Zooming in to a location on map

[SearchQuality]

I am building up a DVD describing the places I visited during a voyage. I need the camera to look at a map from high above and zoom in to the location visited. The location is either a city or an island. For this purpose I can find the maps from internet. My question is what is the best way to do this process? Which software should I use? In what format should the video asset be? Please advise. Thanks in advance.

[Baldrick]

I would use Google Earth, http://earth.google.com/ , and try capture the zooming using a desktop capture tool like Camstudio or Fraps. See http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/09/record-videos-in-google-earth.html

[mats.hogberg]

MS Photo Story 3 has an effect where you easily can set start rectangle and end rectangle for a still, and create a zoom effect. You could start with a big rectangle in the upper left corner, and end with a small rectangle in the lower right. The video would then start "high" above the upper left part of the map, then zoom in to a location inthe lower right. Of course start and end rectangles can be anywhere in any size. Only limitation is that the movement is linear.

/Mats

[olyteddy]

It's a pretty big download, but NASA's World Wind can zoom into and out of any place on the earth, moon, mars and even jupiter. You can save the sequence as a series of stills or a movie.

[SearchQuality]

Thanks for the responses. Using Fraps for screen capture and video recording is quite handy. The Google Earth and NASA site also offer valuable tools. I also found another solution. With Proshowgold from Photodex <www.photodex.com> I used the zoom and pan function on a high resolution map. Proshowgold can render slide show as an MPEG2 file. I then merged the resulting file with my video files using TMPGenc. The result is quite good. I hope this discussion will help users dealing with similar problems.