Google earth animation jerky

[8321]

Hello all,

I am trying to include a bit of Google earth animation in an AV. I use Screen recorder Gold to capture the screen (maximized) and produce an AVi.

As recorded, the action is smooth but played back with Windows media player it is jerky. PTE video converter does not make the jerks any worse but also no better. It would appear to be a non-PTE problem.

I know there was an answer somewhere else about not being able to capture screen animation perfectly but I can't find it now.

I have tried slowing down the earth movement and various combinations of capture frame rate from 15 to 60 per second.

Any suggestions welcomed. Thank you.

Jeff Morris

[Lin Evans]

Hi Jeff,

I'm afraid you are up against a loosing battle. Screen video capture software is designed, primarily for use by people in the "educational" fields where perhaps they are explaining how to use software, etc. This use is not very taxing and the primary "animation" is mouse cursor movement. Even though the "capture" software provides high frame rate speeds such as 60 fps, it doesn't "translate" well because of numerous technical reasons. I've attempted to do this for a number of years and have even resorted to breaking down the captured video into still frames and sequencing these frames with PTE. This has worked "much" better than trying to use the video directly. Also, if you don't need audio for the sequence and it's not too long a clip or too complex in colors, you might try conversion software which converts either the still frames to animated gif or converts the video to animated gif. Where there are images which can be adequately displayed with 256 colors, this often works well.

Back in early PTE beta 5.7 days, I made a demo of some of the great features of PTE. With the exception of the ability to include video clips, it's still quite relevant today. In this demo, I showed a simulation of the Earth rotating around the sun. This was done using still frame captures - over 800 of them converted to PNG's with transparency - to get the rotation for the simulation. It was a daunting task, but the outcome was very smooth "if" the viewer's system had sufficient resources. As it turned out, I seriously taxed the resources of ordinary video cards and CPU's to get all the animated effects with water, snow and celestial motion. If you have a decent video card in your system and don't mind downloading a 102 meg file, you can see the result from the link below:

http://www.learntoma...emoshowfull.zip (for PC)

http://www.learntoma...showfullmac.zip (native exe for MacIntosh)

Best regards,

Lin

[8321]

Thanks Lin and Tom. A very comprehensive answer as usual from Lin.

For what I need, frame capture is overkill. I will stick with what I have rather than trying google earth pro, which I am sure is the way to go in future.

Regards, Jeff