After Effects Tutorial: Counting Numbers

Jacob Smith
3 min readMay 3, 2021

To better my adobe skills, I wanted to try and use After Effects, and adapt my skills in various areas. This one in particular is out of interested as to how numbers count down in videos automatically.

To start off with, I typed in a 0, and to have this 0 move, I need the Slider Control effect from Effects & Presets.

For this to work, press ALT as you click on the Source Text, which shows something important off for later. That swirling icon on the right of Source Text, should be clicked on and then dragged over to the slider effect. When you dragged or type in on the number panel next to the effect, this changes the 0’s number to match that one. So if I slid it to 100, it’d become that, and if I slid it down to 41, it would become 41.

From that option of clicking ALT, there should be a pop up panel for coding. For this to be finalised and run how you want, you need to put the word ‘effect’ next to ‘(“Slider Control”)’ (with no space), then close that all off with another set of brackets. And in front of all that on the left, type ‘Math.round’. Again, important to note, no spaces.

And then when you are done, just set the slider to whatever number you wish, time and pin point where you want this set on your video’s timeline, and watch the number’s go. Depending on what number you set and how long it’s going to take to get to that number, will vary how long it takes to count down.

Final Result

Overall, this has been a very useful and interesting way to figure out countdowns, and may become a very useful tool in the future.

Learnin5. (2015, December 2). Animating Numbers Counting Up In After Effects | Beginner Tutorial. Retrieved April 24, 2021, from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQPwWZuyzZk

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Jacob Smith
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Graphic Design Student at Birmingham City University