Worldfocus producer Channtal Fleischfresser attended a German election party at the German Consulate in New York on Sunday and watched the results come in.
The event featured a panel discussion moderated by Garrick Utley, Chairman of the American Council on Germany, and featured panelists Klaus Peter Siegloch, bureau chief of ZDF German Television, Nikolaus Piper, Senior Correspondent for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and Cathleen Fisher, PhD, of George Washington University.
Though the election results were expected, observers said the record low turnout suggests dissatisfaction with the current options in German politics.
In our second installment of our Worldfocus Google Earth tips, I’d like to demonstrate another workaround that helped us zoom in on a given region more effectively.
If you’ve ever tried to zoom in from a very high to a very low altitude on Google Earth, you will have noticed that it takes a while to process the zoom and adjust the resolution. In addition, on the broadcast we use color overlays on our wide views of countries, which we don’t need when we zoom in close on a city.
You can see the problem in this zoom of the island of Capri, off the coast of Naples, Italy:
A nice way we found to work around this was to create two maps: one of the wider view, and one of the close-up.
Once I export these two map moves, I bring them both into Final Cut Pro and dissolve them together. Take a look at this zoom into the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin:
In addition to editing video and keeping track of the goings-on in Europe and Brazil, lately I’ve developed another pastime: learning how to use Google Earth, the alternately fascinating and infuriating global satellite technology.
Using the detailed mapping software, you can see into your own backyard – literally. You can look out across the Himalayas from the peak of Mt. Everest. But how to navigate Google Earth’s decidedly un-user-friendly customization settings to make them suitable for a television broadcast? That’s a different story.
An example: thanks to increasingly specific satellite imagery, we now have the ability to zoom into cities not only in the U.S. or Europe, but also in many African cities, where for a long time detailed satellite imagery was lacking.
The problem: as you can see in this most recent 2009 composite view of satellite images of Africa, the continent now resembles a 19th-century impressionist painting. Pixelated splotches of color dot the landscape, where some areas have much more satellite coverage than others.
Happily, we were able to figure out a solution to this dilemma. Google Earth has an underused “history” button, which allows the user to view satellite images from different dates in the past. (Naturally, the number of dates available depends on what part of the world you are looking at and how far away from Earth you are.)
So if I want to show a view of Africa, but want to see a clean view of the continent, without all the satellite clutter, I can simply select the earliest date possible on the “history” view – in this case 1930.
This won’t actually show you 1930s satellite views if there were none from that time, but in the absence of such satellite imagery, Google Earth will automatically default to a clean satellite view of the landscape. So with this simple work-around, we’ve gotten one step closer to implementing Google Earth on our broadcast. Stay tuned!
Watch this video for some more Google Earth history tips and an interesting visual comparison of how the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan has shrunk over the years.
