The Swiss Fighter video synchronization I did back in 2007 has served as a test bed for various GE technology innovations. This time, an idea Keir Clarke came up with last week inspired me to update the concept yet again. He threw together some javascript to load a YouTube player next to the GE plugin and play a GE 5 Tour in synch with the video.
The concept I wanted to re-create is the flight of a Swiss Fighter Jet, shown in a popular video found in YouTube, which shows some amazing flights through the Swiss Alps. The re-creation was done by flying with the Google Earth flight simulator (after finding the same mountains and airport). Only this time, instead of capturing the scene with video, I’ve used Google Earth 5’s Record Tour mode to capture the sequences. I then had to splice together the recorded tours of each segment and edit the timings a bit to get them to approximately synchronize with the original video.
Even though I had re-created the flights before, it took a few hours to pull all this together and make it work. To see the synched video and GE 5 Tour – click here 
and make sure you follow the instructions.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
Is there a way to run this without using the Google Earth Plugin? The GE plugin doesn’t run on Linux and is therefor useless to me.
Just amazing. You gota respect Google Earth.
That’s a lot of work Frank, well done! how did you produce the tour? hand writing the XML or a combination of the tour record feature in GEarth and hand coding?
Rich
@Rich: I guess I wasn’t clear enough in the article. I recorded each flight live in Google Earth with the flight simulator mode. This resulted in 6 or 7 Tours. I then saved them in a folder as a KML file and hand-edited the KML into a single tour. I then had to watch the YouTube several times with the Tour and hand-edit the KML to add pauses or accelerate the playback of each flight segment to get them to synchronize. Of course, when recording the flights I got them to be as close as possible first.
That is amazing what a great showcase for Google Earth. Fantastic to see the video and 3D so close in sync.
In the past people have been trying to use the Google Earth COM interface to link it with Microsoft Flight simulator but the problem was that roll was not provided in that interface.
Once I have my current project done, I think it is time to write a decent link between MSFS and Google Earth and show how superior Google Earth data is.
I suppose I might as well write decent instruments and flight physics into Google Earth. Anyway, great inspiration.