Extreme zoom from U.S map to close-up satellite imagery?

[simonx314]

Hi. I'm trying to create a flash application which displayes 20 locations on a U.S map. Right now I have a satellite image of the U.S, and if you click on a location it zooms and you see a close up. I am achieving this effect by playing a short flv video captured from google earth. The first frame is identical to the map image, then it rapidly zooms in (about 1 second) to the location, the last frame is the same as the satellite imagery of the location.

It looks pretty good, but each zoom video is 1 to 2mb to achieve video quality which matches the satellite imagery and looks good with such extreme movement. The problem is the flash presentation is too large with all the videos, can I achieve the same affect with images? Something like a deep zoom effect? Is an image zoom technique practical considering I'm zooming into the whole country image way beyond a single pixel of the image all the way down to satellite imagery? Any ideas would be much appreciated, it doesn't have to be in flash, but I can't use the Google Maps API because it has to work offline.

[AttackRabbit]

are the zoom videos flv's ? are they being loaded dynamically or are the embedded in a symbol on the timeline ? what are your compression settings ? what are the frame rates and duration ? also something to consider is degrading the quality of the start and end images , to match the quality of a lighter weight video. Then you can you creatively use blur and motion blur to take attention away from banding , artifacting , or weird aliasing your start and end images have.

also im thinking , a zoom in , even with some easing , shouldn't really take more then a second . so if you have a fairly standard frame rate , like 30 fps per second , if you create 5 bitmaps of the zoom sequence at increasing levels , and actually you have a start already being the satellite image , and an end image, so really you would only need 3 bitmaps of the in between states of the zoom sequence. Then just do a cascading scale of the five images. You could then adjust the compression setting from your flash library , because the 3 in between bitmaps are in motion , so they dont have to be high res. I think you could achieve a convincing effect for less than myabe 150 k . Or at the absolute least , less then one meg. I guess it all really depends on how you break apart your assets.