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A video with dynamic subtitles or a GPS moving map insert

I kind of know how to make a Google Earth track from GPS data - here.

But how would one make an animated 3D flight profile, like those one sees on TV or in some accident reports?

Presumably the end product would be a Flash movie, or an Mpeg. But if one could generate a sequence of still images then making a movie from that is easy; any half decent movie editor can turn a sequence of thousands of consecutively numbered jpeg files into a movie.

It can't be completely trivial because one has to choose the perspective from which the flight will be viewed, for example.

Perhaps there is a way to feed the GPS data into FSX?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Does your GPS data show heights or altitudes? I have recently exported an output from SkyDemon and from memory (I dont have the file here in the office, it's at home), it shows lat/long positions and heights or altitudes (one of them), in a text file. It does show a 3D flight profile in 2 separate panes, though not animated. I believe its a .CSV or other standard format, though I dont know if the format is suitable for Google Earth - I have never tried that in any shape or form.

I dont know if you have SkyDemon, but I will put up a sample of the data later. My advice is however a bit of a stab in the dark I feel.

And a friend of mine has some kind of .exe which logs his FSX flights real time and sends the data over an internal IP network to another PC, which displays his progress in real time on Google Maps. I will see if that is of any use. Another stab in the dark possibly.

These were snippets from the 2 files from SkyDemon.

The .gpx file is more self explanatory and looks like .XML style, though I dont know what those speeds are. At 49. something, they certainly arent KT or MPH as I was doign about 110 kt at this point!

The .flightlog file doesnt state the column structure in the file, though its clearly .CSV.

Peter - if you dont have SkyDemon, I am happy to mail you the 2 files in case you want to try them in your Google Earth upload.

The .gpx file
    634.1973
    48.254891
    2012-11-29T14:00:53Z


    630.6007
    48.049112
    2012-11-29T14:00:58Z


    627.7051
    47.637555
    2012-11-29T14:01:03Z
The .flightlog file

924,N513110.25 W0023443.95,268.2,34.7,141.4,0.0

4918,N513110.25 W0023448.50,270.5,47.8,142.7,0.0

5015,N513110.25 W0023449.85,270.4,47.8,144.0,0.0

10015,N513110.05 W0023457.30,267.1,56.6,170.3,0.0

11942,N513110.00 W0023458.85,267.5,57.9,175.2,14.3

Ah, the site has processed and taken out the tags for the XML file.

Peter - you can probably look behind the scenes to see what it's really like. Its basically elevation,speed and time.

I have the data in .mmo .gpx and .csv formats. There is lat, long, alt(metres).

There is no problem plotting it laterally, but I think to plot it from a "perspective" is going to need it feeding to some sort of flight sim program.

BTW, for unformatted text use the

< pre>
text text
text text
< /pre>

directives (no spaces after the < )

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

This is the link to the site my friend uses to plot FSX movement onto Google Maps, though you still have the issue of how to get GPS data into FSX. If you do work out how to do it, it would certainly be quite novel

http://fsxget.codeplex.com/

At 49. something, they certainly arent KT or MPH as I was doign about 110 kt at this point!

49 m/s is 96 kts....

AQ

YPJT, United Arab Emirates

Peter there does seem to be a SDK for MSFS, so a programmer could do what you want, though I suspect it would take them some time. MSFS SDK

But given that it's possible, I'm sure someone must have done it already, but I can't find it unfortunately.

EIWT Weston, Ireland

I sometimes play around with this sort of stuff as a hobby, and routinely make 2D plots of GPS tracks on scanned charts.

I am trying to understand your 3D animation. Is it a pilot's eye view of the the flight, looking down on the relevant bit of Google Earth? Or a simulated following camera, e.g. showing a moving vertical line between the ground position and an exaggerated altitude?

If it is the latter, wouldn't a still image do just as well? The end result would be a bit like a side view of the Great Wall of China, except all on flattened ground. The wall could be semi-transparent, to show some ground image behind the wall.

Is the animation just for dramatic effect?

Showing height agl is tricky without capturing detailed ground elevation - this is an order of magnitude harder than just tilting a plan view of the Earth to generate some perspective side views.

In case it helps, I have had some success with animated perspective views. I used a C++ program to write a sequence of SVG images, then batik-rasterizer to turn them into jpegs, then ffmpeg to turn those into an mpeg.

i.e. repeated calls to a Windows batch file containing this:

java -jar batik-rasterizer.jar -d %1.jpg -m image/jpeg -q 0.999 %1.svg

then the following turns out1.jpg, out2.jpg, ... into out.mpg:

ffmpeg -f image2 -i out%d.jpg -sameq ..\out.mpg

You don't have to use Windows - these tools will work on any sensible OS.

White Waltham EGLM, United Kingdom

Also, does this help? Importing tracks into Google Earth

If that works, can't you just fly the tour in Google Earth, or did you want to make your own video?

White Waltham EGLM, United Kingdom
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