Save 80% and get all your credits upfront with the new yearly subscription! See details

5 Shopping Cart
Your cart has been updated
checkout
Categories

Cover image via

‘Beat Assistant’ Automates Music Timing in After Effects

Danny Greer
Published: Last Updated:

Animate video and graphics to a music beat in After Effects!  ‘Beat Assistant’ automates much of this process, cutting down keyframing and making your edit more dynamic.

Edit to the Beat AE

We’re big advocates of taking the steps to make music work with your video editing or motion design, instead of against it.  Recently we covered an essential editing trick – laying out markers in your animation or video editing timeline to identify beats.  This technique is useful for determining where to make cuts in your footage, as well as identifying points where you can edit the a music track to shorten or lengthen it.

A new plugin by software developer Mamoworld aims to simply the process of cutting to the beat in After Effects.  Beat Assistant uses music analyzation technology to identity the beats per minute in a track.  From there, it will mark the beats on an AE timeline using a default or custom annotation (marking every other beat, every bar, etc).

However, the real magic of Beat Assistant is the auto keyframing function which can be set to modify the attributes of a layer (or layers) based on the beats in a music track.  Take a look:

It is possible to setup automations for editing to music in After Effects using expressions (and arguably AE pros may prefer working this way).  Beat Assistant attempts to make this type of animation just as customizable but using more intuitive controls.

More info and download ($39.99 USD) at AEScripts.com

A