How To: Create a Zoom out to Orbit Video

Nothing adds scale to a video like a zoom shot that goes right from your back yard out to orbit. Unfortunately, launching your own surveillance satellite is a bit beyond the budget of most home video productions, so here’s how to cheat and to get Google to do the hard work.

 

To do this, we are going to use two programs: Google Earth and CamStudio 2. Download and install both of them. The first uses satellite images to produce a realistic animated view of the earth from space, while the second can capture anything that appears on the screen and save it as a video file.

 

Once you’ve installed both programs, set them up for the animation; you’ll need to have both running at the same time, but quit out of anything else that’s running in the background. In Google Earth, go to the Places section and make sure that all of the locations are not selected: the real Earth doesn’t have big labels that say things like San Francisco on it. Do the same for Layers, except the terrain layer.

 

In CamStudio 2, go to the Video Options on the Options menu, and move the quality slider to 100, then select Indeo from the Compressor menu (this produces better quality video than the default option; feel free to experiment with the other options if you like). Click on OK, then select Fixed Region from the Region menu. In the dialog box, enter a width of 720 and a height of 480: this will capture enough video to fill an entire video frame.

 

Now go back to Google Earth and maximize the window, filling the entire screen. Find the location you want to zoom out from or into and zoom in as far as you can. You get better results if you start close in and zoom out because of the way that Google Earth works. You should zoom in and out slowly a couple of times so that the program loads all of the required images.

 

Next, hit F8. A box will appear: this shows the area that CamStudio wants to capture. Move the box with the mouse and click in the middle of the Google Earth satellite image screen. You’ll see four green marks that show the area that is being captured. Now use the zoom control to zoom out, slowly and gently…

 

Once you’ve reached orbit, hit F8 again to stop the capture and switch back to CamStudio. Hit the Stop button and save the video to wherever you want.

 

Now, load the video into your video editing program and enjoy! If you want to zoom in instead of out, reverse the clip. Another good tip is to zoom out very slowly, then speed up the clip in your video editing application. This helps to get rid of any jerkiness, producing smoother video. I typically double the speed of the video, so a 24 second zoom out becomes a 12 second zoom video.

 

IMPORTANT NOTE: The images that Google Earth uses are copyrighted, and are the property of the satellite companies that produce them, and they aren’t likely to take kindly to you ripping them off if you’re planning on selling the video you produce. You aren’t likely to have problems if you’re just doing a home video, but you should contact Google if you’re using the video you produce for anything commercial and ask them about licensing the images.