,
I am especially excited about this next feature announcement. Blender artist and now OpenShot contributor Gwen Bulleryahen worked with the OpenShot team to bring this feature to life: Animated World Maps!
How does it work? Simply put, it let's the user enter a few basic parameters, such as the latitude and longitude of anywhere on earth to anywhere else on earth, and renders a beautiful animated line between the 2 points. This effect is often used on television and movies, and is very effective at showing the distance traveled between 2 far away places.
To create an animated world map, you launch the "Animated Titles" screen in OpenShot, and select "World Map" from the list of animations. You will need to look up the coordinates of your 2 locations using a web browser, Atlas, Google Earth, or any other resource that has coordinates. Only 1 map texture image is included by default, but it's easy to point to other map images. You can find all sorts of equirectangular projection images on the Internet, if you do not like the default one. The rest of the settings are relatively easy to understand, such as the color, the text of the labels, etc...
[The World Map editor - available on the Animated Titles screen]
Behind the scenes, OpenShot uses all sorts of fun math to calculate the angles, rotations, camera movement, X, Y, and Z coordinates of many different objects, all based on the latitude and longitude entered by the user. These numbers are then passed into Blender using the Python API of Blender 2.5.6+, and the rest is history!
If you want to hear OpenShot news before anyone else, be sure to join our Facebook page or subscribe to our RSS feed. Enjoy!
January 21, 2011 4:47 PM
This could be really awesome, just have no idea when or with which release we can expect this or any of the updates in other posts as well?
January 21, 2011 5:04 PM
All of the posts during January are referring to new features that will be in OpenShot 1.3.0. Thanks!
January 21, 2011 5:18 PM
I'm getting so excited! The work you've done is amazing. After this next release no one can argue that any other Linux based video editing software is superior! What's the word on when 1.3.0 will be released?
January 22, 2011 7:26 AM
Man in the space of a few months Openshot has totally started to exceed the features of windows movie maker! well done!
January 22, 2011 10:39 AM
whith all of these new features, it would be more like a 1.5 or a 2.0 version...
bye bye iMovie
January 22, 2011 8:04 PM
Can one zoom in also?
I'd like to be able to use this on a less global scale.
January 22, 2011 9:31 PM
Well I have come close to buying an iMac, but I am seeing less and less reason to, I would rather donate some money to Jonathan. I hope that we will soon be able to speed up sound and video. I hate to admit, I use WMM for that.
BC
January 23, 2011 10:08 AM
Hello Flamekebab
No you can not zoom.
But you can edit the file:
Open /openshot/openshot/blender/travel_map.blend
On the right of the window in the "tree": Scene-> EmptyCam-> Cam (click)
below (Properties) click on the cube 3d
Transform-> Location X= 30,000
you can put 20
press f12: you have a preview
February 4, 2011 10:14 AM
Wow - all these new features! I hope they will work properly without any minor bugs ;-)
This specific feature is really great I think! (I looked for opensource-software doing this for some time now but couldn't find anything like this)... One feature which should be added to this I think is that it should be possible to e.g. select a plane or car or even pedestrian 'drawing' this line from one location to another. Also 2D-maps would be really good (sometimes this 3D-globe may not be appropriate for a certain video - kind of to 'childish' or 'kitsch').
And even cooler would be 3D-maps showing the elevation like mountains (and of course the zoom level ;-))
Great work though! Keep it up :-)
February 13, 2011 12:15 PM
Hello, I've a IMac, and I'm interesting to use an animated maps. Could I? How can I install?
Thanks.
Luiz
February 21, 2011 9:46 AM
I love this feature!!
And I have to suggest one thing:
Instead of introduce manually the cordenates, maybe the python script can consult the Geonames api (cc-by licence (creative commons attributions license)) and autocomplete.
http://www.geonames.org/export/
February 24, 2011 5:44 PM
Oh, okay...as a long time KDEnlive user I have to say that I am going to be installing the latest OpenShot when I upgrade to Kubuntu 10.04
(Yes, I am slow to change - I use my machine a lot for video editing and cannot afford to spend too much time fixing problems in upgraded versions :))
Big, big "Up" to the developers of OpenShot. The speed of improvement is fantastic and the new ideas and options put in place are frankly amazing.
You've earned a new fan.
I'll be giving a talk showcasing the new additions to OpenShot in my regular spot at the Sydney Linux Users Group meeting which is on tonight (Friday 25/02/2011), 6.30PM, Sydney, Australia.
February 25, 2011 1:21 PM
How its possible to change that globe map? not like the first one like the original, but like those other from the vimeo video preview?
thx, this is awesome!
March 18, 2011 9:55 AM
Would be cool if you could import a gps trail onto the globe.
October 2, 2011 9:48 AM
Additional maps can be downloaded from Marble: http://edu.kde.org/marble/maps.php
October 3, 2011 7:11 AM
Thanks for writing this. I really feel as though I know so much more about this than I did before. Your blog really brought some things to light that I never would have thought about before reading it. You should continue this, I’m sure most people would agree you’ve got a gift. Thanks for sharing…
Video Production