Hello, and welcome to the Getting Started tutorial for Earth Studio.
I'm Jon, and I'm going to be taking you through just a basic overview of the tool:
how to find your way around, make your first animation and render your project.
So let's get started.
When you first get to Earth Studio you'll have the option
to either make a blank project or open an existing one.
There's more options under these menus, but we're going to ignore those for now
and just create a new blank project.
We'll give our project a name - in this case, "Getting Started" -
and we'll have options to adjust our dimensions, duration and frame rate.
We're going to leave those all the same right now and just hit "Start".
And this is Earth Studio.
You'll see that the interface is split into three main areas.
We have the view port in the centre - this is our main way of controlling the globe -
and also a live preview of our final animation.
Below the view port we have our editor.
The editor is split into two parts: the attribute list on the left,
and the timeline on the right.
The attribute list contains a list of every element
that can be animated on the globe.
By default, you'll see that we have the camera position
and camera rotation attributes visible.
You'll see their name, their current value and a keyframe button.
The timeline has the frames of our animation all laid out on top,
and a playhead to mark our current active frame.
Finally, we have the top bar.
This contains our playback controls, search and options to save a snapshot
of our current view, or render our animation.
So, to get started, I'm going to position the globe to where I want it to be
on my first frame.
Now I can quick-jump to a location by using the search bar right here,
and I'm going to search for "Tokyo, Japan".
You'll see my view has updated,
and I chose Tokyo because it has really nice 3D imagery.
So now let's frame our first shot.
We can move the Earth around by clicking and dragging.
Right-click can drag up and down, to zoom in and out,
or use the scroll wheel on your mouse.
If you hold the "Alt" button while dragging, it will orbit your camera
around the center of your view.
So let's use these controls to frame our shot just the way we want.
And I'm trying to get a nice flyover of this area of Tokyo.
So to start, I think I'll frame my shot right like this,
and when I'm satisfied with how everything looks I will come down here
and click the Keyframe all button.
And what that will do is it will save all of the values of my attributes here
to the current frame.
Now that these keyframes are set, if I move the camera around
you'll see that the keyframe turns yellow,
and what this means is that my current view does not match the value
of the current keyframe.
If I move the playhead off the keyframe, it'll reset
and snap back to the saved location.
So keeping that in mind, let's make our second keyframe to make our animation.
We can drag our playhead to the last frame and now we can reposition our camera.
And I'll do something like this, and here you'll see that
all of these keyframes are yellow,
meaning that I haven't saved these values to a keyframe yet.
So I will click the "keyframe all" button again, to save those values -
and just like that, if I press "Command" and the "left arrow key"
to jump to the first frame and press Spacebar,
I can preview my very first animation, which is a beautiful flyover of Tokyo.
So if I want to make changes to this, there's a few things I can do.
I could jump to the last frame here and drag around the globe,
like we just did earlier.
But I don't want to do that, so let's reset.
I can also come here and let's say on this first frame, my altitude is 986 meters.
Let's say I'm looking for a more helicopter-style shot,
where the altitude doesn't change.
So I can come over here, look at this altitude,
and I can click and drag left and right to scrub it and change its value down.
And what this will do will actually change the value of the keyframe,
without me needing to press the keyframe button again.
So I can do that, and then I will move my view to compensate for the changes
so my shot is still framed correctly - I'll keyframe those changes again -
and I'll play back again, and this is more like it;
this definitely has that kind of sped-up helicopter flyover feel.
So I'm pretty happy with this, and I think it's time to render it out
so I can view it outside of Earth Studio.
To do that, I'll go up to the Render button right here
and now we're at our Render settings page.
You can see we can change our file name;
by default it's set to the same as our project.
We have some basic settings here.
We also have the number of frames that we can render, so if for instance
we only wanted to render the first 180 frames, we could do that here,
and we will see that our preview to the left will update.
This is a great way to check that your crop is correct
and that the right number of frames are being rendered in the final.
We'll switch that back to all frames.
We can resize our animation, and then we have our attribution.
So Earth Studio imagery must include attribution
to both Google and Google's data providers.
By default we include that as a watermark
in the bottom right corner of the screen.
You can change the location of that watermark using the menu right here.
Just be sure that your usage follows the official attribution guidelines,
which I'll post in the YouTube video right here.
So when everything's all set, we can hit Start
and Earth Studio will go on and step through each frame of our render -
the first one will take the longest,
as it's rendering all of the 3D for the first time -
and it saves these images to our local file system in the browser,
so this means that if you were to quit out of Chrome your render would be paused
until you revisited Earth Studio again.
And then you would have an option to recover.
It also means that if you were to have another tab open, the render would pause,
because there might be some issues when the Earth Studio render
is not the main focus of your Chrome window.
So basically this will go through and render all the frames -
it doesn't take too long, depending on the length of your file -
so we will come back and have a fully rendered project.
All right, and here's the final product!
After the render was done it downloaded as a ZIP file
to my Downloads directory,
and I just ran it through After Effects to turn it from an image sequence into a film
and that's what you're seeing right here.
So that's it for this Getting Started tutorial for Earth Studio.
We've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in the program,
so look forward to tutorials in the future covering things like easing,
camera target, multi-view and lots more.
And be sure to check out our documentation in the meanwhile.
So until next time, bye!