English "Match of the Day" fans will instantly recognise the sophisticated fly by intro to each football match: the viewer flys through clouds and zooms into the football stadium. Now that's a cool effect and clearly out of reach to us mere mortals. At least that was until Google Earth appeared. Using Google's nifty little application you can zoom right into your house from anywhere else in the world. And if you combine this with a screen capture application you get a free fly through video from your doorstep to any destination in the world.
But that's not where it ends. Combine this with a picture-in-picture effect of a map route and you've got yourself a sophisticated video introduction to any holiday destination. You'll have the friends and family itching to see the rest of your video with this little introduction at the start of a DVD.
You'll need a few tools for the job and I've chosen the excellent Pure Motion Edit Studio 5 for the PIP and map route, the easy to use HyperCam 2 for the screen capture and Google Earth for the video fly through.
First off we need to set up Google Earth to provide an optimal display for video playback. Click view in the menu at the top and untick all of the items (Compass, Status Bar and Lat/Lon Grid) as in the image below:
Now click Tools > Options and in the View tab select the detail area as large (1024x1024), select the Anisotropic Filtering as high and Labels/Icons as small. Untick the compass. Now move to the Control Tab and set the fly to speed to about ten percent and then click OK to return to the application.
Google Earth only renders the area you've visited (I presume the details is downloaded and cached on request to both provide updated detail and keep the download size to a minimum). We therefore need to ensure the areas we're going to fly to and from are rendered before we start capturing. So zoom into the approximate area you want to fly from and wait for the image to be rendered (you'll see it slowly go from blurry to high detail), then zoom right over the house that will be your starting point. You'll notice here that some areas are different colours to others - this is because some areas (the darker areas) have been mapped in higher detail so that you can zoom right with no loss of quality (the greener areas don't have the high detail at full zoom).
The easiest way to fly to destinations is to set a placemarker. I've selected the offices I once worked in (along Fenchurch Street in London), so I located the street and then selected Add > Placemark from the menu. Now label the placemark (and make sure you add a description) and move the placemark to the exact location.
Now we need to do the same with our destination, so let's chose our imaginary Paris office.
Once you've selected your two locations, we can fly between them using the places folder (Tools > Places from the menu). Your two added places should be at the top; to fly to one of them select the text below the blue hyperlink (clicking on the blue link creates an ugly pop-up over the map) like so:
We're now ready to fly! So load up Hypercam 2 and select the Screen Area tab. Ideally we should select a screen area in the PAL or NTSC format - so that's 720x576 and 720x480 respectively. Rather conveniently Google Earth has a video preset, so select view > view size > tv playback then select either PAL (Europe) or NTSC. Now drag the window slightly wider and switch back to Hypercam and click on select region, switch back to Google earth and place the marker at the bottom right of the video window and drag it up to the top left as shown below (include the Google and other copyright marks!):
We can now start to record the playback (make sure you don't move Google Earth though!). So go to the AVI tab in Hypercam and select the compression as Full Frames (uncompressed) and select a location for the video file. Set the playback and record rate to 25fps (for PAL) or 29.97fps (NTSC). Finally Move back to Google Earth and hit F2 when your ready to record.
After hitting F2 you will capture everything within the select region, so make sure you don't move your cursor into this region. Now click on your destination in the places panel as described above. As an alternative, you might want to click on "sightseeing" first to zoom all the way out, then click on the destination. Press F2 to stop recording once you've reached your destination. We now have a very large file of our journey from London to Paris.
Before we open up Edit Studio and start to edit, lets take a screen shot to use as our map: zoom out so that both destinations are in view, then press F2 to record for a second, then F2. Now open up Edit Studio 5 and import both your videos we've just created into your media folder by selecting File > Import Files in Edit Studio (Note that before importing, I converted these video files to DV AVI for easier editing - this is explained in the FAQ). They will now appear in the Media Explorer under My media:
Place the video of your trip around the world on video track Video B, and the second video on Video A by dragging them from the My Media window.
Now take export a still of the map by selecting File > Export > Export Frame and saving. Now import the saved frame into your project, delete the map in video track A (by clicking on it and hitting delete on your keyboard) and then place the new image of the map into Video A. You can now make the map the same duration as our video fly through in Video B by clicking on the end of the map and dragging the end to the same length as Video B:
We now need to make the map smaller and placed in the top left hand corner. You'll see a "move placement" icon in the Monitor window - click on this:
You'll now be able to resize and move the video. To resize, click on the bottom right hand corner and drag towards the top right. Now click inside the resized video and drag to position as above.
We now have the picture in picture effect, so lets add a trace route. Switch to the video effects tab in Media Explorer, then drag the "grey route with glow" to the text/effect layer on the timeline above the video. Now move the start of the effect to where our camera starts to zoom out, and the end to where we reach our destination:
We now have to adjust the route to follow our camera. To do this, go back to the monitor window and click "Move Route". Move the nodes to cover the start and end destination as below:
The line is slightly too big, so to change the trace route properties we need to change the settings in the properties box:
And there we have it. Click file > export movie to include in another project, or use the excellent Pure Motion Edit Studio to complete editing your film. This is just a foundation for your video - you could spruce it up by adding a scroll to the PIP map, or creating a drop shadow for the PIP... let your creativity run wild!
