Getting started with Google Earth Studio
Hello everybody, recently I was googling places for my future vacation and I was interested is there any way to record a helicopter-like fly video without an actual helicopter.
Screen recording fly to Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain using Google Earth
My first try was to capture screen from my phone while looking for something in the mobile version of Google Earth.
The result is pretty decent. Yeah, it is good enough if such trivial animation is the limit of your dream, but it is not about me.
After recording about a dozen videos of this type, I asked my self, — “Is it really only me looking for such a tool?” probably not, and I continue my research.
I found Google Earth Pro for desktop. It was much better. The app allows the user to record customizable tours with a lot of variations. First of all, it was designed to build tours, work with the map, 3D objects and, mentioned earlier, tours. It was initially released on June 11, 2001, and it is about 20 years ago.
Google Earth Pro offers premium high-resolution photos. It could be used for everything from planning hikes to placing solar panels on rooftops. Google Earth Pro has all the easy-to-use features and detailed imagery of Google Earth, along with advanced tools that help you measure 3D buildings, print high-resolution images for presentations or reports, and record HD movies of your virtual flights around the world.
There are a lot of features for professionals of any kind starting from travelers like me and finishing with synoptics and scientists.
The result of one hour of my work is here. The quality and complexity of this video are much better than I could imagine but even this is not the limit.
Earth Studio is a tool for animating geospatial information to create still and video content.
Google Earth Studio
Since the Google Earth pro looks old, feels old and, no surprise is old, I continue my search and found the Dimond, the Google Earth Studio. The service is currently in beta and that’s mean that it is not publically available, any way you could try your luck and join beta testing filling the form using the official website. You also have to keep in mind that it works in Google Chrome only.
I get an email in less than a day.
Just look at this video, just “wow”.
Such videos could influence anyone to start trying to do Earth animations. Of course, most of them made in Adobe After Effects but even the Google Earth studio by itself allows to do the magic.
I recommend you to start with QuickStart and play for a while with five standard animations where the hard work is done for you. You could struggle with the main features for hours so exciting it is.
The beauty of Earth Studio is that it’s an entirely browser-based experience
Once you start a project, you’re given a view of Google Earth where you can either explore or type in the location you want to start animating.
With Google Earth Studio you will be able to:
- Control every aspect of video recording starting from position a camera angel and finishing with the weather, daytime, and clouds.
- Create smooth animations using Google Earth 3D content.
- Create an animation using 5 presets.
- Join lots of tutorials and user group available
- Use 3D depth data saved for After Effects further tweaks
But there are a few sad things about it:
- Service produces only outputs as JPEG Image Sequence for now
- There are many white gaps without 3D cities on the map
- It is easy to get in a mess when trying manual animations
The workspace
What you see now is the workspace where you spend most of the time working with this software. It consists of three main parts:
- Top bar — has a main menu bar, playback controls and render button.
- Preview area — preview the camera rout and preview video result.
- Bottom work area — the place with tools and bars to put the camera such a way as you want in your video starting from camera height and finishing with angle and speed of rotating.
Top toolbar
- Main menu to set up the project
- Search icon to find places on Earth
- Playback bar to control the video you’ll have in result
- Render button to get the result of your project as a sequence of images
Preview area
There are 4 types of screen view available as you can see in the picture.
- Only video preview
- Video preview and map with camera route on the map
- Video preview, camera route on the map, camera route preview from the west
- Video preview, camera route on the map, camera route preview from the west and camera route preview from the east
Position of each of them could be customized or you could switch them or replace with preview the from north, south or from the top
Video preview window
Here you could preview camera route, camera position and of course you could tune it to move faster, slower and smoother.
Style of the map and the action on playback could be set up as well.
Here is the video preview window. What you see in it that will be in your final movie.
The preview quality could be tuned in View > Preview Quality
In my case, I have a vertical video aspect ratio because I working on content for my Instagram account. You could set up a video aspect ratio before starting the project.
Left and right from the main content area are obscured fields of preview, they could be useful for you as an author to preview what going to be next in the shot, but it will not be available in the final cut.
Beneath the preview zone is the editor, it is the primary workspace for animation. The editor contains the Attribute List on the left and the Timeline on the right.
Camera Position has three main options:
Longitude — the angular distance of a place east or west of the meridian at Greenwich, England, or west of the standard meridian of a celestial object, usually expressed in degrees and minutes.
Latitude — the angular distance of a place north or south of the earth’s equator, or of a celestial object north or south of the celestial equator, usually expressed in degrees and minutes.
Altitude — the height of an object or point in relation to sea level or ground level.
Camera Rotation has two options to adjust:
Pan — using this option you could move the camera left and right without changing the position of the camera on the map.
Tilt — using this option you could move the camera up and down without changing the position of the camera on the map.
Each of the options could be finely tuned, just click on that option and the following window will show up instead of the timeline window.
Camera Target — Lock your camera to point on the globe
Field of View — adjust the camera’s field of view
Time of Day — change the position of the sun
Clouds — show or hide
Ocean Overlay — Show or hide ocean topography
Roll (Experimental) — adjust camera’s roll
After you finish work on the project to get the outcome press big red RENDER button, choose the name of the resulting archive.
Do not forget to select “High” textures in Advanced options.
The result of your work is an archive with a set of frames that could be combined in the video.
Google Earth Studio does not allow us to create the video, but we could use a third-party app.
I could recommend you to use ImageJ. It is easy to use and it is free.
ImageJ is a Java-based image processing program developed at the National Institutes of Health and the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation.
ImageJ can read in a number of image formats, but it can save only .AVI files to extend formats list you could add a plugin.
ImageJ could be downloaded from its official website by the link.
Open the ImageJ app, go to File > Import > Image Sequence and choose any photo from the set.
After about the minute of processing images, you’ll have a video preview.
To make sure everything’s ok, check the opened stack.
Save the AVI file by clicking File > Save as… > AVI.
Make sure you choose the correct amount of frames for your video. It should be the same as you set up while creating the project. In the other case, the video will be looking odd, unreal.
The process of compilation video from images is pretty quick, so it should not take much time.
In a few minutes, the video will be ready.
I have a few of Google Earth Studio videos on my YouTube account, so you could check them out.
Google Earth has a massive store of 2D and 3D Earth data, from large-scale geological features to individual city buildings. Earth Studio is the easiest way to leverage this imagery for still and animated content.
For now, you could start with documentation.
