How to make an animated opacity percentage slider in Adobe After Effects

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SECTION: 4
Camera – 1 Node 9:36
SECTION: 5
Preview & Playback 6:45

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Course info

52 lessons / 7 hours 1 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan. I’m a Adobe Certified Instructor and I LOVE animating infographics & bringing potentially boring data to life using After Effects.

This course is for beginners. You don’t need any previous knowledge in AFX or any motion graphic experience. We’ll start with the super basics, taking simple icons breathing life into to them with After Effects.

We’ll work through a real life projects, connecting Excel into After Effects to transform your boring spreadsheet data into approachable visual information. We’ll experiment with lighting & cameras. We’ll do some fun things with masking, looking at how important sound is in your presentation, all the way through to exporting for Youtube, Powerpoint and all sorts of social media including animated GIFS.  

There are projects for you to complete, so you can practice your skills and use these for your portfolio. There is a cheat sheet and I’ve got exercise files so you can play along. I will also save my files as I go through each video so that you can compare yours to mine - handy if something goes wrong.

Know that I will be around to help - if you get lost you can drop a post on the video 'Questions and Answers' below each video and I'll be sure to get back to you.

What are you waiting for? Lets get making!


What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe After Effects, Illustrator & Photoshop CC 2017 or above. 90% of the course will be done in After Effects but a few things are better done in Illustrator & Photoshop. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

  • No previous motion graphic skills are needed.

  • No previous After Effects, Illustrator or Photoshop skills are needed.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 48 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.

  • You'll learn to take Excel spread sheets and animate this in After Effects.

  • You’ll learn how to make animated pie charts, line charts & bar graphs.

  • You’ll learn how to create percentage counters.

  • You’ll learn how to animate icons making beautiful infographics.

  • You’ll learn how to create 'voice over' infographics.

  • You’ll learn all the animation techniques needed to bring your data to life.

  • You will have the finished files so you never fall behind.

  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet.

  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew.

  • Techniques used by professional motion graphic designers.

  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your new career path.

What is the target audience?

  • No previous After Effects experience is necessary.

  • This course is for people completely new to After Effects. No previous animation or motion graphic design experienced is necessary.

  • This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce impressive video for your business or organization. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with our course.

  • There is a 100% refund if you don’t find this course useful. Just message me, no questions asked, I’ll refund your payment in full.

Course duration 5.5 hours + your study.

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files Download Completed Files

Transcript

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to do this where this kind of image white thing goes. And we've even brought the percentage counter back. It's an easy one, let's go and do that now in After Effects.

First thing is, we're going to make a New Project, then we're going to make a New Composition. And I'll call this one 'Color Bomb'. And 'HDTV'. We're going to make it 5 seconds long. Make sure the background color is black, click 'OK'. Going to bring in an Image. So 'File', 'Import', I'm going to bring in this Jpeg called 'Color Bomb', and I'll drag it on to my Stage. Then I'm going to lock it so it doesn't move. And we're going to draw our little Transparent box that slides across it. It's like that, remember that color circle that we used to create the doughnut in the Pie Chart? It's not that fancy, it's easy to do, and the effect is pretty cool.

So we're going to go to 'Layer', 'New', we're going to make a new 'Solid'. Make sure it is black. And give it a name, this one's going to be called 'Transparent Box'. And we're just going to slide it across. But first of all let's change the transparency of it. So down here, click on 'Transparent Box'. Click 'T' for Transparency, or Opacity. And get it down to something that looks good. You can kind of slide it across, mine's at 65. It's a clear kind of definition of that line now. I'll put it back to where it was. Go back there. So, we just need to add some Keyframes. So my Playhead's right at the beginning. I'm going to click on the Layer, 'P' for Position. Start the stopwatch, and after some time, I'm going to get it, and click, hold, and drag it holding 'Shift', just to get it going across. If you're finding that hard, just drag this little Slider as well.

Now, this is going to be 90%. It's 90% of people of Creatives who use Photoshop as part of their creative work. Now, 90% of this Color Burst, not sure how you calculate it, so I'm just going to guess it. If you're a data scientist, and you're watching me, probably this whole tutorial series you're cringing when I'm just going, "That will be fine." Probably you want to calculate it properly. I'm not, in this case, so...

So, that's it, moves across. When you do a few things, we're going to do some Parenting. First of all, I need to add the Easing. First thing we always do, it's getting to look nice. And then we'll get some stuff to Parent to it. So carry on, because there are a few extra little tips we're going to learn. So we have used the Easing to get it to look nice. And I twirl it back up now. I want to add a line, so it's a little bit clearer. It's fine, but I like a little line across there. Move your Playhead along, so it's completely stopped. Grab your 'Pen' tool. Pick a Stroke color by clicking this box here. I've picked kind of an off-gray. The size of this, maybe '3 pixels'. And I click once up.

I'm going to make sure it's just high enough to cover that part of Color Burst. Holding down 'Shift', so I just click once, then holding down 'Shift', click once again. And now I'm going to have to zoom in a little bit, just to see-- space bar to move across. It's kind of there, just going to move it across. Move it across a little bit. Just so it's around the edge of that. Kind of transparent box there. Now, trouble is, it does this. Not connected. So what we can do is, make sure your Playhead is all the way at the end, so they're both lined up, then all you do is Parent them. Let's actually rename this one here, so this is going to be my 'Line'. Parent them, I would like my Line to follow my Transparent box, please. You guys be buddies. That's Parenting.

A few other things, so we're going to do a Text Box, and at the end, we'll bring in our Percentage Timer again, and the cool thing about that is we can just cheat. Not sure it's a cool way of cheating. So, you... And when it gets to the end here, I'm going to grab my Rectangle tool. Make sure you have nothing selected. If you do have something selected, like if I have my Transparent Box selected, and I start drawing out objects, it becomes Masks. And I don't want to do that, I'm going to undo. Just make sure you got nothing selected down here. Then grab your Rectangle tool. And draw out a rectangle for my Type.

Now, mine's really preset because I was playing around with this, practicing this tutorial for you. So what you might have to do now, is go up here. Click on the 'Color', pick black. Click the word 'Fill', and 'Transparency' down to something else. I've got mine at 65. Stroke around the outside, I don't want, so I click on 'Stroke', click 'None'. So I've got my little box, my Type to go into. Now we're going to put our text in there. I've got some text in the exercise files, but it's not that much, but I'm going to go out and grab it. It's in the 08 Mask file, and it's called Photoshop, I want to grab this text here, and grab my 'Type' tool, click once, paste. Messing around with the Type. I'm going to maybe adjust that a bit. Stick together to fit in there. Yes, it's looking okay.

So, problem again, it's not playing along. Eventually the Playhead is along where it's all stopped, and then say you two, Parent, this, Transparent Box, everybody's following the Transparent Box. Nice! The next thing we're going to do is put on our percentage counter. We don't have to do it again, so we're going to cheat, and steal it from another project. So once you've downloaded all these things you do a lot of copying and pasting, or stealing, or File Save As, and just adjusting it because this one here would be particularly easy to adjust for lots of different data points because you just changed out the Image in the back, change the Text, and you're away.

So what we're going to do is, double click in here to Import. We can actually import other After Effects files. So, in your '08 Masking', I've put one in here called 'Number counter'. You can go and find the one that you've made in the previous tutorial if you've got that around, but I've got this nice simple one here called Number counter. What happens is it brings it in. So, here's the Number counter into this little group. That's everything that was in that project. Inside of here, there's the Comp we made. And what we can do is, double click it, here he is there, that's the thing I made. We might have some font problems because I adjusted this middle one here. This 'Lust', I like it, it's free, well it's part of Typekit.

So all we need to do is, here, I want that and that. I want the 53% and the percentage sign, they're on two different layers, just hit 'Copy'. I'm going to close down this Comp. Now I'm on my Color Bomb, just going to 'Paste'. I'm going to move it along to about there. We need to adjust the numbers now because at the moment, it's kind of working. 'Space bar' So, it's the Keyframe on '53', that are our most important, so just have that selected, hit 'U'. There's those Keyframes. So what I want to do first of all is probably drag this one back to the beginning because that's the one at 0. Then this next one, I want it to be wherever this thing finishes. It kind of finishes about there, so you come along. And the other thing is that the data is wrong. So it's 53. So with it selected, click on this one called 'Effect Controls'. If you can't find it, go to 'Window', go to 'Effect Controls'. Oh, I can't even find it, in there somewhere.

And what I want to do is change it from here, and I want to change it to 90. Okay, I know where it is now, there it is, 'Effect Controls'. So that's it. We've borrowed it, it's working, now we need to Parent it. Do the exact same thing, just make sure

If you Parent it back here, it's at the beginning here. And I Parented too early. Transparent Box, it works, but that's just kind of a reference point, watch... bye. So I'm going to undo, and then before I Parented both of these I make sure my Playhead is where everything stopped and then go 'Parent' to the 'Transparent Box', it's the Pied Piper box. Everybody follows him. That's kind of going to be it. I'm going to add Motion Blur, because it looks cool. So I'm going to close all these down. I'm going to add

It's easy just to drag across them all. Make sure it's on the whole project. It's going to take a little bit longer to Preview. You might not like it, I do like this. And that my friends is a cool little transparent white to show our Data, and we learned a few things, we're Parenting, and how to steal from other Comps. Let's get on to the next tutorial. Easy fun.

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