Space Debris

[Lin Evans]

O.K. - these snowy days have me housebound so have to do something to kill the boredom. Here's a little fun project. I used Celestia (free program) to run a simulation of Earth in rotation then screen captured as a video with Screen Recorder Gold. My system isn't quite powerful enough to get the video capture completely smooth, so I apologize for the slight "jerky" motion of the Earth in places....

http://www.lin-evans...spacedebris.zip (about 37 meg zipped pc exe)

Lin

[Boogie]

Hi Lyn

Great job! I didn't notice too much stutter on the Earth, I was too busy watching what appeared next over the horizon!! Or disappeared like the half stars that started on the edge of the frame!!

Loved the relaxing music too.

The snow caused another interesting project from you

Regards

Boogie

[Lin Evans]

Hi Boogie,

Thank! Fun things for snowy days.

Just as an aside - several years ago there was considerable interest in learning how to move an object in an elliptical orbit. One of our French forum members, JPD (Jean-Pierre - now deceased) had a brilliant mind and left us a virtual legacy of amazing ways to accomplish things. Though several of us were doing it in other ways, JPD had a simple, but brilliant solution which was discussed and he even created a model to show us how he did it. The problem is that unless one was around in those days and just happened to remember, the thread would be most difficult to find. When I made the little sample show I thought about the fact that we had never really "formalized" this and make and posted a tutorial to show others this solution. So I created another tutorial (#33) in the PTE Made Easy series which is now available. Perhaps some newer members might want to know how to do this and some older members may have forgotten how it was done.

Best regards,

Lin

[dadou]

Very interesant way to pass snowy days !

daniel

[colin hill]

Hi Lin,

My first download warned me of the dreaded AVG "superbug". Anyway, was successful on second attempt.

I found no jerky movements of the Earth on my system which was to be expected with my Gigabyte GTX 580 graphics card.

Nice little presentation.....keep them coming whilst snowed in.

Thanks for sharing.

Colin

[Ken Cox]

lin

one little jiggle when viewed on the cooler

by now you have likely read your mail

ken

[Lin Evans]

Hi Daniel,

Yes - sometimes it's just fun to "play" with PTE.... Lots of great features for sure!

Best regards,

Lin

Very interesant way to pass snowy days !

daniel

[Lin Evans]

Hi Colin,

Thanks! This little show actually takes advantage of one of PTE's really nice features which is the internal "circular mask" which makes it possible to run the video of the rotating Earth without "any" of the excess area of the rectangle interfering in any way with the background "starfield" image. By perfectly encircling only the rotating Earth part of the video, the background stars and objects passing behind the Earth fit perfectly - something otherwise only possible with Chroma Key extraction and video masking. I wish this had been available when I made my original PTE Demo show back in version 5 beta days. To get the Earth to rotate on that demo took 631 separate PNG views of the Earth in different rotational captures done by extracting individual jpgs from each frame of a video, then creating 631 PNG transparencies carefully removing everything except the Earth and then keyframing the entire sequence with all PNG's on a single slide in 631 layers plus additional layers for other objects in the sequence. Literally days of work which now only takes seconds! The old way took literally thousands of keyframes carefully sequenced with opacity changes and overlapping by milliseconds. What a relief to be able to just put in the video with a mask!!! The really amazing thing was that PTE was up to the task even with that very awkward way of creating it!

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin,

My first download warned me of the dreaded AVG "superbug". Anyway, was successful on second attempt.

I found no jerky movements of the Earth on my system which was to be expected with my Gigabyte GTX 580 graphics card.

Nice little presentation.....keep them coming whilst snowed in.

Thanks for sharing.

Colin

[Lin Evans]

Hi Ken,

Thanks for checking it out! Yes - still false positives from AVG - someday they will get it fixed - hopefully!!

Best regards,

Lin

lin

one little jiggle when viewed on the cooler

by now you have likely read your mail

ken

[Boogie]

Hi Lyn

I remember that JPD showed us how to create the ellipse movement and I used it to include in a sequence at that time. I much appreciate your latest tutorial because I had completely forgotten how to do it.

I have downloaded most of your video tutorials which are so well done and easy to follow. One problem I do have with your tutorials, which you might comment on, is the audio level is very low. I have to crank up the volume on my amplifier to a very high level to hear your commentary.

Any suggestions.

Cheers

Boogie

PS I did check that the volumes of both the computer and media player were at max.