This tutorial demonstrates how to create a dynamic countdown timer effect in Adobe After Effects, incorporating visual elements like a circular progress indicator and animated scaling for enhanced visual appeal.
in this video i'm going to show you how
to create a countdown timer
right inside of adobe after effects so
so once you're inside of adobe after
effects and you have a brand new
composition created we're first just
going to be in by creating
a brand new black solid so we'll go layer
layer
new solid go into color and change this to
to
black press okay okay
and then we'll going to effect some
presets and search for time
so as you can see in the text window
you've got time code we're just going to
drop time code
onto the footage so as you can see this
composition is
eight seconds and this timer is running
for exactly eight seconds
the problem is though we've got all of
these extra other numbers that we don't need
need
so we're just going to move this into
the middle
we'll increase the size of the text
and then we'll just frame up this this
semicolon here we'll put that in the middle
middle
like so now from here we're just going
to go into layer
new solid we'll create another black
solid we'll drag this
underneath then we'll select both of
those layers we'll right-click
go pre-compose you can call this timer
and then now we're just going to create
a mask around that so we're going to go
into the pen tool
and just create a mask around these numbers
numbers
like so and that will get rid of those
first few numbers like so
now feel free to adjust the anchor point
to put this in the middle so
the anchor point should be sitting
between those two semicolons like so
so that looks great but the problem is
that is
counting up we need this to count down
that's a simple fix all we have to do
is right click go into time
and then time reverse layer so as you
can see it's now starting at eight or
seven 24 frames and counting down to
zero that looks really cool
so next we're going to add a background
color so we're going to go
layer new solid we'll rename this to
bg we can press ok on this and drag this
underneath the timer
then we'll go into effects and presets
and search for for
color gradient drop that onto our background
background
and then as you can see we've got all of
these different points i'm going to change
change
color one to a pinkish
purple color color two can be a blue
color three can remain pink color 4 can
be a darker blur
and then we'll go down to blend we'll
increase the blend so that we've got
this really nice gradient background
and then as you can see we've got this
black around the timer
so we're just going to select toggle
switches slash modes
and we'll change the mode from normal to
screen and that will get rid of that
black background
so you can see we've got this really
cool eight second timer counting down on
this really cool gradient background
but we want this to look more dynamic so
we're going to add a clock or a circle animation
animation
and it's going to count up as the timer
is counting down
so we'll go up to this window up here
it's rectangle tall at the moment if you
drag down to ellipse tool
that will allow you to create a circle
then you want to go into
fill select the word fill not the box
and make sure you select the no fill
option then the stroke you want to select
select
fill on the stroke change the color to white
white
you can change the stroke width to let's
go 20 to begin with
then we're going to hold shift on the
keyboard and just draw a circle around
the clock
it doesn't have to be perfectly in the
center because we can adjust the anchor
point in a second
so if we press a on the keyboard that
will load up the anchor point and we can
just put this back
in the middle like so
now if you wanted to you can always
increase the width of the stroke now
that you've got a better understanding
of what this looks like
and then once you're happy with that we
can turn the proportional grid off
and we go into our shape layer so we'll
select the drop down
arrow we'll go to add and we'll select
trim paths we're going to go into the
trim paths menu
and as you can see if i pull the start
down it's going to animate over time
but we don't want to start we want end
we want it to start off and animate on
or we can start it on and animate off
it's completely up to
you so let's start with it on and then
it's going to animate
off like so so we'll keep the start at
100 the end at zero we'll go to the very beginning
