How to make counting numbers

Welcome to the discussions, robsowa.

To me, that looks like a video because Keynote can't do the swirling icons thing right before that part that counts up to 25,000 either.

I built a countdown timer in Keynote once...took me HOURS.

I have to wonder if you could just try using two numbers and try one of the text transitions on them to see if you could fake that effect.

Hmm, good point, as long as the audience ends up having the FEELING that it was a count up, that's all that matters.

You'd probably need to make a graphic of digits 0-9 and then mask it off to single digit, then move the graphic fast and loop it. Last time I checked KN can't do builds on the mask or object independently, it does them together or not at all. So you'll have to make a shape with a cut-out see other threads for svg2key. Can do in Adobe Illustrator or anything else too. Having said that it's pretty easy to do the effect in other apps like motion, after effects. I did this in quartz:

Video on Vimeo

The numbers chase; t is year from 1990 to 2030; P is Population chases to 5 mil. The number chasing took about 10-20 min to patch. The flyby and everything else (gradient colour shifting over the day) took a day or so I guess as I tinkered with it quiet a bit to get movement how I liked it.

I did this in Final Cut Pro by using the time code generator and running it backwards. Worked pretty well, though I was doing minutes:seconds, so that might not do the job.

Not that familiar with what final cut xpress can do... sorry. If you want something really basic I can email you a .mov wrapped .qtz file that you can stretch in the timeline (to get the timing you want, as the file is rendered in FCP (it's code not image frames) it should render at whatever time-scale you want) that counts from 10000 to zero and from 10000 to 4000.

Perhaps Brians method is better for you.