Accurate World Maps

So if a Google image of a country isn't good enough for your graphic, then here's a possible way to get a good, high-quality map of a country. Also before you do all this elaborate GIS stuff to get border info, try this page at Wikipedia, Blank Maps for pretty simple borders. It's not good for detail but if detail isn't need or even desired, then save yourself a bunch of hassle. These images at Wikipedia are SVG, and I give a few tips about the SVG format below.

There's probably an easier way to do this, but here's a method that I found for getting very accurate country borders for Mac users.

1. Source of Information
Digital Chart of the World Server
Select a country. Next you select "download data". Then it asks you what kind of information about the country you want. Not very intuitively (none of this is intuitive by the way), you make no selection and press "continue". The next screen gives you a few options--I skipped the ArcView projects, and selected PC Compression. The next screen gives you a download link to the data--HTTP link will do a regular file download. You now have data for the borders of that country. I did about 15 downloads and one country, Turkey, I couldn't get to work.

2. Render Data
I used some GIS software to render the data. I used the GrassGIS. This is open-source and free. There a couple of versions for Mac. I checked out two that I found were buggy, and I ended up using both to complete the process. The less-buggy version is for download here.

The other version, which is more buggy, is from Open OSX, for donwload here. The 6.2 version wouldn't open for me, but the 6.3 version ran. The Open OSX download came with a tutorial. Do this tutorial or otherwise you'll never figure out the Grass software. Again, not intuitive at all.

The Open OSX and the less-buggy version are similar enough but the menus and commands are layed out a bit differently. The Open OSX would crash as I added layers, but the less-buggy version built up 10 layers for me with no problems. But the less-buggy version crashed when I tried to export the files. Luckily projects would open up in either versions. So I imported the map info into the less-buggy version, saved the "workspace" (which is different than the project--again, you gotta do the tutorial)--then I opened up the project and workspace in the Open OSX version to export the map. The project is where all the data is stored, and the workspace is how it is displayed.

So the Open OSX seem to be bad at running a bunch of layers. As each country is only one layer, it's possible that you could do everything in the Open OSX version without it crashing. I was trying to work with a bunch of countries, so I want ahead and worked with the less-buggy version. But eally you can only export one layer at a time anyway, so I'm not sure if there's any real advantage to working in the less-buggy version for what I describe below.

One handy thing I figured out on my own was that if the software crashed, then it was actually still running. You had to go to the Terminal window where Grass is running and type "exit". Then Grass would stop running, so that you could restart it. Don't worry about starting up Terminal becuase both of these apps automatically open up terminal windows when they start--make sure you find the terminal window that has Grass to enter the exit command.

OK, so how do you import and export the data? When you start up Grass you either open an existing project or start a new project. So I suggest naming your project, like "countrymap". (BTW, I think Grass doesn't like any file names with spaces.) The import command that works with the data you have downloaded is under the File Menu, scroll down to "Import vector map" then choose "Multiple formats using OGR". Pick the file that you got from Digital Chart of the World server, which was called "ponet.e00" (all files downloaded from the site are named that, so you might want to name the file after the country.) In OpenOSX, all the relevant import options are under "Optional" (go figure.) "OGR datasource map" refers to the file you are importing. Enter a name for the "output vector map" and the "new location to create." After you did this, OpenOSX would crash. But it still would import it, and when you restarted you would have a new location. Open that new location (not the new mapset.)

This only imports it into your project, then you have to make a vector layer for it--I won't describe how to do that, again you got to do the tutorial. After you make the vector layer, then in the Display window, hit "Display active layer" and/or the "Redraw all layers" buttons. Then you finally get to see your map displayed.

Unfortunately, only Open OSX would do the export of the map for me. So if you are working in the less-buggy version, save your workspace. Make sure to add the .grc suffix to the workspace file. Open up your "country map" project in the Open OSX verion, then open up your workspace in the Open OSX version. To export your map, go to the File Menu, select "Export vector map", then "SVG". It opens up a window, where you select which layer you want to export (I couldn't figure out how to export more than 1 layer at a time.) Then under output type, select "line" (poly, which is the default, doesn't work.) Name your file and go ahead and find the directory where you want to save it, but make sure to add .svg as the suffix to the file name too.

3) Merge the Border to a Background Image of Earth
Not many programs seem to like the .SVG format. You can see it in a web browser. But Photoshop won't open it. Illustrator does. I don't have Illustrator on my laptop, so I jumped backed into open-source software and downloaded GIMP for Mac. I went ahead and also updated X11 as the GIMP site recommends, but I don't know if that's necessary.

GIMP runs pretty much like Photoshop. It's a raster-based editor. So when it opens your map border, it wants to render it out to a raster image. So make sure you pick a good resolution to render the image to when you import, but the path is just as important because it will preserve vector data too. So when opening, select "Import Paths" and "Merge Imported Paths". You could do the rest of the work in GIMP, I think, but if you know Photoshop, then just save this file as a Photoshop document and do the rest of the work in Photoshop. Just make sure the rastered image resolution is big enough to work with in Photoshop because the paths don't get transfered to Photoshop unfortunately.

The background image I use is from NASA. It's the Blue Marble: Land Surface, Shallow Water, and Shaded Topography. The way the earth is projected onto the map seems to align with the export from the GIS program. NASA has other world images with this projection in their Blue Marble collection. There's actually a special version of this image called a GeoTIFF at unearthedoutdoors.com. The GeoTIFF can be imported into Grass and the country maps will align perfectly over the image. Cool, but it's really only valuable as a preview because you cannot edit the image in Grass.

Sorry I'm going to skip how to composite your border and the background. I actually did this in Illustrator, but you could do it in either Photoshop or GIMP. I align my map and background in Illustrator. Then I edited the image the Photoshop. Finally I wanted to do a spinning globe thing, so I brought the Photoshop doc into After Effects. In After Effect, I used the CC Sphere FX to put my flat map on a globe.

I actually was working on this GIS workflow, then I found the Blank Map SVG file at Wikipedia which had plenty of detail for my map. Plus, there's over 50 countries on this map, and it would taken a super-long time to handle all of those maps in Grass and align them properly. Here's the result of what I did with that (BTW, Bosnia is not a Muslim-majority country).

Muslim Countries Rough Animation from Matt DeVries on Vimeo.

Adobe--Photoshop and Future Technologies

PHOTOSHOP FOR VIDEO
With Photoshop CS3 Extended, you can now bring in video to Photoshop. Why would you want to do that you ask? What about After Effects? What about Color? Well I just came across a cool site/podcast that gives you a number of interesting ideas about how to harness Photoshop to make your video better.

Here's a video from the Photoshop for Video site that shows you how to use the Shadows-Highlights command on video. I recently used the shadows and highlights command in iPhoto to save some snapshots, and I was thinking "if I can do this on software that's practically free, why can't I do this in Final Cut Pro?". Well I still don't know how to do it with FCP, but I could correct my video this way with the latest & greatest version of Photoshop.


Back to the issue about Color. I haven't used it yet and frankly I'm not thrilled about learning a new interface. Now I have the option of harnessing my knowledge of Photoshop to do some cool tweaking. Also, for you folks who don't know Photoshop, I think this website/podcast is good way to pick up knowledge about the best image editing application out there.

Here are some other cool videos from Photoshop for Video at Adobe TV that I recommend:
Spot Color Grading
Making Alpha Channels for Logos (I do this lots)

So this appears to be regularly updated via a podcast--good way to use podcast subscription to do some regular learning if you're interested in Photoshop. Oh, video in Photoshop only just got added to the Extended verison of the latest Photoshop. But not everything on this site is about this feature, good stuff that can be done in older versions of Photoshop is available too (e.g., the alpha channels for logos movie.)

ADOBE'S FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES
While on the topic of Adobe, there's another interesting video from NAB where Adobe talks about some future technologies. The most interesting one for me is what they call "End to End Metadata". In particular, they were demoing speech recognition that generates transcripts for movies. Then that transcript can be leveraged in editing (Premiere Pro) and in delivery to the web (Flash video.)

Avid has already deployed some of these tools with their Script Sync, which I wrote about on this post. Basically you can hop around in the text of a script or transcript, and the software know where people are saying that bit of dialogue. But I like how Adobe takes it another step further by allowing delivery of the text too--think subtitles, think closed captioning, think searchable text on the web.

I don't know about the voice recognition engine creating automatic transcriptions. I can't believe voice recognition is that good--on the other hand, I'm sure our government is spending billions on voice recognition software so that they can monitor everyone's phone calls. Eventually that technology will filter down to us mere mortals--just another great benefit brought to us by the Bush Administration.

Here's the outline of the Adobe technology presentation if you are interested in any of the other stuff:
1. Cinema DNG
2. End to End Metadata
3. Mobile Delivery
4. Interactivity without scripting

So I found out about these video over at Pro Video Coalition, which is turning into my main source for video news.

FCP's Competition--Avid & Adobe

Big news from Avid today. The cost of the software-only version of Media Composer has been cut in half to $2500. And they are killing Xpress Pro.

I haven't worked on Avid in over 5 years now. So I can't really comment on how it measures up now to Final Cut Pro. IMHO, I don't think this is going to upend Final Cut Pro's dominance. But it may help Avid from losing too much more market share. They are also offering an educational license of Media Composer for $295. For owners of Xpress Pro, you can upgrade for $500.

Good commentary on these blogs about the latest news from Avid:
ProVideo Coalition
HD for Indies
Studio Daily Blog

I'm about to get a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium. I'm getting it is as a swap. Unlike Avid and Apple, Adobe has a non-profit pricing. So Production Premium CS3 retails for $1700, but the non-profit price is under $600. When you look at everything that's in the Production Premium, it's a competitive product. Here are the apps:
After Effects CS3 Professional
Premiere Pro CS3 (runs on Intel Macs but not PowerPC Macs, e.g., G5's)
Encore CS3
Photoshop CS3 Extended
Flash CS3 Professional
Illustrator CS3
Soundbooth CS3
Device Central
Ultra CS3 (Windows Only)
OnLocation CS3 (Windows or Bootcamp)

Afters Effects and Photoshop Extended each cost $1000 retail if you buy them separately. So the bundle has some value. When you compare what Apple is offering for $1300, it leaves me wanting more from Final Cut Studio. While I'm very happy with Final Cut Pro, Apple needs to do more work on the secondary apps. Color has bad buzz for being unstable. I know Motion 2 left a lot to be desired in reliability and performance--I'm hoping that once I start working with Motion 3, I'll be happier. And no update for DVD Studio Pro when Final Cut Studio 2 came out. What is up with that Apple? I'm still holding out hope that Apple's waiting until they can introduce a Blu-ray burner in their laptops and then they are going to announce support for authoring Blu-ray discs in Final Cut Studio. But I wouldn't hold your breath. Adobe's Encore CS3 already does Blu-ray authoring. (Recently Toast 9 was announced with support for authoring Blu-ray video discs.) The fact that the MacBook Air doesn't even come with a DVD drive makes me worried that Steve Jobs thinks that the iTunes Store means that no one needs a disc to watch video anymore--or reading between the lines, Blu-ray is just competition for Steve's dominating video like he dominates music.

The things I'm most looking forward to in After Effects CS3 are better performance and 3D text effects. But frankly, I'll probably never even try out Adobe Premiere. I worked on it ages ago and felt burned. I'm happy with Final Cut Pro and it's not worth it for me to learn a new app when I don't know that if it's as powerful and reliable than FCP (much less better.) Not to mention the advantage Final Cut Pro has by being the de facto editing package for the type of work that I do.

Scaling Up your Video

Integrating DV Source Footage into HDV Projects, Part 1 By Jan Ozer

This is a good article on the basic issues on scaling up footage for high-definition video. Goes over frame resolution, pixel aspect ratio, and interlace. One good tidbit mentions an advantage to using Compressor with interlaced footage:

On the other hand, when converting from interlaced DV to progressive HD, deinterlacing is a huge component of the quality equation, which could and perhaps should change your workflow, particularly for Final Cut Pro editors. That’s because Final Cut Pro deploys different deinterlacing algorithms than Compressor, which uses the glacial but ultra-high quality Optical Flow algorithm from Shake. If converting from interlaced source to progressive, you may produce noticeably better quality by scaling and particularly deinterlacing in Compressor. This means creating a separate sequence for your SD footage, rendering it out through Compressor, then re-importing the file back into Final Cut Pro. On the other hand, I found scaling quality relatively close between Final Cut Pro and Compressor, so if you don’t need to de-interlace, scaling in Final Cut Pro should work just fine.

This article says that FCP and Compressor do an equivalent job of scaling-up video. But early this year I wrote about a tip for getting better-quality uprez with Photoshop. A tricky workflow, but if quality really matters then it's doable.
[via FreshDV]

Best Way to Scale Up Video (without buying another plugin)

One more post of my cribsheet from DV Rebel's Guide. So Stu Maschwitz recommends using Photoshop to scale up video. In his case, he's talking about using video shot letterbox 4:3 to a native 16:9 for DVD, but seems like it could work for standard-def that needs to go to high-def too. After Effects uses bilinear interploation, but Photoshop CS has a better algorithm for scaling images--bicubic sharper. So how do you use Photoshop to work with video? Stu recommends converting your movie to series of TIFF images (with LZW compression) and then using Photoshop actions to automate the process. This assumes that you have progressive video--if you have interlaced footage then you'd have to deinterlace with After Effects (use preserve edges), output 60 fps of TIFF's, scale in PS, the re-interlace in After Effects.