light flicker wiggle expression after effects

There is lots of footage of neon tubes available. When designing a visual effect it is always a really good idea to look at some actual footage of the thing you want to create. Try shooting a neon sigh at 100 fps and see what you get. Neon light flickers all the time at the same frequency as the current. If you want to get absolutely accurate about a neon animation there would be just a couple of frames where the start and end of the tube would have a different intensity and color as the AC voltage is applied. Random and wiggle will give you a flickering neon tube, but this will give you one that is far more realistic. The advantage of this workflow is that you make the effect more believable by reinforcing the flickering neon effect with audio, you don't have to worry about sync, you can precisely control the audio level that will turn on the lights, and if needed, you can slide the Audio Amplitude layer a little to the left or right to give the light a little time to react to the sound. T = thisComp.layer('Audio Amplitude').effect('Both Channels')('Slider') Īnytime the audio level goes above 1.3 the light starts to turn on, by the time the audio gets to 1.5 the light is fully on, and it never takes more than two or three frames for the tube to light up. Here's the expression I used for the values in my audio file: You could change the value2 to 1 then add Math.round() to the expression if you wanted a turn on and tun off, but I think this looks better. I picked values for tmin and tmax that were close together because neon lights don't do much dimming as they turn on. It's just two copies of the same text with one set to a white fill and a black stroke used as a Luma track matte for the other dark red text layer with fill only so I could make the font look more like a tube.Ī little more work on lighting effects and maybe some subtle lens flare and I'd be happy to deliver it to a client. I actually did not need to pre-compose the text layer. Nothing more than Fill with opacity controlled the expression + Bevil Alpha + Glow applied to a Text layer pre-comp. Here's a project that I did in about 3 minutes: Hovering over any point in the graph will tell you the exact values. Here's a typical section of one some stock footage of neon lights I have in my library: You can use the Graph editor to examine the values of Both Channels and then pick the point where you want the flicker to start. Then I would convert use the keyframe assistant to convert the Audio to Keyframes, select both channels and apply a linear(t, tmin, tmax, value1, value2) expression to the properties that would drive the flickering.

If it were my project I would first create an audio track with using stock audio FX of a neon light turning on and flickering. Random and Wiggle will be hard to control and time.

Light flicker wiggle expression after effects