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After Effects - Animated Infographic Video & Data Visualisation

How to make a number counter ticker thing in Adobe After Effects

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hello, welcome to the Number Counting thing where it goes up from 0, in this case it goes to 53%. All right, let's look at how to make that now.

So first up, I've got a project I kind of started for us. You can obviously use your own, go to your Desktop find your Exercise Files, there's one in called 'Pie Charts', and it's called 'Number Counter'. Now what I've done for you is I've created just exactly what we did in the last exercise, instead of having two of them where we had Tablet and Mobile, I've just done one. The percentage is going to be 83%. And I've just calculated that already. It's just a silly disc in the middle, making it look like a doughnut.

Now what we want to do is add the Number Counter. First up, we need the Text. So we're going to grab the 'Type' tool, clicking it right in the middle. And I'm going to type out my numbers. I'm using this font here called Lust. It's a free one, it's from TypeKit, we looked at TypeKit earlier. Now what we want to do is, we don't want to have the percentage in the same text box, so he's 50, actually it's 53%. It's my top one. And I want to have it in a separate box because the Number Counter can work here but it can't append the percentage there.

So, I'm going to select it down here, copy and paste. And it's made it to 54, it's cool. Double click it, and change it to percentage. Now it's kind of in the way now, just grabbing the tool. Sliding it across, I'm holding 'Shift' while I'm dragging. So now we've got these two little units. So we don't need percentage anymore. It's just this 53 that we're going to be working on. If you are trying to edit other bits, I have locked together all the Layers so you don't wreck it, but if you want to wreck it, unlock them.

The first thing we need to do is create something called a Slider. And it's going to control the up and down of this, and allow us to Keyframe it. So what we're going to do is go to 'Effects & Presets', and type in 'Slider'. And in here, there's one called 'Slider Control'. Click and drag it to either here, or it's easier to drag it to the number down here on the layers. Now, this is what we're going to connect to. So I've applied this effect called Slider, and the Slider just allows you to crank it up and down. It's not connected yet. We need it to connect to one of the attributes inside of here. And actually what's going to be good for us is the Source Text. And the way you connect these two together, it's the same as when we add an Expression. Remember, we hold down the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac. Click the little stopwatch. And we've started a bit of Expression.

Now what we've done previously is deleted it, and replaced it. Now what we're going to do is use this thing called the Pickwhip. And his job is to click, hold, drag, he's kind of this little weird thing, so I want you to connect too, and let go on Slider. Click 'return' on your keyboard, click anywhere else in the document. And now, if we put our Playhead back at the beginning this Slider is connected. Cool, huh! So we still to need to animate the Keyframes with this little stopwatch here. So at the beginning, I'm going to set it to '0'. You can go negative, so set it to '0'. Let's start the stopwatch to put in a Keyframe. It's up to you. We're in this 'Effects Controls', you will actually find the stuff down here, there's the Effects. This is the Slider control. And if you prefer using it down here like we have in the rest of the tutorial, you can see the Keyframe there, or use the one up there, it doesn't matter.

So how far along we're going to go? What I'm probably going to do is, I'm going to get it to start about there, so I want this first Keyframe to be 0 at about there. It's this bar here, we're kind of getting it to be associated with, and when it's finished I'd like to lift it up to 53%. Awesome! Problem is, it has fractions, or decimal points by default. It's pretty easy to remove. It is actually counting up fine. What we want to do now is find that Expression that we worked on. It's under 'Text', 'Source Text', there it is there.

Now what we're going to do to fix it up is we need to put it inside a parentheses inside a set of brackets, so there's a bracket at the end, bracket at the beginning, so wrap it up. At the beginning here, we use Capital M for Math.round No spaces. Click anywhere else out, and hopefully now goes up without all the extra decimal points. And that my friends is it. All right, we've got our little percentage going in our cool little graph.

That's it, I will see you in the next tutorial. I'm back for a second. I was just closing the file, and was like "That might kick them up." See over here, in my Panels, we're in this kind of other mode here. So you can bring in Switches, actually we're in Modes. Now if I click on this, that's back to how we've been for most of the course. Click on this again. It's kind of a weird button to find. You can search up here, high and low, but look at this guy, transforms from-- we're going to look at these more, as we go through Masks but most of the time we're going to be here with our lovely Motion Blurs and our 3D. So make sure you set it back after-- the reason it's switched over is because we were messing around with the Expressions earlier. All right, as you were.