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.