MIDI Controlled Animation in After Effects

Music :
Joey Korenman : Yo Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day five of 30 days of after effects. Today, we're going to get experimental and talk about how to get MIDI information into after effects to create animation driven by that data. If you don't know what MIDI is, don't worry. I'll explain that too. We're going to be sort of in and out of after effects today, because we're going to have to use another program logic to be specific to actually create the media information. Now, hopefully this is really interesting and gives you some cool ideas about unique ways to use after effects. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account so you can grab the project files, example MIDI from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. All right, let's check this out. So let's start out this first video by doing a quick primer on what MIDI is, um, for those you, that don't have any experience with it.
Joey Korenman : Um, and for those of you that do, um, you know, who knows, maybe you'll learn something. So this pro this, uh, app that I'm in right here is called logic. Um, and there's a lot of different, uh, programs out there that you can work, you know, with audio. And you got pro tools, logic, Cubase, sonar. I mean, there's a lot, um, if you have a Mac, it comes with garage band, which can do MIDI. Um, I just like to use logic. So first let me just kind of show you what MIDI is, right. If I hit play
Music : [Alice DJ - Better Off Alone]
Joey Korenman : It just sounds like bad eighties music. So, um, so what MIDI is, it's a way of storing musical information. Okay. So this song, and I just downloaded this off of a free MIDI site. Um, you know, it's got six instruments here and each instrument has its own track. And if I click on each one, you can see that there are notes assigned to each one. So, you know, when you go into a recording studio, typically you have microphones and you record the audio and once it's recorded, you know, you can edit it and do things to it. But typically that's what you got, whatever you played, that's what you get with MIDI. It doesn't work that way. So with this tracks selected, I'm just going to hit play. Um, and you can hear what it's doing, and you'll be able to see exactly what all these notes mean. So, you know, when you go to a recording studio and you play a piano in front of a microphone, um, you've recorded an actual audio file, but when you record MIDI, all you're recording is the information about when you hit each key on the keyboard, how hard you hit the key, um, and you can, and it records just a bunch of data. And what's great about that is then you can change it. So if I take these two notes, I can move them around, right.
Joey Korenman : And I've made the song even worse than it already is. So, um, so that's how many works and you can see that it kind of works on a grid system, right. Um, and this is great if you're, you know, if you don't actually know how to play an instrument, you can still kind of make music, you know, really simply, um, you know, just sort of, let me get rid of scared of some notes here. You can just sort of, you know, program in whatever you want. Um, just by adding notes, you know, there's a note,
Joey Korenman : Right? And so that's how many works now. Um, you know, if you have a, if you actually play piano, if you have a keyboard, you can really easily record your own MIDI information. Um, and, you know, as an animator, this was intriguing to me because, you know, especially when you're doing animations that have to be timed out to music, or you want things to sync up to a beat or something like that, it can be very tedious and there's some ways to do it in after effects that, you know, there's plugins that can kind of try to, you know, figure out when the kick drums being hit and when the snare drums being hit and, and kind of read the audio file. But if you could actually get this information into after effects, that would be super useful. Um, so let's, uh, so first thing I want to do is I want to show you guys, um, how I got some media information that I thought would be useful.