TUTORIALS FOR VFX & MOTION GRAPHICS
Free After Effects Tutorials & More Hosted By: Andrew Kramer
July 02, 2007
• Create a cosmic Earth zoom in AE
• Use masking and parenting to link imagery
 
 
TUTORIAL NOTES:
No information available at this time.
Running Time: 23mins. 5 secs.


WATCH MORE TUTORIALS:
Real world projects
901,731 Views
1,242,188 Views
1,046,983 Views
1,120,644 Views
584 RESPONSES TO "EARTH ZOOM"

by Croftbest 19 hours ago
Thanks. Thanks for share your knowledge. God Bless you.
by Heli 03/12/2010
A very nice demonstration and a professional tutorial. Thanks for this and I hope to see more of this

Heli
by franklin 02/26/2010
Hi. sir i am franklin, that tutorials are good. my ID samfranklinv@143.gmail.com
by maryn 02/23/2010
I kinda love you!
After doing a lot of your amazing tutorials, i am gonna buy some of the dvd's as wel!

Greets from the netherlands
by Hamid Bilverdy 02/19/2010
Hi.
I know AK use high resulution images, I use 1000x500 px earth images which I got fra google maps and cropped out in photoshop. I am having issues when I set the scale to 100% and scrub the scale slider, it will only show until image 4 then it goes backward and zooms in?? Does anyone knows why?? I am trying to combine this earth zoom with the blu planet tutorial, I want to make a zoom in effect. Please advice anyone, cause i really want to make this since I spent a lot of time on geting the correct images.
Thanks for very learningfull tutorials!!!
by tvtreated 02/12/2010
fixed the parenting problem. instead of parenting all to layer 1, ignore this layer and parent to layer 2.
It seems that when your layer 1 get gets scaled very close to 0,0001% (or something like that) it resets to 0% so all you other layers get 'confused' and won't show.

Hope this works for others.
by tvtreated 02/10/2010
great tutorial, but i'm having the same problem with parenting all to layer 1 : only the first layer is visible.
I managed to create this strange behaviour with the original project but can't figure out what's wrong in cs4.
by Charles Ferran 02/10/2010
Andrew, great tutorial, to everyone else asking where to get images, a few things: Google Earth is best because you can go to any level you want to take snapshots. You really should only use a city or other well documented place. Your house might not cut it since satellites don't take as many pics of your house as they do cities. So if you're doing this for a client, you might want to mention that. Also, notice these images come from PhotoShop, they've been touched up, you should do the same, if you have a lake that looks funky, clone-stamp it, if you have those hard edges on things, blur them out, stuff like that, no real 'easy fix' with this tutorial... Again, awesome job Andrew, you're an inspiration to us all. Oh, and sorry for my bad engrish, I failed that class in High School ;)
by hugo castro 02/09/2010
Hello andrew , awesome tut, greetings from portugal.
I'm having the same scaling issue as some other people here. So I parent everything sequencial, and after that point, remove all the parents in layers, I select layer all layers except layer 1 and parent all to layer 1, then the scale from the last one stays on 100% and layer 1 goes back to 0%. Then when I scale up layer 1 to 100% I only see layer 1.
What i'm doing wrong.
Thanks for the amazing tuts. I'm doing a short-movie, and I learn so much with you. If you come to portugal let me know.
by Pere 02/07/2010
Hi. Thanks for all that tutorials you made, they are so usefull =^_^=

I got a problem with that tutorial because when i try to animate it, instead of making a 10 seconds animation, it animates all in one second (even though in the time line shows that its a 10 second animation) and it only allows me to work like if it was project of 10 frames. I tried to do all i know, but i didn't get nothing.

Sorry about my english if there are some mistakes. I'm spanish and its too late here, i'm almost falling asleep xD

Thanks for all
by goran 01/30/2010
8^), i need more tutorials!!!!
by Albart 01/28/2010
Hey Andrew,

just want to say - "you are the MAN! and your tutorials are the SH*T!" You've taught me very much.

I realize you're a busy guy, and I also realize that I'm not the only one to ask this question, but WHERE did you get your images for this? I can't figure it out..... any help would be greatly appreciated!

it can't be google maps or earth because your images look way better.....

Thanks!

Al
by Cathie 01/21/2010
Hi Andrew. Where did you get the pictures from? Are they just Google Earth cut and pasted into photoshop?
by Larry 01/21/2010
Great tut. and I love your sense of humor.
by Amir Zahir 01/18/2010
Hello and Great PAGE really great page man.
I was searching for something like this for a long long time and as you can see you've posted this tutorial 2007 and we are know at 2010 wow this is a long time. making my story short I NEED HELP PLEASE.

When I Grab all the files and then select layer to none and then select the number 1 file and get the scale up to 100 it does go to 100 but not like the video tutorial you have 100%, 100%. But I have 100%, 601.7% and does some funny things to the pictures and moves them around why? what I'm I doing wrong? please help me this is great to learn.

By the way one again KEEP UP THE AMAZING WORK WOULD ALL THIS WORK ON ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS CS4 PROFESSIONAL EDITION? BECAUSE I SEE YOU HAVE USED ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS VERSION 7.01 PROFESSIONAL EDITION.
by Alejandro 01/16/2010
I can not write well in English
but I write only to congratulate
for your work is excellent
by Tómas Ingi Ragnarsson 01/14/2010
Gratitude for all the tutorials. Here is my edition (done as a party invitation):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUn6CV7lVg0
by altaf 01/13/2010
amazing what else could be said!

www.altafk.com
by Rajat 01/12/2010
I am a software developer and accidentally landed to this site, but man what a wonderful tutorial i have...awesome. I am a graphic desgining and animation lover and i really like the efforts. KUDOS guys keep doing good job
by Connor 01/09/2010
Hi, just watched the earthzoom tutorial. great work. One question though, where did you get the images to work on? Was it google maps (satellite) or what?

Thanks

Connor (N.Ireland)
by Alek 01/06/2010
really great tutorial, just the thing I needed for my project!
by Sumardiyana 01/03/2010
great tutorial man...
thank you andrew,...you are the best...
by atif 01/01/2010
Thank you Andrew.

well you are good, i really like that. A year ago i had the same kind of animation project, but after watching the tutorial i feel that this is the more right way to do this kind of animation.
i want to say thank you again
by Syed Faizan 01/01/2010
SUch a Beatiful Animation ..... I LOve Andre Kramer
by Neko 12/29/2009
I saw this on some science thing except it was zooming in on a cement block and it zoomed in 2,000,000 times. you could see the silicon atoms! it was so cool!
by ABS15 12/26/2009
your are the best andrew :) yesssss
by Sukar Madrid 12/25/2009
Thank u so much

Sukar Madrid
Saudi Arabia
by Sensing 12/21/2009
Hello,

A lot of people asked about the pictures and how to get them....

Usually you can buy them. My Team an me are creating such Pictures for commercial use.
You can ask the local Gouvernement they should have such pictures.

alex
by AbN 12/16/2009
Muchas gracias
by MIS ZHANG 12/16/2009
THANK YOU!!
by Gold D Randy 12/13/2009
Thank's to Videocopilot
this very good
by Jamie Cooper 12/11/2009
I ran into a problem 27 seconds into the video. I cant find a weather balloon or a hot air baloon anywere! Where can I find something like this? Im not someone who can spend much as im only 15.
by jalan 12/11/2009
where do u get pictures of the world like that
by grost0ny 12/11/2009
Thanks for this great tutorial !!!
by Alejandro 12/02/2009
HOLA Andrew, you are so nice and your tutorial is so great. Thanks. I use it to do a film you will see sooner in my web page about Namibia, South Africa, and Botwana.

Meanwhile, why don´t you do a tutorial about a progressive route or itinerary over a moving map?.

Thanks.
Alex
by Ziekheid 12/01/2009
Thanks for the awesome tutorial Andrew, much appreciated!

Some problems I ran into (and seen others who posted here run in to) are:
Scaling to %0.0005 will sometimes show the composition background.
By playing around a bit with the scaling I could get it to be exactly the way I wanted it, which is the most zoomed out picture. I ended up putting it at 0.0015 I think.

I've also seen people who had problems with the exponential scale being greyed out, I had this too but after linking the layer up (which was explained a step later in the tutorial, the second time you use it) it suddenly worked again..

Hope this helps someone :)
by Tomi Scotti 11/24/2009
hey, great tutorial, but I can´t find good photos. Google Maps doesn´t work cause the photos never fit at all and it get´s blurred.
Google earth hasn´t got enough details. Can you please gelp me (photos captured with windows [capture button] and sharpend with Gimp).
Sorry for my bad english i´m German.

Thank you for these great Tutorials!
by kemebo 11/23/2009
wow Andrew u rock bro, ur tutorials are so crystal clear and to the point. I am a beginner and I am so ahead of the learning curve due to ur teachings great job to u and all the guys that are behind the scenes at Video Copilot.!!!!!
by zh 11/21/2009
This is the best tutorial ,Thx
by Mehmet 11/20/2009
Hey, I have a problem. When after the first part, when parent all layers to layer 1 and scale it to %0.0005 i see my composition background instead of world view. I realised that when I change the scale of layer 1, layer 8's scale doesn't change. What should I do?
by kasidech (Kitaro) 11/18/2009

Thank you the tutorials ! Thank youvery much !
I's in Thailand.
by kasidech 11/18/2009
Thanks a lot for all your great tutorials !
Thank you very much !
Thailand
by Trevor Speer 11/18/2009
that string joke got me..i thought u really meant it so i went outside i paused it before u continued then just thought to myself did Andrew really do this took me 1 hour to figure this out. Nice vid!
by juniorar 11/13/2009
increible....gracias a vos conozco AF !!! segui asi que se valora mucho el aporte!.
desde argentina!
by Scott Bedford 11/09/2009
Great tutorial - I used this technique as part of a website intro for Coke: http://www.vimeo.com/6973731 (hope I did it justice - I think it's cool!)
by prabhakar 11/04/2009
hi this is nice and cool effect. But where i can found this images can any body tell me
by Steve 11/03/2009
If you've ever seen the tv show The Big Bang Theory this exact effect was used almost identically on season 3 episode 5 at the very end of the show and I have a strong hunch it was created using this this tutorial.
by Enzo 10/30/2009
I swear am half way about crying here... this lining up is definately NOT as easy as you make it look man.. Am so fustrated i feel like blowing up. Andrew, do me a favour, use me instead of Sam. i think i need all that torture :P
by the way, love ya Sam.. Your awesome too.. Feel like releasing my fustration just typing alot but.. not such a good idea.. my coffee even got cold trying to concentrate too much.. But, il just say your just amazing.. wish i could ask you questions.. wait, rather, interview you haha. Alright i'l leave now
by kbto 10/25/2009
nice n clear tutorial
by Michael Mandaville 10/21/2009
Andrew,
Thanks for the tutorial. I very much enjoyed and learned from it.
by samy 10/20/2009
I used this technique to my job,it is very easily
thank u Andrew
by JORDAN SKYLER ANDERSON 10/17/2009
I love your tutorials learning alot from you!
Im 17 and im a intermediate user at this program love it!got years of practice 2 come

A quick thing i did:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzgPWAAuye8
by richeie 10/11/2009
guys/ its an awesome tutorial but how the flip do you scale down the images//
i'm having trouble. i've tried everything..
can anyone help me please//

ciao
richie..
by Ruby 10/10/2009
wow! how'd u get to visualize those things?! u must have great photographic skills...and to think you can link it perfectly to after effects. that's just so whoa! thanks andrew...-college student^^
by JoeyRiverrocks1 10/08/2009
Great tutorial andrew! Keep it up!

If anyone's bored out there plz let me know what u think of my earth zoom to australia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2oeG9rpy-A
by blues brother 10/07/2009
i love digital
by Anseres of people 10/06/2009
Hey. Everyone keeps asking: "Where do you get the images from?"
As for me I don't know where he got the high resolution images from. What I use is google earth for the in close pictures and NASA World Wind for the farther away pivtures(State and country). I use Wisdom-Soft ScreenHunter 5.0 Pro to capture the picture because after you can crop out anything you dont like. On google Earth it has all the writing at the bottom which you can crop out and on NASA World Wing it has the tool bar. Both have the top window and bottom window. Just use sreen hunter. Crop and your done. I don't know about the high res screens though
People asking about maps can also try http://flashearth.com
Hey guys! the images: from google maps (not google earth!!!)
by sasha 10/03/2009
how did you get the sound FX???
by Hermann 10/02/2009
wow :O

you are the best video maker!

nice n1!
by Kao Yang 09/30/2009
WoooooooooW!!!!! Awesome. I love it. Love your work. Thanks.
by Fifth Weapon 09/30/2009
You a bad man...In another life you would have been a rasta...thanks and praise to jah for the kramer.
by felipe 09/27/2009
it's spectacular
it's perfect
it's beautifull
it's very very great
sorry for mi english i'm spanish
by Ian 09/26/2009
You're the man, Andrew!
by Jojin Kang 09/25/2009
Great tutorial as usual Andrew, I guess you are always pressed for time doing 100's of these tutorials but I would go one step further and go through each layers and fade out them out completely as they get too small to be noticed. that way you wont notice colour difference when they contrast like in the last 2 shots.

thanks for your tuts mate, you got me interested in after effects. Something I never thought much of before.
by Tulio 09/23/2009
Andrew, earth zoom video tutorial is breaking down when you reach close to 8 min of video. You should check this out!

by Jordan Clayton 09/22/2009
Great Video I love all the effects ;)
by FeanaroSingollo 09/19/2009
Amazing tut. it was so fun to do :)

People i used Google earth to get high res images :)
by ultimatebuster 09/18/2009
Awesome project, but enabling the motion blur makes it much nicer.
by Mike 09/13/2009
Fantastic tut!
Does anyone know were to get the high res images from ?
by Stephane 09/12/2009
Hey Andrew, awsome turotial,
I'm attemping to recreate this zoom from my part of the world, I was wondering where you get the high res pic from?
by Shivang 09/12/2009
amazzzzzzzinggggggggggggggg is also small word for your tutorial..........!!Keep it up Andrew...
by ateeb 09/11/2009
love it man bravoo
by SaQr 09/10/2009
The best Tut ever seen 10/10
by Madhan 09/08/2009
its really superb and usefull.
thanks a lot.
by irene 09/07/2009
Anyone can tell me where can i get images of a diferent place in the world? I've tryed with Google earth and it works for closer ones but when i zoom out it looks pretty ugly...

what can i do?
by Bear 09/06/2009
Hi I am desperately looking for a slow, long zoom out video from the earth into the far reaches of space. Can ANYONE help me with this?
by jabez.in 09/01/2009

Andrew Thanks for that great tutorial god bless you
where are those maps from ??? Google Earth ??? I realy like some maps of MY city
by sagar 08/31/2009
nice sir one more time u inspired me to do something...u r geat...plz check the below link to see what I have done using u r tips on Google earth
plz do reply
by

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq0xHzEjSGs
by adri 08/31/2009
you're the best I'd like to be like you
by madhu sanjel 08/31/2009
Love the tutorials. Congrats on the new addition.
Also curious where one would find photos of this high a resolution?
Also, what would be the procedure of reversing the effect where you come from space and zoom into a street... but then, add in a motion shot of a person looking up, as if to start a story of such a person? Which is what I'm now wanting to do. I'm sure I've actually seen this somewhere actually?
by boryst 08/30/2009
hey guys. i love the tut. worked great. the only problem i ran into was that i want the planet image at the end to be centered in the frame. so the beginning is centered at my house but then when we are in space looking at the earth i want the planet centered. any ideas?
by arts-vision 08/30/2009
nicely done man
by Thiago Emídio 08/28/2009
Cara Muito Bom!!!!
vcs tiram Onda Mesmo!
by dimasoktawijaya 08/19/2009
andrew yoo ma... ^_^
by Balkar 08/18/2009
damn nice tutorials! xD
by Raj 08/16/2009
Awesome Project
by StokOne 08/14/2009
Very Nice work!!
Thank you Andrew!!
by Michael Stoffels 08/14/2009
Hello there,

first of all, I want to apologize for my bad English.

Last week, I was watching TV and during the advertising I was zapping around. I found sth kinda funny on the German Channel "Pro-7".

They have a stupid Casting Show called "Sommermädchen 2009" (Summergirl 2009) and on this day, the finale was on air. They used this effect here. But not just this effect...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF5j0b5Q8yw
by unees 08/08/2009
EXCELLENT!
THANK U!
by KoenBucket ( 93GB on YouTube ) 08/05/2009
Hey people,

I was working on this effect, and had the same problem with the scaling, with the black screen showing instead of the Earth image, however, I found an easy way to (sort of) fix this. For some reason AE doesn't recognize any value below 1 for the scaling. What you want to do, is the following:
- Just leave the black screen when you enter 0,0005%, which will be changed by AE into 0,0%, and go on with choosing the exponential scale.
- You will notice that the black screen is gone and the earth image is visible. However, the earth looks very tiny, which doesn't looks very nice (however, that's just my opinion). If you check the scale at the end of scale-animation, you will see that it has the value of 0,0001. Also, if you go through the whole scale-animation, you will see that the Earth will 'shrink', but stops 'shrinking' while the exponential scaling hasn't even ended yet.
- What you want to do, is search the part where the Earth has the size as you wanted it to be. The next thing you have to do, is deleting all the keyframes that come after it. If you have done that, and you check the whole animation, it will stop at the right moment.

This worked for me so far, I hope it'll help you guys. Good luck

P.S. I'm from the Netherlands, so please forgive me if there is any bad spelling in my comment (I always like to keep it clean, I know how hard it is to read when someone writes unreadable stuff with lack of dots and stuff.)

Note: Some details about the outcomes as I described it (like the tiny Earth), could be different than others, because of the sizes of the PSD's you use, etcetera

Note 2: With 'sort of fixing', I ment that when you will fix the problem with the scaling, the stuff like time will slightly change, so if you made the animation last 10 seconds in the first place, it will end up lasting 9.1 seconds or something like that.
by James Felizardo 07/29/2009
Andrew Kramer Tutorials = awesome After Effects
by Garrett Phillip Montgomery 07/23/2009
Great tutorial. I was able to get decent photos out of google earth. What would make it even better is to combine maltaanon's tutorial for 'Advanced 3D Planets' (created with CC Sphere).
http://maltaannon.com/articles/after-effects/advanced-3d-planets/

Although I don't know how the heck to do it because my last layer (Pre comp of 3D spinning planet) would be spinning. I start zooming out from downtown LA and then end up in Africa. Any suggestions on how this can be done?

by Manoj Perumbavoor 07/23/2009
Hi, video copilot creaters, excellent creations...nice tute, my HD movie making come true.....
manoj Boogloo
by Pradeep 07/20/2009
this is awesome man, where did u take this satellite pictures from?
by DarkEntity 07/14/2009
whaaaaa...that was amazing!totally brilliant!you are bad!!!thanks man!you're the master,the prof!
by JBL 07/12/2009
Just like code said:

"alright, i just wanted to let everyone know that the best solution i have found so far is to parent every layer to the last layer (earth) and then, starting with the scale of that layer at 25 million, keyframing it down to 100. i can see this causing a lot of problems and it definitely isn't perfect. that being said, i could still use some advice on this one."

This method works but it's extremely slower and less user friendly.

I had to move my anchor point up to a 0.00001 precision (my project is kinda bigger than the one in the tutorial)
by JBL 07/12/2009
I got the same problem as Olli,

"Hi. Thanks for that great tutorial.
Still i've got a question:
Wenn i connect all Layers to Layer Nr. 1 I just see a Black Window.
If I Scale Layer Nr.1 at 100 I can see the right Picture, but if i scale it up and down i can't see the other Layers. They are not connectet any more.
Does any of you know why this is happening.
THX Olli"

by PeaceUN 07/10/2009
Old tutorials doesnt work :/
by Olli 07/09/2009
Hi. Thanks for that great tutorial.
Still i've got a question:
Wenn i connect all Layers to Layer Nr. 1 I just see a Black Window.
If I Scale Layer Nr.1 at 100 I can see the right Picture, but if i scale it up and down i can't see the other Layers. They are not connectet any more.
Does any of you know why this is happening.
THX Olli
by Dave 07/09/2009
Hi, i really like this tute, and want to use it for a promo video i'm working on. i live in Australia and was just wondering how you got the high res pics of San Francisco, i would like to get some of a city here.

Cheers.
Currently showing 100 of 584 Comments.
Please Read
If you are having a problem viewing the tutorial or downloading a project file or preset, please start a new thread about it in the Website Support Forum. This section is for commenting on the tutorial, not posting problems. If you post a problem with the tutorial here, it will not get dealt with in a timely manner.
Leave a Comment
  Name (required)

  Email (will not be published) (required)



If you are asking for a certain plugin or are having a problem with the tutorial, please check the forum (button below) for an answer and if you don't find one, start a new topic with your question. If you would like to proceed with posting your comment, click Submit Comment.

Your comment is now in the moderation queue and should appear shortly. Thank you for your comment.