Google Earth Tricks for Presentations

Demo

You can use PowerPoint slides, panoramio images, tours, animation, ground overlays based on 2D PDF maps to awesome-ify your presentation in Google Earth!
YouTube video of what you can do
Google Earth KMZ file of Flood Risk presentation
KMZ of Animated Hurricane Irene Image

Put PowerPoint Slides into Google Earth

It isn't that hard to add powerpoint slides to Google Earth.  There are many ways to do this.  To make them easily fill up the whole screen without fighting they should be a screen overlay.  Screen overlays can't be created by hand in Google Earth but you can pretty easily make one by hand by copying the following code:

<ScreenOverlay id="khScreenOverlay756">
 <name>Slide2 - Flooding</name>
 <visibility>0</visibility>
 <Icon>
  <href>C:/YOURPATH/YOURFILE.png</href>
 </Icon>
 <overlayXY x="0.5" y="0.5" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
 <screenXY x="0.5" y="0.5" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
 <rotationXY x="0.5" y="0.5" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
 <size x="0.8" y="0" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
</ScreenOverlay>

Ground Overlays from PDF, JPG Etc...

To do this you must first capture just the image of the map you are looking to add.  You will probably need to crop out the background and stuff so that it doesn't look crappy.  To do this I used... uh, um well, I used powerpoint.  To be honest, I love powerpoint it simple, powerful and easy.  In Powerpoint 2010 you can use Insert and then picture or screenshot to select the map you need.  Once it is in PowerPoint you can use the remove background tool to make sure it only shows the part of the map you want.  Once this is done right click on the image go to save as picture and then save it as a PNG.  In Google Earth go to add image overlay, find your image and then adjust the size/position/rotation so that it matches up with Google Earth.  You can get some very nice results.

Animated Placemarks (points):

Animating a set of points is fairly straight forward.  Google earth makes it possible for each point to have a beginning time and an ending time (see timespan in KML reference).  To make it for Google Earth, first make a spreadsheet with the points names, locations, beginning and end times.  Then you must save it as a CSV.  Then you can use a website (such as earthpoint) to make a Google Earth KML file based on your spreadsheet).  This can lead to some pretty awesome results.

Animated Image Overlay:

Example:  Animated Hurricane Irene Image 

So this one was a little harder.  I wanted to get the video of Hurricane Irene into Google Earth.  I first used a program to take a video of Hurricane Irene and turn it into individual  about 40 TIF images, one for each time period.  After that I used Google Earth to add one of the image overlays and stretch and place it in the right position.  The KML code for the rest of the overlays will be exactly the same as the first, except we need to change the filename pointing to the TIF file and we need to have it be visible during a different timespan.  I wrote a program in python that takes the template KML code and then makes a copy of it for each time period, substituting in the appropriate time span and filename.  Once this was done I put them all in the same folder and put them in Google Earth.