Google kindly gave me access to their Google Earth Studio platform a few months back. I recently used it to create a variety of videos including a 2D 360 interactive video tour of my home city of Chester in England amongst others as seen in the examples below.
Controls and Keyframing
Camera controls including field of view, location, tilt and roll all have similarity to the type of keyframing you would find in Adobe software such as After Effects, Premier Pro and Character Animator. It’s fairly easy to create animated sequences and produce some interesting videos using areas of the map where 3D data is available. Google have only recently released 3D data for Chester – as its a beautiful city and familiar territory, this made a great focal point. In addition, I added some ‘tilt shift’ effects to Birmingham and Barcelona sequences to create a ‘miniature’ effect.
Exporting Videos
Once you have established the camera path for your sequence using the keyframing tools, it is possible to export traditional video or equirectangular video suitable for upload to YouTube – this process is either completed in the cloud (via Google servers) or by export as individual jpeg frames (which at 50fps is time consuming). Note that the limit per day for processing frames is around 15000. Having uploaded, YouTube then translates the data into a 360 video capable of being controlled with a mouse or TV remote.
Render Quality
Having uploaded 360 videos to YouTube the first things you notice are clarity, resolution and aliasing issues. Essentially, the 3D render contains moire patterns and flicker on buildings with lack of definition on hard edges. This reduced the quality of the viewing experience considerably. However, using Topaz’s video enhancement software it was possible to upscale the rendered video to 8K. When re-uploaded to YouTube the conversion was much sharper with improvements in antialiasing and fine detail.
Notes
- Not all of Google’s coverage features 3D photogrammetry data. The major cities of the world and sites of interest are covered, but there are still many locations with 2D imagery only
- If you’re interested in alternativeS then maybe try Geolayers, a plugin for After Effects. It allows more advanced visual techniques for animating maps with After Effects suite of effects and camera attributes such as depth of field.
- See my previous Google Earth Studio experiments
