Animated Map

Discuss which third party applications you use to help create your slide shows using ProShow Producer. This is not a forum to promote other slide show software programs.
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Re: Animated Map

Postby AMD » Tue Feb 15, 2011 5:52 pm

Douglas,

No, I am having no problem at all except I need to get some good maps with higher resolution. Mine are just low resolution ones that I have snagged from the Internet.

When I go to Settings and then click on the little Icon that is at the end of the path under the Map Selection, it pops up with the main Map folder and all the folders and maps appear--including any I have added.

Hope you can get your problem solved. They did come up a bit short by not having an "import map" capability, though, I think.

Good luck.

Ann

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Re: Animated Map

Postby dcbyrne » Tue Feb 15, 2011 10:11 pm

Hello Ann and Texan,
Your right about the "import map" capability" Ann. To be honest, I don't care for any of their maps. If you want to travel from state to state you will find very few cities listed. For example a map of the USA they call Classic With Names. That map shows Seattle, Portland, Reno, Sacramento, San Francisco and nothing in between those cities except mountain ranges water and flat plains. There are only 16 cities listed on the entire map.These maps are what you might call physical maps. They illustrate the physical features of an area, such as the mountains, rivers and lakes. The water is usually shown in blue. Colors are used to show relief—differences in land elevations. Green is typically used at lower elevations, and orange or brown indicate higher elevations. Not good for what I had in mind. There are no US State maps included. But they sell a package of 250 maps of the Americas and some maps have city names for 49 EUR or $66.00 This is why Ann and I are looking at getting our own maps and installing them ourselves. With the link Lynn posted the program can be purchased for $39.00 plus tax. I have no idea how Roxie is selling this product. As gsmcl0964 mentioned the developers of the software is Motionstudios. Check his link if interested. I think they are a German company. Version 5 has 3 versions. 5HD Ultimate 299 EUR or $404.00, 5HD Professional 149 EUR or $201.00, 5HD Advanced 99 EUR or $134.00, These are today's rate of exchange. I sent the company an e-mail requesting information on Roxie's part in the game, any information they have on importing our own maps, and if support is available from them on version 4. I don't expect any good news from them. To be honest I like the program. For $39.00 there are a lot of good features I will use. The map problem I can solved by getting the maps I want, and placing them into the program myself. Like Ann said, high resolution JPG maps would be a big help.

Douglas

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Re: Animated Map

Postby texan » Wed Feb 16, 2011 6:09 am

Well, I was worried about the quality of the maps.........sounds like "your cost" to get the program optimized is going UP!!

I'm glad I waited to hear what you guys thought about the program.......thanks for your honest opinion......

You just saved me $49.........
Texan

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Re: Animated Map

Postby tdew » Wed Feb 16, 2011 7:09 am

Well, I bought it too, through the Roxio link provided here. (thanks!) It takes a little getting used to, but I can see great shows in the future!
I'm not crazy about the maps that are included either, but expect I'll find ones that I'll use from my own collection.

The video tutorial is a big help because a lot of the terms and buttons are not intuitive.

I was Looking around for a map that would show a plane going from NY to Madrid. I think a world map is the only one that will work, and then the trip would have to be mapped in segments.

I did come upon this link that might be useful for free maps.
http://www.mygeo.info/eng/maps.html

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Re: Animated Map

Postby dcbyrne » Wed Feb 16, 2011 8:18 am

I just received a reply from the software developer (Motionstudios). For support with version 4 we can contact them through their web site, http://www.motionstudios.de/. At present, the only way to install our own maps is the way we are doing it. Find the map we want, and save it into their map folder. That's about it. With maps that I will add, I'm sure this will work for me.

Douglas

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Re: Animated Map

Postby gsmcl0964 » Wed Feb 16, 2011 1:32 pm

@ Douglas and others...

For those that bought from Roxio, I'd really appreciate seeing what you guys are able to do with this program. When I looked at the demos from the developer, I thought to myself, "the maps are not my style" and dismissed the program. Perhaps, your creativity will be inspirational. Thanks in advance, if you choose to share what you are able to do with Vasco da Gama and Producer.

Greg

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Re: Animated Map

Postby AMD » Wed Feb 16, 2011 2:12 pm

Doug,

Thanks for the info regarding the support. Yes, I can certainly live with the more rudimentary way to get to my own maps.

Greg,

I will, for sure, post a sample when I get around to completing something. As I had mentioned, I certainly think it is worth my $39.95--but I had balked at $49.95 myself.

Ann

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Re: Animated Map

Postby jonP » Wed Feb 16, 2011 8:26 pm

All,

I too am not ready to upload anything until I have a better grasp of the software (been a rediculously busy week on the workfront) but I have explored enough to know that it is trivial to bring in your own maps. My test case consisted of a simple road map of Colorado using a screen snap of a google map page showing Colorado in reasonable detail saved as a .jpg. To use your own map you simply bring up the project settings dialog which is the button just to the left of the trashcan icon. On there you will see the map selection entry zone where you can enter the directory containing your map images. Thats all there is to it. Obviously, the higher the input resolution of the image the better the output will be.

Using this .jpg as my background I was able to quickly map out a roadtrip route following several major and minor roads by adding numerous dots along the path. Note, there appears to be no limit to how many of these dots you can define so I was able to make it follow the twists and turns of the highway quite accurately.

I still have much to learn about other areas of the program such as camera control, zooming panning etc as well as what the various output video formats provide but from my brief testing I must agree with others that this is well worth the $40 discounted Roxio price.

My only complaint so far is with the user interface. It suffers from a trend in software I don't particularly like these days - that being user interface design that is more game-like rather than conforming to the well-defined GUI standards that make learning a new program simpler. Even Microsoft themselves have gone away from what we are all used to with their new icon-based ribbon as seen in Office 2007/2010. Basically what I'm saying is I want things to be functional and easy to learn, not cute.

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Re: Animated Map

Postby dcbyrne » Thu Feb 17, 2011 12:22 am

Hello Jon,
Thanks for posting your thoughts on the program. I guess I have a unique problem opening maps. When I open project settings then select map selection entry zone, I am taken to the Map location as we all are. Located there are the programs 8 map folders. Individual maps of Europe,Kartel1.b, South Pacific Big, South Pacific Small, World Big2, World Big,World Small 2, and World Small. That's it. The folder (USA Maps) that I placed in their map folder on my C Drive is not seen. In order for me to see my USA Map folder, I have to go to my C Drive, Motionstudios, Vasco da Gama 4 HDPro, Program Files, Motion Studios, Vasco da Gama 4 HDPro, Open the Map Folder, and there I will find my USA Map folder. I open that folder and select any of the 8 map I put there. That's a heck of way to have to do this. I Sent an e-mail to support asking for some help, and why this is happening to me. Ann does not have this problem. I don't understand your comment about it being trivial (little significance or value) to bring in your own maps. The program does not supply any road maps that I know of. If we want a road map to suit our purposes as you did, we have to find it and import it into the program. If we want to use this program with good maps using city names, points of interest, etc. It would be best to make our own map folder, find the (good maps) and save them in that folder for future use (in my opinion). There are others that have their own map folder. The difference is, there's works within the program correctly, and at present, mine unfortunately does not.

Regards,
Douglas

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Re: Animated Map

Postby jonP » Thu Feb 17, 2011 6:27 am

Douglas,

Ok let me start with an apology if my choice of words (trivial) was bad. I wasn't trying to imply anything by it, just saying I had not experienced an issue and hadn't really noticed this being much different than other software with regards to selecting files, with one exception which I describe below.

so to resolve this, Lets me make sure we aren't talking past each other.

My example uses a simple road map with city names, roads etc. which I made using google maps and saving a screen snap in .jpg format at approx 1280x1024 resolution, but this could really be any .jpg image or whatever map you have access to.

I saved this into C:\temp as coloradotest.jpg.

In VDG, when you have the project settings dialog open, you see the Map Selection line showing the default location where the program's included maps are located. To the right is a little folder icon. When you press that icon a regular Windows folder selection dialog comes up allowing you to navigate to your specific map location and choose your own map image. I navigated to C:\temp, saw my coloradotest.jpg and selected it in there pressed the open button which closed the dialog. Next I closed the project settings dialog and the new map came up. That is all I did to use my own test map. The nonstandard thing mentioned above - You'll notice the map doesn't appear onscreen in VDG until you actually close the project settings panel, not immediately when you select the map in the Windows file-selector screen and press open (like when you open docs in other software). In other words, the open is literally just changing the name on the project settings line and until you press ok on the project settings dialog, you don't see the new map. This kind of goes to my comment that this non-standard user interface is a little weird in some ways.

Hope this helps
Jon
Last edited by jonP on Thu Feb 17, 2011 7:14 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Animated Map

Postby tdew » Thu Feb 17, 2011 6:54 am

This morning I've been digging out all my old mapping programs - only to find that they won't work on the computers I have these days.
It's kind of sad that Nat'l Geographic, Street Atlas and such used formats that don't allow you to even see the images anymore.

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Re: Animated Map

Postby AMD » Thu Feb 17, 2011 8:02 am

Douglas,

Could this be a solution to your problem? . . . I am no computer guru, and I don't know if I just screwed up when I installed, but the program actually installed two places on my unit--strange! It is in a MotionStudios folder right on my C drive and the other one that is inside my Programs folder on C drive. I placed my maps inside the Maps folder in the one that is in the Programs file and I see them fine.

When I run the other installation, the maps don't show up. You might check to see if yours installed two places also.

These are the two paths:

This is the one where I placed my maps and which is, obviously, loading for me.

C://Mycomputer/Program Files/MotionStudios/Vasco da Gama/Maps (This is where I placed my maps)

This is the other one:

C://Mycomputer/MotionStudios/Vasco da Gama/Program Files/Motion Studios/Vasco da Gama/Maps (When I load from this one my maps don't show up)

Hope this nonsense does make sense to you.

Ann

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Re: Animated Map

Postby jonP » Thu Feb 17, 2011 10:48 am

Hi Ann,

something looks very strange with both of those paths.

Typically the Program Files directory in all versions of windows is directly in the root of the C drive, what is the additional Mycomputer layer above it? Did you set up something different on your system or is this a network view of a shared directory on a server? I'm Looking at the local directory structure on the PC and I'm on the 64 bit Windows 7 so it is slightly different, i.e it's using the C:Program Files(x86)\MotionStudios\Vasco da Gama 4 HDPro directory which is the default for where 32-bit programs loaded onto the 64-bit version of windows reside. I also have the C:Motion Studios directory tree but Is suspect it is not needed and leftover from the installation process.

< 15-minute pause >

OK, I just did a quick test installing this in a 32-bit version of windows on another PC to see what is occurring and it is precisely what I expected. Watching the process what I saw is that the other directory, i.e. C:MotionStudios\Vasco da Gama 4 HDPro is created during the first phase of the the installation as a location to unpack the compressed installation files contained in the original Install_VdG4HDProUS.exe file downloaded from Roxio. After this completes the Windows installer then runs the 2nd phase, loadings the actual program into the typical program files location. After that it prompts to install Adobe Acrobat reader (which you can reject if you alreeady have it) and then it automatically upgrades to DirectX9 adjuncts if it detects it is needed.

When the total 10-minute installation completed I was left with the both the C:Program FIles location (Where your desktop shortcut should be pointing to) but also the C:Motion Studios installation directory which should have been automatically deleted as it is only a temp directory used for the installation. To complete this test I deleted the entire C:Motion Studios directory and ran VDG successfully proving it is not necessary. FYI, Normally all of the unpacking and cleanup phases occur in the background using temporary windows directories so you don't see any leftover garbage even when they are sloppy about cleaning up.

So bottom line is no, you didn't do anything wrong and you should probably delete your C:\Mycomputer\Motion Studios directory so you reclaim the 1.5 GB space it is wasting on your drive.

FYI, back at an old software company I worked at we had a term for this sloppy problem - "installation turds". :wink:

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Re: Animated Map

Postby AMD » Thu Feb 17, 2011 11:05 am

Jon,

Thanks for replying and supplying the info. I will delete the one. I found it strange that I had two copies and two paths, and you have explained it.

I had posted the situation to see if it might possibly be the reason that Douglas' maps weren't showing. I had wondered if it were possible that he placed his maps in that "temporary" installation . . . or if, per chance, if he placed them in the other one could the "temporary one be loading." I do know that there is an executable file in the "temporary" installation that will run.

Ann

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Re: Animated Map

Postby dcbyrne » Fri Feb 18, 2011 1:09 am

Hello Jon,
Using all the information given I now have my USA Map folder visible. When opened, all my maps are also visible. Thanks for your time and help. I would have replied earlier but we were shut down for awhile.

Regards,
Douglas

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