that sound there. To further go over here let's select this and go into Behaviors and you could see it here. So when we start to play the keyboard comes in and you could see it really starts to move this part of that. So I could, you know, take this filter down a little bit more.
There are all sorts of other things you could do. You can set a floor and the floor and ceiling are those. Frequencies are those. But you can do Smoothness. You could do, you know, do you want sharp peaks, smooth peaks. Do you want it to add, subtract, or multiply to the scale. So let's change both of these here to multiply. Then instead of going 100% and then up it's like going from zero on. So now I get this. (Music playing) So there's so many more things that you could do. One of the things that you could do is you could have kind of an equalizer effect. Let's create another group here. New Group. Let's create a line, draw a line like that. Under the, let's see, Properties for that line we can change the scale to the Audio Behavior there. Set it to music sample and let's set it down to here for the scale. (Music playing). You could do that. But here's the thing. I could duplicate this, Option Drag, make a second copy of it. Let's just create a bunch of them. I can see all these audio ones here. That's the audio for this one. This one. Let's go to the bottom here. So that's the first one. The second one let's have it go to this. The third one go to this. The fourth one, etc. So we're building a little onscreen equalizer. I think we've got one more. So now we could play this. (Music playing). 
So that's like an equalizer.
Now another cool thing that you could do is we can, let's create another group here, and this is the last example I'll show you. In this group I'm going to draw a line, just like before, like that. Then I'm going to set the shape here of the line the width to one so it's just a line like that. I'm going to, with this line selected, I'm going to do Object and I'm going to make particles. So this is going to be particles now. So it's just going to do this like a little particle generator. I need to move this over so I do the whole group here. Move it over here. I committed the sin in Motion by not starting at the beginning and it's always hard to recover. But you could see it's just emitting these particles. (Music playing). Okay, so let's control these particles a little bit more here. In the Emitter let's say the emission range is zero. So now it's emitting them out to the right. Okay. Let's do the birth rate something smaller like 10. You could actually go out here and we can see it's throwing out these lines. Then let's go to the scale here. So we have the scale. Let's add the audio to this. That's the scale. Yeah, there we go. So each one that's being emitted now it's being emitted at a scale based on what it's finding in the music here. So we could go, you know, back to like let's do it for this section here and that area. So now (music playing). Let's go further into the behaviors here and you see it says Apply To, Object Scale. But you can get more specific here. I could say let's Apply To, Scale Only Y. So it's not going to make it thicker. It will just make it taller. Then instead of Apply Add let's Apply Multiply. So it's zero when it's zero and multiplies it based on that. So now, (Music Playing). 
So there's a whole bunch of different ways that you could have fun here with Audio Visualizers in Motion. But then, of course, if you create this project here as a transparent background to make this the color that you want you can tie this to the music and export it with the music and kind of a semi-transparent music visualizer. Then put that in iMovie and then put a picture-in-picture or cutaway over top of that actually make this the cutaway on top since it's semi-transparent. Then you could create one of these as a cool visualizer on top of iMovie. Of course in Final Cut you can have as many layers as you want so you could have this as a layer and then music and then other things.
So Apple Motion has a ton of different settings, different particle effects, replicators and all sorts of things. You could tie a lot of those into the audio that's playing. So really you could just play around with this all day long and come up with new music visualizer types to use in your project.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

File: 2560MusicVisualizer.motn.zip.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Creating a Music Visualizer In Apple Motion”

Afi

8 months ago

Thanks! This is the easiest tutorial I've found. I'm a teacher and I'm making visualizers for my students' beats. I've got a ton to create so I really appreciate your efficient approach.

Kymali T. Ricketts

6 days ago

thanks, could you make one with blender on a MacBook Pro.

Gary Rosenzweig

Kymali: Probably not going to do Blender videos. That's a huge topic and I don't use it. I'll leave that to the many Blender experts.

Creating a Music Visualizer In Apple Motion

Comments: 3 Responses to “Creating a Music Visualizer In Apple Motion”

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