• Adobe After Effects

  How on earth did they do this ?

  Posted by Andres Meira on February 16, 2020 at 9:11 pm

  Hi !

  I want to replicate this amazing earthquake video (but for a specific country) :

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqI2glLK8V4

  I have used the Orb plugin to create the earth pretty much identically.

  I also downloaded all the earthquake data from USGS, and organized it chronologically so that each earthquake has a unique frame count (instead of date), eg 001, 002, etc.

  I created a csv file with this data (frame count, latitude, longitude, magnitude), and imported to AFX.

  This is where I am stuck, and my scripting abilities are quite basic.

  I am able to import the individual events with correct 3d locations using the Locations script ( https://aescripts.com/locations). I can name the layers with the frame count, but can’t create a script that assigns layer start time according to layer name. Also, I don’t then know how to assign the magnitude to control an effect on each layer.

  Any thoughts!?

  Thanks

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  Michael Szalapski replied 6 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 5 Replies
• 5 Replies

• 

  Richard Garabedain

  February 17, 2020 at 5:47 pm

  I think you are just way over thinking this…Using a flashing dot, i can place all over the earth map image so that orb is playing it back, it will light up in random places on the earth..just do that to your earth map and you are done right? what am i not seeing?
• 

  Andres Meira

  February 17, 2020 at 5:58 pm

  thanks for this. Yes I am able to add flashing dots and particle effects on the correct 3d locations using the latitude and longitude.

  The problem is each flashing dot needs to start at a specific frame count (an earthquake from 1920 must be before an earthquake from 1960).

  Also, the size/color of the flashing dot should be driven by the earthquake magnitude.

  Perhaps this is easy to do, but I am not sure how to connect the csv data to the layer start time, and flashing dot size/color.
• 

  Richard Garabedain

  February 17, 2020 at 5:59 pm

  ohh…orb freezes the image…thats a shame.. element 3d can do it
• 

  Andres Meira

  February 17, 2020 at 6:03 pm

  Ah I understand what you are saying- just add the flashing dot to the earth map, not the 3d object.

  That makes sense !

  I still need to figure out how to animate the start time for each flashing dot (will be thousands), as well as the size and color based on magnitude.
• 

  Michael Szalapski

  February 21, 2020 at 10:27 pm

  See if this page helps automate some things for you: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/data-driven-animations.html

  – The Great Szalam
  (The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

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