Hi ritsmer,

Thanks a lot for that lead! I've got 2 questions please: 1. It looks like one has to be careful to adjust the image size to exactly what it should be on the chienworks palette. Can you alter the basic palette size from 786 x 576. (I use PAL) to say 720 x 576, i.e DV widescreen? Seems you have only 2 choices, i.e. NTSC or PAL. 2. I cannot get Vegas to render a movie that plots the line fast enough. I got the bmp sizes down to 0.038 sec but that seems to be about as far as one can go. One gets errors beyond that. For 1500 images it then takes a minute to run. Would like to see 20 seconds at the most. I managed faster execution only by using the time lapse function of Vegas – i.e. speed -up the Vegas rendered file (.avi in this case). I don’t come close the speed that the demo file runs on chienworks.

Thank again, I appreciate and will certainly use this!

Emile

Hi emile

You can crop the mapliners bmp's to what you need - you just then have to start out with a sufficient large picture and only draw maplines in the part that will remain after the crop.

If the resoloution of your map is not good enough maybe you could make the map used in mapliner in one color different from the maplinerdots and then remove it using croma keyer and put a better map in the track below.

As to the speed you can set each mapliner bmp to 1 frame.
Is this not fast enough you might prerender the mapliner sequence(s) and then use this prerendered media in your project - setting its playing speed higher - as you suggest yourself.
What I am thinking at is: 1500 frames at 30 Fps = 50 seconds. A playback rate of 2,5 should give the wanted 20 secs.

Btw: 1500 mapline images is awesome - are you doing "Around the world in 80 days" ? :-)

More Btw: When Chienworks sees this he might remember his old thoughts about making a mapliner version 2 ? :-D

I'm pondering ... after a very long day at work of multiple conflicting priorities piling up endlessly ... ugh.

But, i'm about to hop in my car and have a nice peaceful 2.2 hour commute home. I'll think about it on the drive, then test a few things when i get home. I'll let you know if i think of anything or can make some easy changes to the software.

Actually you do want 786x576 as this is the size of a PAL frame in square pixels. This frame size imports into a PAL project almost perfectly without distortion. Sorry, no widescreen or HD yet.

You should be able to set Vegas' still image duration to 0.040 for 25fps or 0.033 for approximately 29.97fps. The pro version of Vegas has an "import still image sequence" function that makes this step much nicer.

1500 is a *lot* of frames! How many stops do you have in your flight path? You can determine how long you want each segment to last in seconds. If you have 10 stops and you want it to last 20 seconds, set each leg to last 2 seconds before you render the output sequence. This way you shouldn't have to adjust the speed in Vegas at all.

Hi Chienworks and ritsmer,

Thanks a lot for your replies. No, I’m not doing the “round the world” thing but it involves twisty 4x4 tracks through mountainous areas, I want to follow the actual tracks we’re doing, using Google 3D images so it involves a lot of plots. I did however realize that I can drastically reduce the amount of frames rendered. This is a great tool, ill be using it a lot.

Chienworks when you do a HD version let us know – I will be first in line to buy!

Thanks again for your response – you solved some issues for me!

Emile

"i'm about to hop in my car and have a nice peaceful 2.2 hour commute home"

Sorry to stray from the topic of this thread, but I hope that isn't a daily commute for you Kelly! (Is it?) Surely you were just visiting some other branch of the company you work for, right?

Eh, four days a week. It's about 129 miles each way. Why? 'Cause it's the place that hired me and they pay well, and i tried living down here but hate it, so i'm back to living where i always used to be and enjoy. Even with today's gas prices, the commute is still only about 1/4 to 1/10 the price of living near where i work.

The bad part is that it's 18 hours gone out of my week that i'd rather be spending on family, cats, audio, video, graphics, and software development. *sigh*

Sounds like a *great* place to listen to .... podcasts or audio books .. (but I wouldn't want a commute that long)

Richard in Boston