Give yourself a hand—you’ve done a lot of animating in this project. But you’re not quite done. You’ll add a soundtrack that matches the lighthearted mood of the video, and fade it out. You’ll also shorten the composition, since the last few seconds are static.
- Click the Project tab to bring the Project panel forward. Then, double-click an empty area of the Project panel to open the Import File dialog box.
- Navigate to the Lessons/Lesson05/Assets folder, and double-click the Soundtrack.wav file.
- Drag the Soundtrack.wav item from the Project panel into the Balloon Scene Timeline panel, placing it at the bottom of the layer stack.
- Preview the movie. The music changes just as the canvas flies off the balloon.
- Go to 18:00, and press N to move the work area end point to the current time.
- Choose Composition > Trim Comp to Work Area.
- Go to 16:00. Expand the Soundtrack.wav layer and the Audio properties.
- Click the stopwatch icon to create an initial keyframe for the Audio Levels value.
- Go to 18:00, and change the Audio Levels value to –40 dB.
- Preview the animation, and then save it.
Congratulations. You’ve just created a complex animation, practicing all kinds of After Effects techniques and capabilities along the way.
Editing audio files in Adobe Audition
You can make some very simple changes to audio in After Effects. For more substantial edits, use Adobe Audition. Audition is available with a full Adobe Creative Cloud membership.
You can use Audition to change the length of an audio file, alter its pitch, or change its tempo. You can apply effects, record new audio, mix multitrack sessions, and more.
To edit an audio clip you’ve used in After Effects, select the file in the Project panel, and choose Edit > Edit In Adobe Audition. Then, make your changes in Audition, and save the file. The changes you made are automatically reflected in your After Effects project.
Review questions
1 How does After Effects display an animation of the Position property?
2 What is a solid-color layer, and what can you do with it?
3 What types of audio can you import into an After Effects project?
Review answers
1 When you animate the Position property, After Effects displays the movement as a motion path. You can create a motion path for the position of the layer or for the anchor point of a layer. A position motion path appears in the Composition panel; an anchor-point motion path appears in the Layer panel. The motion path appears as a sequence of dots, where each dot marks the position of the layer at each frame. A box in the path marks the position of a keyframe.
2 You can create solid images of any color or size (up to 30,000 x 30,000 pixels) in After Effects. After Effects treats solids as it does any other footage item: You can modify the mask, transform properties, and apply effects to the solid layer. If you change settings for a solid that is used by more than one layer, you can apply the changes to all layers that use the solid or to only the single occurrence of the solid. Use solid layers to color a background or create simple graphic images.
3 You can import any of the following types of audio files into After Effects: Advanced Audio Coding (AAC, M4A), Audio Interchange File Format (AIF, AIFF), MP3 (MP3, MPEG, MPG, MPA, MPE), and Waveform (WAV).