Looking for ideas...

[Bob D]

I will be beginning a project for our church of the youth groups volunteer work in Tennessee. I did this last year and created a 13 minute project and they loved it. I am using PE2.

One of the things I did last year was to use a map with a picture of a van (they travel in vans) and showed the van moving along the map to their destination with sound effects. I'm kinda stuck on trying to do something different this year.

I thought the google earth thing would be cool, and it still might, but I can't figure out how to capture the "flying" motion successfully. I tried some months back, and now I can't even remember what I tried, but I gave up on it. It never cam out smoothly for me.

I know this is the most creative form in the known universe, so I thought I would throw out the challenge.

Bob D

[Chuck Engels]

I tried a few things last year and what works in a pinch is to do a screen capture at every zoom level and then import those still images in PE with a cross dissolve between each one. It does a pretty good job although it is a bit time consuming.

[Paul LS]

I used Camstudio screen video capture software when i used Google earth and was capturing the rotating earth and zooming in...
http://www.camstudio.org/

[Wheat King]

Here's the write up I did
http://www.chuckengels.com/PremierVideo ... ing_earth/

There's a wmv of an example I did capturing from Google Earth. There was a long thread on this in the adobe forum. Some others had some better quality results with their capturing. I wrote a pdf of the steps and settings in Snag it and Google Earth.

What tool are you using to capture? I think one person even used their camcorder to capture (mighta been twosheds?) That would give a nice DV-AVI to work with if you get the light and positioning right.

[Rockdoc]

Bob,
It looks like you and I have the same needs. I am developing a pilot program on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed for some area schools and want some zoom ins and fly overs to add as instructional media.

I wanted to get the kinks worked out and post a step by step procedure, but I will tell you what I have been doing in case you can use it for your project. I have been using NASA's World Wind (for science reasons) but it does have a plugin called Movie Recorder. This plugin runs by a simple script based on map coordinates, but could be very customizable. My stumbling blocks have been 1) it works in latitudes and longitudes (not a big deal because you can find web sites that convert addresses to coordinates, but time consuming) and 2) I am trying to figure out a how to import personal data (sequence of points and/or shapefiles) to illuminate the areas that I want, and 3) I don't currently know how to do the fly overs (rather then just zooms from space). It's possible that the Virtual Earth plugin could do this, but I haven't had time to try it.

The Movie Recorder plugin saves a series of frames to a folder. These can then be put into PrEl with the "create slideshow" command as suggested in my other post. It works pretty well, but I haven't had the chance to mess with the scripts long enough to see how smooth a slow zoom is.

So that is the state I am in now. When I get my pitch for my watersheds pilot program done tomorrow and my assignment done for my online class, I will take another stab at it and keep you posted.

And, if anyone out there has clues on how to import data into layers in World Wind, I would kiss your... feet... for some help!!

Jennifer

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

You are correct Jamal. I did post on the Adobe forum that I used my camcorder on a tripod in front of the centre of the screen to video the Google Earth zoom.

My monitors are 1280x1024 so the captured images were quite OK. Also, by using the camcorder's zoom to centre in on the main part of the screen I was able to cut out the 'Google' info along the bottom of the screen.

I also remember that some Adobe forum contributors were pretty scathing about my 'videoing the screen' approach but it worked OK for me.

I have since tried using Camstudio. It is easy to use but to my eye it is not significantly different in quality to my video approach.

[Chris B]

Oops. I think that might have been me being "scathing" Sorry about that - it wasn't the intention.

There seem to be several ways to do this - some easier than others. The easiest end is simply placing the camera in front of the monitor as above. If the resulting file is "good enough" then go for it.

Screen capture programs may seem like the most obvious choice but most capture programs don't seem to be able to deal with the frame rate required (There's a huge amount of data and/or processing power to shift around). I've played with this screen capture driver
http://www.hmelyoff.com/index.php?section=8
combined with amcap here
http://www.hmelyoff.com/download/AMCap.exe
and can only get reliable captures at 1-2 frames/second (AMD X2 4600+ processor). You have to do a lot of work with the video afterwards (re-render , time stretch, crop etc.) to get them to work well.

You might also try seeing if your graphics card has a "TV Out" on it. If so then you might be able to send this to your camcorder and record it on tape to be re-imported later. If you have a camera that will accept s-video then the quality will be pretty close to direct screen capture. If I were doing this kind of thing I would probably go down this route.

My Nvidia card has a tv out mode that acts like a window on the desktop only showing part of the screen. This can be used to "clip" google earth (or whatever) to only show the bits you want. Other cards may have similar features.

Hope this helps.

[Doreen L.]

Like Paul, I used Camstudio for a video using Google earth and after a couple of trys, it came out great.

[Bob D]

Thanks everyone. I tried Camstudio last night without good success. The capture was jittery. It could be that my computer isn't up to the task.

I think at this point I will be going back to a map effect. My kids shared some interesting things that happened along the way that I can add to this portion e.g. truck rollover causing back ups, etc.

Thanks,

Bob D

[Chuck Engels]

Bob, If you tell us where you were going to zoom in on, and what your thoughts were about how it would look, maybe someone would be happy to do it for you and post the file in the gallery so you could use it

[Bob D]

Interesting... I'll give it a try.

The trip starts at First United Methodist Church in Arlington Heights, Illinois. and goes to Winfield Tennessee. I wanted the start to begin zoomed in right over the church and parking lot. basically encompassing the whole block it is on. From there it would fly to Winfield Tennessee and zoom down. I wanted the roads and borders to be included in the fly.

If I could get a smooth clip that would be great. If not I can live with plan 'B'.

Bob D