I recently signed-up for and got access to the new Google Earth Studio web-based animation tool for Google Earth. It’s pretty cool, anyone can sign-up and hopefully get access to.
With my limited experience of animation, I’ve struggled with the main features and have so far mostly just been playing around with their 5 preset animations where the hard work is done for you.
As a result of my initial look, the pros and cons are currently:
Pros:
- Ability to create smooth animations using Google Earth 3D content
- Powerful tool for controlling animation once you understand it with nice features like time of day and clouds to tinker with
- Fairly quick to create an animation using 5 presets
- 3D depth data saved for After Effects further tweaks
- Lots of tutorials and usergroup available
Cons:
- Not everywhere is available in 3D on Google Earth
- Easy to get in a mess when trying manual animations
- Being browser-based, memory and complex geometry pushes hardware and often the website crashes losing all your work
- Only outputs as JPEG Image Sequence meaning you have to manually import and create movies for sharing
Setup (Mac)
I’ve been mostly playing around with it on my mid-2014 Macbook Pro with 16Gb RAM, 512Gb SSD and Geforce GTX 750m chipset. As a result, when doing the heavy lifting, the Macbook sounds like it’s about to liftoff and/or explode. I really should flip to my VR-Ready high-end PC!
I also don’t care for command line FFMPEG so here’s an overview of my process I’ve settled on after much faffing with various options, to get movies out for sharing on social medias:
- Google Earth Studio access
- Create JPEG Image Sequence ZIP (Google does this for you)
- Import this into ImageJ
- Save as .avi movie (at 30 FPS)
- Import .avi movie into iMovie
- Save as .mp4
- Share to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever
Things to Note:
ImageJ needs Java installed on Mac. It also complains about ../private/.. directories thanks to recent Mac OSX updates to security so you have to fiddle to expand the memory allocation to 8Gb+ in order to process the longer animation JPEG sequences (set to 3Gb by default, not enough). Details of how to do all these things are listed here and if I managed to work them out, am sure you can too.
I am sure there are other ways to take a JPEG Image Sequence straight to .mp4 but I tried iMovie and Adobe Media Encoder CC 2019 (my god what a piece of shit software that is) and the other option was Quicktime 7 Pro, which is no longer available/supported. I am sure at some point Google will offer an .mp4 render and download as an option without the faff in the future.
I found this tool recommended on the Google Earth Studio discussion group which should cut out ImageJ and allow me to go straight to MP4:
http://www.dayofthenewdan.com/projects/time-lapse-assembler-1/
After a few attempts of playing around with a blank project, I was confident enough to create the following animation, showing how to get to our studio.
