Over the next several days I will teach you how to make your very own heart rate monitor using Adobe After Effects and nothing more than an animated stroke. You first need to make a composition any size that fits your your intended project. When you are constructing project like this it is always important to make the compositions larger than you might need. You can always decrease the size of scale but if you try and increase it will run into pixelation issues.

To begin start with: Layer>New>Solid and create a black solid the size of your composition. (Note: The reason you want to build this on a black solid is just in case you want to lay this over video is some sort of mode the black will allow for this). Next with the pen tool draw out your heart beat across your layer. You can make this a simple or as complex as you wish. If you have a heat rate sound effect you draw your heart beat to match the waveform of the heart beat audio file. Once you have drawn the heart beat you now need to add a Stroke Effect to the solid layer in your composition.

I will let you experiment with the stroke effect for now and try and predict how you might animate the beat. Meanwhile make sure you sign up for our next After Effects class or let us send a “Personal Genius” to you!

Read more from: http://www.geniusdv.com/

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Digital Filmmaking, Final Cut, Post Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.