How to create a countdown timer (Step by step Canva tutorial - so easy!)

hello and welcome to the live stream in today's video i'm going to walk you through step by step how you can create your very own countdown timer now if you join me live on a live stream you you know that sometimes i have a countdown timer that leads you into the live stream and i'm going to show you exactly how to create one of those so for those of you who don't know me my name is sarah newan and i help coaches consultants and creative pros build their business using video with ease and i live stream a lot about live streaming or to help you live stream as well now make sure that you check out the links in the description because i'll put the links there as well as the time stamps to this video so you can go back and reference all of them all of the fun happens in the description now as i mentioned if you've been lucky enough to be on a live stream you know at the beginning and now at the end of my videos i have a countdown timer and what i normally do is you'll see something like what you see on the screen right now and the reason why i have a countdown timer there's a couple of reasons so the first reason is when i live stream i want to give people a tiny bit of notice not too much um so that they can join me live because i'm sure you all check the schedules all the time but when you live stream youtube and facebook will push out a notification that you're live and if i go earlier 5 10 minutes 60 seconds then you'll get that notification and with the countdown time it gives you a bit of a five minute buffer so that you can see the notification and then join me live if you are available but then there's that five minutes before i start what am i supposed to do so i play a countdown timer with some music so people can just chill out get ready get a drink get comfortable before the live stream i used to tell jokes but i'm running out of jokes so i found that the countdown timer was the way to go um the second reason that i have a countdown timer is that there is a little bit of a delay between going live and then the feed as it pushes out to youtube and facebook so i kind of use the countdown timer as a way to buffer that so that i don't just push live and start talking right away because um i found that when i did that in the past i'd get cut off so i let the countdown time at play and that's why i have that so i can you know make sure that you actually hear all of it and you aren't actually i'm not actually cut off so that's why i have a countdown timer and the one that you see here so i get lots of questions about how do you actually create one how do you add it to your live stream and that's the purpose of today's tutorial to walk you through exactly how i would do it um the one that you see here i've created using canva one of my favorite tools in the whole wide world and i like using canva to create it because first of all it's incredibly simple to do and you can do it really quickly and they've got so many features that you don't need to spend lots of time to pump one out so big fan of the countdown timers i like with canva as well that you can really just you know they've got so much there that you can customize it to have your own feel and personality and even add music to it so i'm going to walk you through how to do all of that in today's tutorial so um that being said when we are creating countdown timers um we need to have a couple of things in mind so let's go over to canva now and i'll walk you through how you can create it and then i'll tell you what you need to watch out for as well i use canva over other um i guess design platforms because i really find them the easiest to use in addition to having the most features in order to create the countdown timer as a video you do need to have the canva pro version yes it's the paid version however if you sign up through my link you get the pro version for free for the 30 days and you can use you know the countdown timer you know and download it during that 30 days so you kind of you get it for free you can use the paid version for free so technically in my mind that's free you don't actually have to pay for it so use this tutorial go create your countdown timers and then you can use it in your future live streams so let's get started into the actual tutorial you'll need to have a canva account i have linked a playlist to all of my canva tutorials i have lots of them and i walk you through everything you need to know about canva this is specifically looking at how do you create your countdown timer so from canva from the home page you can start creating it creating it by doing two things in the search bar you can either search for video and this will bring up um different video sizes size wise you want to ideally go for 1920 by 1080 as the dimensions or you can go the smaller um ratio of that which is 1280 by 720 i typically create it in 1920 by 1080 and it will make make a lot more sense when i actually show you how to actually upload it um in stream yard and things like that so the first thing you can do search for video in the search bar or you can typically find it if you scroll in this recommended section here you'll see they've got video it doesn't really matter or you can go to create a design in the top right hand corner and put in the custom dimensions that i talked about say 1920 by 1080 and select create a design any of those ways will work to get you started i'm going to go ahead and select the video option here and this will open up the blank canvas where i can start to create my countdown timer and it is so much easier than you may think so the first thing i want you to do is to go to elements on the left hand side and this is where you'll like just be so in love with how fast this is so you can create countdown timers to be whatever length you want it to be i'm experimenting between five minutes two minutes one minute i'm not sure i think five minutes is where i'm landing right now i've heard people push their countdown timers and have it go for 15 minutes or half an hour before the live stream and i'm a bit like if i was on a live stream half an hour early and i just saw that that a countdown timer and nothing else i'd probably get distracted and go away and not come back to it but people you know different things work for different people so you do what works for you um let's go and have a search for some of the countdown timers so in the element section you can literally type in countdown and this brings up oh countdown timer nope sorry you need to go to the video section my bad it's um monday morning and i haven't had coffee yet in the videos tab on the left hand side in the search bar that's where you want to type countdown right and then what happens here as you can see is that you've got all these pre-made countdown timers that you can start to use so you know whether you want to go for 10 seconds you literally scroll and pick one that suits you so there's this one here so i selected it it appears on the canvas and i can have a look to see what it's like i stretch it to fit the canvas if i don't like it which i you know i just simply delete it but there are so many pre-made ones here right so you literally just pick one and they're so um you know they're just beautiful i found like they're just this beautiful suite that you can use and like how easy is that and look at all the different designs as well there's bound to be one that tickles your fancy so they've got them in all different sizes over the actual videos you'll see there's like a little time stamp so there's 30 seconds 15 seconds 12 seconds all sorts of times to see what you need i found a little hack so if you go to videos and in the search bar on the top left hand side type in 10 i found a 10 minute timer so if you need a 10 minute timer this is a really good one it's a simple black one goes with everything if you want it less than 10 minutes all you have to do is choose it and then go to the scissors section here see where it says 10 and then you can literally drag it to be whatever length you want so let's just say i want five minutes of the same 10 minute timer design i just drag it and then i can just use start it from five minutes like this there you go see just choose it to be whatever you want so you can trim the length of the actual timers that they have um and that's pretty and that's pretty much it and then you go to download it and then you download it as a video and that's it right and then you have this video file which is your countdown which then you can then use on your um live streams it's that easy you can use their pre-existing ones or you can do what i did and i'll walk you through how i did it now where i use a combination so i use a couple of videos i add the countdown timer so that there's a little bit of action happening and it's not just the countdown timer although there's nothing wrong with just the countdown timer if you just need a countdown you've got a countdown to use from here so so easy to do how easy is that so i'm going to show you how i do created my one so this is the one that you um saw me play a little earlier and if you're on the live stream this is the one that you'll see and what it is is it's a combination of this 60 second one so in the last 60 seconds i'll have this neon lights countdown timer but for the other four minutes i have if i play it um this galaxy with some text and then the first four minutes of the five minutes playing in this countdown timer so that's how i've kind of put it together now let me show you from scratch how i actually did that so in my actual design what i did was i went to videos in the blank canvas and then i just found a background right so i found a background video and there's so many here so i found a galaxy i think it was that i was looking for and i liked the um just the look of the galaxy one so i just chose one that i liked so there's heaps there see you can play it and then have some movement during your um countdown timer so that people can watch something so i chose the countdown timer added it to the actual um canvas i'm losing words today it's monday morning then i selected add new page so with canva we're creating a video here right in the first one i showed you we just had one video which is this 10 minute timer that we trimmed to five minutes but if you want to add you know a couple of different let's call them scenes you do that by adding a page so we've got the first one which is the galaxy and then in the second one i want to have my countdown so all i did was i found a 60 second timer or 30 second timer that i liked so i literally just scrolled through um to find the timer there are so many here um i can't remember where it was so just pick one then i'm going to add that to the screen that's probably not the best color combination but you get the point it's for the purposes of this demonstration so i've got the first scene here and now remember on my actual one i had that five minute timer so i'm going to go back here i'm going to search for 10 there's that 10 minute timer here i'm going to add that to this video so just on the top of it i'm going to drag it put it somewhere on the screen i'm going to select it again and then i'm going to trim it with the scissors at the top here and then i'm going to make that go all the way down to uh five minutes five minutes and then i'm going to trim the ending so that um there's a minute off it so that it will go four minutes and then it will go down to whatever that timer is so that's how you do it and then the other thing that you can do with your countdown timers in canva is you can add music to it so if you select the music tab here not many people know this and it's such a great feature but they have all of this music and the actual provider is epidemic sound right so they've got all these great tracks that you can add to your actual videos and like the catalog that they have is massive like i have a lot of fun just playing around with all of the music and i swap it out from time to time so um they've got all of this music that you can use so you literally you would choose one add it to the actual video and you can play it there [Music] you need to be aware that with um epidemic sound or with canva and this music licensing that every time that you actually create a video you get one license right so you get to use it and you're covered even if you don't have a canvas subscription anymore but if you use it on a new project you need another license meaning you need to download it again so this is something that i discovered when i was um using the same countdown timer um you'll get a copyright claim but then all you have to do is to download it again so that that license is reissued for your channel now when you actually go to download it um oh my little um when you actually go to download it in the right hand side you'll see that if you go to download it has these video options here so i'm going to go to video and when i go to download that's doing something weird here it didn't allow me that option when you go to download what will typically happen is that it will ask you to connect your account so you can connect your youtube account and that will connect your youtube id with the license of the music so it's really important that you do that each time you use the video because you need a license for each time but you're covered under um you know if you have that subscription you just can't use it for new stuff if that makes any sense anyway i feel like i'm digressing so that's how you would actually go ahead and um create your own countdown timer so use the video elements use the music and then um yeah with the you can use a video background and also you can use the video um countdowns there and they've got so many here there's bound to be something that you actually like now once you're happy with it and you go ahead and download it i'm not going to do it now because it seems to be doing some slightly weird strange things um but you can then upload it to use on your actual live streams so let's go over and i'm assuming that i've you've downloaded it i'm going to show you how to do it in stream yard now let's get rid of me here so in stream yeah what you would do is you would log into your streamyard account in the video clip section um you need to make sure that the file is less than 100 megs so it needs to be compressed i found that with the canva one um they i haven't had a problem uploading it um this was another file that i was trying to upload but once you've uploaded it you'll be able to access it here in your video section and then just before the live stream after you've pushed go live on the live stream then you can just play your actual video and then as you can see it's just playing it for me there that's it [Music] and then that's how you actually add the countdown timer it's really just a video that you've created that you then play at the beginning of your live stream so that's it so how easy was that so hopefully that gives you a really good account of how to create your own countdown timer in canva such an easy way and like there's just so much flexibility you can either go really you know get something done really quickly get your 10 minute countdown timer trim it down to five three to whatever time you need or you can customize it like i do where i've got like a moving video background some text and then i've got the countdown timer as you know video scenes as well so really allows you to add lots of personality and you get to add music as well so you get to use the catalog from epidemic sound via canva so that's a really awesome way to do it so hopefully that covers it and now you have all of the knowledge that you need to go ahead and create your own countdown timer um thanks for everyone for joining me today valium fmt um thanks so much for being here super excited it's always nice to have people join me on the live stream you know with tutorials i don't know how it's really um whether people are that interested in tutorials but it seems that they are so if you found this video useful give me a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already i do a lot of canva tutorials social media tutorials and you know i teach you how to live stream in my live stream so i and i have a lot of fun as well now if you are looking to get into the live stream game make sure that you sign up for my facebook live master class so if i walk you through my four-step framework to convert your facebook live viewers into buyers so the link to the class is in the description sign up it's free i know you enjoy it and get a lot out of it i'm going to play my outro now so thank you so much for being here and i'll see you on the next livestream bye for now

Channel: Sara Nguyen

Views: 117,337

Keywords: countdown timer, add a countdown timer to your video, how to make countdown, canva tutorial, how to make a countdown video, count down timer, countdown timer 10 minutes, countdown timer 1 minute, how to make a countdown timer, countdown timer canva, canva timer, canva timer tutorial, canva tutorial for beginners 2020, how to create livestream countdown, livestream countdown, livestream countdown timer, how to make a countdown videontdown video, sara nguyen

Id: Et2sxQouTl8

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020