iLife 09 is finally here and iMovie 09 is one of the most exciting upgrades, only next to iDVD. (just kidding).
One cool feature of new iMovie is the animated map. I only get to travel overseas once a year or less, but the animated map feature is cool that it makes me want to take a trip just to use it :)
It provides 4 different styles which I like all, but the last one left me wanting a little more. It is the 'blue marble' one that uses satellite photo of earth for more realistic look than the first three. I wished it'd be little more realistic, with atmosphere and cloud layer. Also the lighting on these globe is just flat so I hoped for 'lit from side' look which we see often in real earth pictures.
<- yeah, a little more like this.
Now it was suspected that iMovie would use lots of quartz engine so I started digging. I opened up iMovie (right-click 'show contents'). Inside the contents/resources you see lot of images and icons used by iMovie. There were many files but I managed to find the quartz composer file that does the globe animated map (Extra - GlobeMap.qtz) and images used with it. 'Extra - BlueMarbleGlobeBackground.jpg' is used for background, obviously, and 'Map-BlueMarble.jpg' is the actual satellite image used for texture map.
I had a 2k x 1k image of realistic earth texture, but Map-BlueMarble.jpg is an 8k x 4k image. Quite high resolution. For now I just enlarged my image to 8k x 4k in Photoshop and replaced the original after making a backup. It didn't automatically replaced the original bluemarble look, but after some more tweaking in Quartz Composer I managed to get this.
I am not a programmer and I only recently started to dabble with Quartz Composer so I'm not in a position to teach anyone about this. But when I get a chance I'll outline what I did to get that result. There are other things I'd like to be able to do but immediately I am challenged by my lack of experience and knowledge. Even if I had all the power I can't make animated maps do more things within iMovie, because there are more to it than just Qtz, but at least I'll be able to save it out as a standalone QTZ project and create custom animated maps.
My personal goal with standalone version would be... (from less to more ambitious...)
- Manual input of location coordinates and names.
- Animation time. (which is easy in iMovie, but in qtz file it is not geared to do so.)
- Export to Quicktime file
(ok, so far it's not too insane)
- To have the earth lit in realistic way, with astrophysical accuracy if possible.
- To have dark side of earth to show the night light image.
- Ability to input departure and arrival time, and have the lighting change accordingly so that you can see how the earth looked during your flight.
