Extracting and animating data from the "UFO Video Captured By Homeland Security"

originally posted by: odzeandennz
a reply to: IsaacKoi

I kinda get it.

but clarify for me please. lol.

does your data proves it could not have been a bird, or drone, or any current commercial or military vehicle. ?

pardon my ufo ignorance. hehe. I'm not on the ufo boards too often.

Did you even attempt to read the original post? Clearly you did not. You are missing the point entirely and I honestly have no idea why you are here. OP, great work. THIS is why this site exists. To break down things like this in a scientific fashion and get to the truth of what we are really seeing here. Star and flag, regardless of what I do or do not think we are seeing here.

originally posted by: kkrattiger
Please take a look at Frames 60 61 & 62. 61 being 02. This is seconds in Longitude (correct me if I'm wrong). It goes from 08 to 02 to 07. 7's can look like 2's but that is not the case here... Unless my eyes are playin tricks on me.

When a value changes, there are sometimes a frame or two where parts of BOTH the old and the new value are displayed. This means that digit that changes can be a blurred mess of two different numbers.

So, in the column you are working on (i.e. Column AU) I would insert 7 in frame 60 and 8 in frame 62 onwards. As for frame in which the change occurs (i.e. frame 61) you could almost toss a coin to decide which value to include. I'd probably go for the 7 on this one.

I would not agonise too much over the change-over frames - either value would be fine for the tiny fraction of a second represented by one frame. I've tended to scroll down a few frames (using the PDF version in Abobe Reader it is easy to scroll up and down) to make it clear what the value becomes and then choose whether the blurred number looks a bit closer to the old value or the new value. (The appearance of a 2 in frame 61 is basically almost all the way to the 7 that is being formed).

I've got a handle on the quick scrolling, using arrow keys in the version you linked to. Thanks for that guidance. a reply to: IsaacKoi

When a value changes, there are sometimes are a frame or two where parts of BOTH the old and the new value are displayed. This means that digit that changes can be a blurred mess of two different numbers.

a reply to: jaffo

Patience will serve you better. The poster was polite and honest in his/inquiry. Asking if the analysis's aim was to exclude whether the object could be certain types of craft was a fair question. You could have answered that the aim is to clarify and gather further data by which people could make better assumptions and ask better questions or that this thread is a precursor to excluding certain objects such as balloon or drone.

No need to be impolite to an honest question IMO.

originally posted by: IsaacKoi
Challenge 2 : Plotting and animating some of that data (whether using After Effects, Cinem4D or otherwise) on a map or maps (whether sourced from Google Earth or otherwise).

Since Challenge 1 (i.e. completing the spreadsheet of data) seems to be progressing nicely, I've started thinking about options for Challenge 2 (i.e. plotting and animating some of that data).

One of the other members of the PRRR team is looking into a Cinema4D plugin that looks like it does a lot of the work regarding terrains/maps.

Personally, I'd like to start with a simple 2D animation (probably just in After Effects) plotting the coordinates of the aircraft each frame and the coordinates of the target (i.e. where the camera is pointing on the ground) with a line between the two points showing the camera's Line Of Sight. (I've been learning how to use After Effects, hence my bias in favour of animating the plotting data in it...).

Many of you have probably seen elements of such an animated GPS track on TV or online, e.g.:


In either case, one of the first issue is simply how to get values from the spreadsheet (e.g. the longitude and latitude values) into After Effects as X and Y coordinates (and/or into Cinema4d).

I've seen a few commercial plugins linking After Effects to spreadsheet that may (or may not...) do the job, but am not sure that such a plugin is necessary. (In the interests of transparency, I'd prefer to avoid commercial plugins that may not be available to anyone that wants to check the process).

So, how do we get the coordinates values from the Excel spreadsheet into Excel? I've read a bit about copying and pasting values or using tab delimited values. I've also read some suggestions at the link below:
Generating AE grid points from Excel data

In that item, "Graymachine" suggests:

1. Save your Spreadsheet as a .CSV file, using a comma as a field separator.

2. Create text layer called "data". This will hold your numeric data. (hopefully this will work with 1000s of numbers)

3. Copy and paste the data from the CSV to the text layer. Again, hopefully this doesn't error or yield suffer from sort of overflow. If this works, then you are in business.

4. On a layer that you'd like to grab the position data, use this expression:

CODE: SELECT ALL
src = thisComp.layer("data").text.sourceText;
p = src.split("r")[index];
p.split(",")

We'd also need to decide which map(s) to use and how to calibrate them (e.g. by plotting a few coordinates via Google Earth) so that the numbers in the spreadsheet can be converted into X and Y values on the relevant map(s).

Tangential to the OP...Sandia Labs has been working on a "multi-modal" UAV apparently at least since 2013.

Just something to think about beyond balloons...when the data gets there.

The military’s swarm robots move from sea to air with a new program to shoot drones.
www.defenseone.com...

Volant, a multi-modal vehicle concept, is a single unmanned system capable of flying, swimming, driving, and hopping across a variety of terrains and obstacles. ISRC has built and conducted limited testing on conceptual hardware, and while the concept may appear to be off in the distant future, our testing has shown that this concept could soon be a reality.

www.sandia.gov...

I've completed Up to row 700 of the 7,000+ rows of column AU. It took about 35 mins.
IsaacKoi, how do I get you the numbers when I come to a stopping point? I do not think I will do all 7,000, perhaps someone will volunteer to do part of it. Say 1401 and up is in need of volunteers. I'll complete the 701-1400.(another 10%).

.

originally posted by: kkrattiger
I've completed Up to row 700 of the 7,000+ rows of column AU. It took about 35 mins.
IsaacKoi, how do I get you the numbers when I come to a stopping point?

Thanks. When you have had enough, you can email whatever you'd done to me (my username at gmail dot com) or upload a file to wetransfer and post the link here.

I do not think I will do all 7,000, perhaps someone will volunteer to do part of it.

No problem.

I told you it was very boring.

No cause for alarm.
I Deleted this post.

Deleted post, since the panic is over.

Pprune, the online pilots forum, link here, may be a good place to find someone who knows who to do the mapping animation. Specifically, the MH370 thread(s). a reply to: IsaacKoi

originally posted by: kkrattiger
Pprune, the online pilots forum, link here, may be a good place to find someone who knows who to do the mapping animation. Specifically, the MH370 thread(s). a reply to: IsaacKoi

I'll have a look there.

Thinking about it, there were quite a few MH370 threads here on ATS so perhaps some members of ATS (possibly ones that don't come in this UFO sub-forum very often) have already grappled with plotting/animating GPS data. Unless someone recalls such an attempt in those threads, I'll just to a few quick Google searches later to see if someone on ATS covered this group there.

My 3 monitor display is finally getting a workout that doesn't involve Eve Online. I have a house guest today and tomorrow but rest assured progress is being made on my column.

It's possible to create a preliminary animation in google earth. With KML it's possible to change the field of view aswell.
From there it should be even possible to export the data for other software with better camera controls.

originally posted by: Mastronaut
It's possible to create a preliminary animation in google earth. With KML it's possible to change the field of view aswell.

Okay. We'd need to work out the details of converting data from the Excel spreadsheet to KML (including the precise format of a KML file)

It looks like that conversion should be relatively simple, with most of the work involved being done by a tool on the Earthpoint website at the link below:
www.earthpoint.us...

There are also some freeware tools easily available online that look like they can convert spreadsheets (or CSV) to KML, e.g.
HERE and some other pages explaining how to do conversions suchas this one.

Sent an email with the spreadsheet through Frame 1401 for Column AU.

originally posted by: IsaacKoi

originally posted by: Mastronaut
It's possible to create a preliminary animation in google earth. With KML it's possible to change the field of view aswell.

Okay. We'd need to work out the details of converting data from the Excel spreadsheet to KML (including the precise format of a KML file)

It looks like that conversion should be relatively simple, with most of the work involved being done by a tool on the Earthpoint website at the link below:
www.earthpoint.us...

There are also some freeware tools easily available online that look like they can convert spreadsheets (or CSV) to KML, e.g.
HERE and some other pages explaining how to do conversions suchas this one.

I'll check out those links to see the resulting code, thanks.

I'm plotting the line of sight (plane to target) mostly to check what the code looked like. I got to frame 915 in 30 frames intervals ~1" geolocation rounding, and about ~1m rounding for height. In KML the height seems to be an integer in meters.
I drew a few triangles to check the approximate search area (1 every 4s), but until I plot the view cones with the real FOV isn't going to help much to do speed estimations within reasonable margins.
At that point it should be possible to draw lines directly towards the object and restrict the area.

Here's a few screenshots of what I'm getting so far, but can't do much more before next week

originally posted by: kkrattiger
Sent an email with the spreadsheet through Frame 1401 for Column AU.

Great. Thank you for that contribution to the draft spreadsheet. Your contribution is the first to be submitted, but it sounds like others are making progress as well (and one or two others will be joining in the effort to finish off the spreadsheet after the weekend).

I've incorporated your submission in the earlier draft and uploaded the revised version to the same link as before:
prrr.isaackoi.com...

originally posted by: Mastronaut
I'm plotting the line of sight (plane to target) mostly to check what the code looked like.

Just to help me start getting to grips with KML, could you post a sample line or two of KML code for a specific frame? I'm curious what KML looks like relative to the corresponding spreadsheet columns for a frame (since this will help me thinking about conversion processes).

This is a three day weekend here in England, so I'll be able to get into these issues in more depth.

a reply to: IsaacKoi

I made a pastebin (can't upload it on the site)
EDIT: used an alternative site since pastebin doesn't work here it seems..

I created 3 folders, 1 for the plane, 1 for the crosshair and 1 for the shapes. The first part of the document defines the styles (colors/alpha/icons).

You can see a position for the crosshair ("xair" in the naming) for frame 15 (Line 159).

For the shapes I used a polygon (in GEarth you can only assign 1 altitude to a path/polygon, had to edit manually).
the tag is lon,lat,altitude (in meters) separated by one space. makes the surface visible otherwise you only get the boundary lines. has 5 values (clamped to ground/sea, relative to ground/sea, absolute).

Can't help much more with kml, I never used it before, but the reference is here.