How does the Timer Countdown Monospaced preset in AE work?

Question

I made a simple 30second countdown timer - keyframed the value 0,50 (half a min, thus 30 seconds) at 00:00 and then 0,00 at 30:00. I assumed this would change the text every second, however I noticed that the text changed in between two seconds (so instead of the timer still reading 27seconds when I'm at about 00:03 and 5 frames it already changed to 26seconds).

Then I thought moving the last keyframe to 31 seconds would fix this, it did not. The time still changed a few frames before the new second.

I played around with the last keyframe position, but can't find a spot where it changes exactly on the second, and not a few frames before or after, for every single second.

I hope my explanation makes sense.

My frame rate is 24fps. Am I using the wrong values for the keyframes? What am I doing wrong?

Please help.

Dan Ebberts · Answer

That’s a pretty complex preset. If you just need a simple, 30-second countdown timer you could use a text layer, add a slider to it, keyframe the slider from 30 to 0, and add this expression to the Source Text property:

Math.ceil(effect("Slider Control")("Slider").value).toFixed(2).replace(".",":")

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