Google Earth Fun

I decided not to wait until Friday to have some fun. All of us in DTLT are acting a bit shell-shocked to be back after Thanksgiving num-nums. I started the week by going through the process of switching hosting for this site. I’m moving to MediaTemple for all of my business and personal hosting.

In the mean time, while waiting for files to FTP to a local drive, I have been playing with Google Earth. It’s been a while, but I have always known that I wanted to incorporate “fly-over” videos into some video projects. The Google Earth Pro program allows you to export your “tours” as movies. The Pro version is $400 though. However, if you have good screen capture software (I used Telestream’s ScreenFlow), you can fake it with a little extra time and effort.

The above video was done by playing the Google Earth tour while recording in ScreenFlow. Then I cropped out the navigation buttons and graphics. I added the Shining music and then exported the video. Pretty simple as far as this goes. More experiments to come. I would love to see some folks do personalized versions of these types of videos. Make a tour from your home (or some other place in the world if you’re paranoid) to work and add the Shining opening theme to it. It’s fun.

Facebook
Twitter

2 Responses

  1. More fun than an iPhone map!

    FWIW for host moving you can save some effort by avoiding download/upload by ftping from one site directly to the other. I use Fetch and open two windows, just drag from one to other, but I’ve heard FileZilla is better cause it will pick up a dropped connection.

    I have a big pile if server baggage!

    Transfer speeds are faster server to server, though you may be doing this way to have backup archive.

    Happy nom noms

  2. Thanks Alan. BTW I use ForkLift on the Mac. I guess I don’t do enough FTP’ing lately, but I do remember now that server to server works. Happy Travels.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

css.php