MAKING A TOUR
What you will learn
 How to make a Tour
 How to make a movie of your tour
What you will need
 A kmz file with place marks ready,
your file, or mine, available at
http://dukevisualstudies.org/publi
c_html/wired/wpcontent/uploads/2012/02/Dioritei
nAncientEgyptTour.kmz
 Some headphones /mic or a
computer with an internal mic (if
you plan to do audio.
One way to enrich the user experience
is to Record a Tour. You can make
either a video-only tour, or also record
an audio soundtrack. You can choose
to pre-program a tour with fixed
intervals between data points, or do
an entirely freestyle tour. You can also combine both effects to create a tourwithin-a-tour and make a movie to export from your tour.
You are almost all the way to making a great Google Earth Tour! You've already put
together the content of your presentation, so you know what to say, and you should
have all your media and annotations in Google Earth, so you know what to show.
Making the tour itself is then fairly simple, let's do it!
1. First, lets make sure that each one of
your place marks has the kind of
view you'd like.
2. Double click on the place-mark in
the Places Panel, and if your
annotation or image is not centered
in the viewer, navigate so that it is in
the center. Then, in the Places panel,
right click on the place-mark in
question and select Get Info. Under
the name, there are some tabs:
Description, Style/Color, View, and
Altitude. Click on “view” and click
“Snapshot current view.”
3. Double Click your place-mark again,
it should bring up the annotation
and go to your selected view!
4. Repeat these steps with each of your place marks.
5. A Google Earth Tour is essentially a recording of a fly-through space going from
each place mark to the next - think of these at the "stops" on your tour.
6. Now we will record the Tour!
7. Once you are satisfied with the orientation of your individual “stops” on
the Tour, go ahead and preview it to see how it looks. To do this,
click on the little folder plus arrow underneath the Places Menu:
8. Now you are ready to record. Press the Tour Button.
9. A Record/Microphone indicator will appear. Click the Red record button
if you want to record only video. This is just a test run to get familiar
with navigation capture. We’ll play with the audio part later.
Play your tour through. It should automatically move through your
placements in the order in which you have put them in your Project folder.
If you wish, instead of playing a tour from a set of placements you can
“freestyle” your way through the Google Earth landscape and record that
movement instead. When you are done, press the red Record button again
to end the recording process.
10. Play back your creation using the playback controls that appear at the
bottom of the screen. If you are happy with your tour, click on the Save
icon. Save it as a KMZ.
11. If you’d like to add audio, Plug the USB headphones into the front USB
jack on your computer. Make sure the slider for the microphone is
turned on. Test the audio by clicking on System Preferences>Audio and
making sure the Input and Output sources are the Plantronics USB
headset. (Or if you are just using your computer’s recording device,
make sure they are set to the internal mic & speakers)
12. Now you are ready to add audio. This time, click the Tour button and
then the Microphone record button. Now start the Tour and begin your
narration. Your voice will be synched to the movement of the tour.
Press the red Record button again to end the recording session.
Playback as before.
12. When you are happy with your creation, Save it and give it a relevant
name. You may also want to Save Place as a KMZ file – this will enable
you to edit the audio track separately later to add in bumper music etc. if
we wish.
You’re all done! Now send the kmz to [email protected]
Extra Options: make a movie
13. There is also an option to make it into a movie. To do this, you will simply
need to play back your tour while in Movie Maker mode. You can choose
a variety of settings for your movie, depending on whether you want it to
be a final product, or if you want to incorporate it into a more complex
multimedia production. Click on your tour (the one with audio) and then
Select Tools>MovieMaker. Choose your resolution etc. For now we will
keep the default settings. Click Record Tour.
14. You have two options here – a freeform video, which is slightly lower
quality but enables you to freestyle the video, or a movie export from a
tour. Browse to a file save location (here I used the name testmovie.mov)
and then click Record.
If you have a tour highlighted in the Places window, you may choose the
High Quality Tour Mode. You will get a Record Tour option and a
progress window. Note that for the “Real-time control” type of movie you
have to click Stop Recording – for the pre-packed tour it will stop when
the tour is over.
15. One thing you will notice when you play back the video – there is no
sound! This is a known
“feature.”
Making a Tour
16. If you want to keep your audio narration attached to your video you
are going to need to do some third party interventions. For that you’ll
need to extract your audio file from the KMZ in which it is housed, edit
it (if desired), and then paste it into your video. We’ll explore the audio
file option in the next section, which introduces you to “raw” KML/KMZ
file information.
Fortunately, you can use a tool like iMovie to accomplish this
relatively easily. Audio edits, such as adding in bumper music or
amplifying sound, can be done within Amadeus Pro or a similar
application, and then you can splice the pieces together in your
favorite video editor.
Another option would be to use a third party screen capture software
that can capture sound as well as video: Quicktime Pro plus the
Soundflower plugin is one option; Snapz Pro X, or Camtasia are others.
You may want to play around and see which gives you better video
quality and compression options for your purposes.
The Wired! Group • Duke University
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