Creating Computer Map Animations

One nice thing about creating a video for YouTube is having a good example of technology that I can reference. Collecting videos and photos is relatively easy. When it came to adding animated maps of where Goblin Valley is located, I did not know what to do. I knew that Google has a pretty good maps of anywhere in the world and so I started there. I tried to do everything with Google Maps but then thought about using Google Earth. Earth is better for doing flyovers like I have at the beginning of the video (at 0:29). You are limited with the web version of Google Earth and I recommend the stand-alone application as it is significantly more flexible.

So how did I do the animations for the other 2 maps (at 1:25 and 5:56)? I asked one of my coworkers for ideas and he suggested using Microsoft PowerPoint. I know how to do that and so I took a screen shot from Google Maps, loaded it into PowerPoint, then added some circles and arrows. Now I just needed to record the animation on my screen. I used the Quicktime player on my Mac to do that. How? Well Quicktime allows you to do screen recordings. I simply started Quicktime and went into the "File" menu where there is a "New Screen Recording" menu item. It brings up a red record button. When I clicked on the button, it asked me to select the part of the screen I wanted to record. Once I selected it, a large "Start Recording" button appeared. Then when I was done recording, I brought up the application bar and right-clicked on the Quicktime icon. It brought up a menu with a menu item to "Stop Recording." Quicktime then allows you to save the MP4 movie file anywhere you want.

Once I had all of my videos, photos, and animations, I combined them all together using iMovie. Everything came together quite easily looked great. The last thing I did was to add in music and my narration. For that I used GarageBand, but this is a topic for another post.