How I Created a Custom Countdown Video with Premiere Pro and After Effects

Uncategorized Sep 14, 2022

Here's how I built our countdown video. It works for the live stream and for the room, and I'll show you how I made one into the other at the end.

The clock

I built the timer in After Effects and did everything else in Premiere.

If you don't have After Effects or don't want to mess with it, there's a five-minute countdown clock you can grab and overlay on your own footage. It's on the free resources page.

Building it in After Effects

New composition. 1920x1080, 23.976fps, duration set to the length of your countdown. Mine was 10 minutes.

Add a text layer and type "00:00". Center it horizontally and vertically.

Then find the Slider Control effect in Effects and Presets and apply it to the text layer. Drive the source text off the slider with an expression and the clock counts itself down.

Exporting it

Send the comp to the render queue. The setting that matters is the alpha channel, so the timer exports with transparency instead of a black box.

Miss that and you'll be back in After Effects re-rendering.

Building the video around it

In Premiere, gather everything first. B-roll from around the church, motion backgrounds, still graphics, licensed music. Keep it in a consistent folder structure so you can find it again next time.

New sequence. Countdown timer on top, motion background underneath. Then still graphics with whatever you want people to do while they wait.

Drop your b-roll in and trim with keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse. It's the difference between an hour and twenty minutes.

One thing people skip: put a black overlay between your b-roll and your timer. Without it the clock disappears against bright footage, and the clock is the only thing on screen that has to be readable.

Music and transitions

Music from Soundstripe, licensed.

Cut your transitions to the music rather than at arbitrary points. I used a zoom transition going into the b-roll section because the track had a hit right there. That's what makes it feel deliberate instead of assembled.

Final pieces

I dropped in a talking head clip of our pastor speaking to the people watching online, layered with motion graphics.

Near the end, a "service begins in X seconds" message so nobody's guessing.

Making the in-person version

Same project. Pull the music and the talking head, put welcome graphics in their place.

Two versions out of one build, and they end at the same moment.

The outro

I built a 60-second outro too. B-roll with a title card saying thanks for tuning in, see you next week, then fade to black.

Worth having. A stream that just stops is a worse ending than one that closes properly.

Make it fire itself

Once it's built, set it to start on its own. Our countdown fires at 10:25 every Sunday off the ProPresenter calendar and nobody touches it.

Here's how we set that up.

Church Media Training