I think my biggest problem here is I don’t know the lingo for what it is I want to do. I have a dataset of events with a datetime and lat/long, and I’d like to make some sort of video / animated gif / etc. of them popping up on a map.
I’ve seen this kind of thing many times before, but right now the best (pretty bad) example I can think of is Scott Manley’s video of asteroid discoveries by year, which isn’t going to help me for a number of reasons.
I’m pretty sure I have less than a million datapoints and ideally I’m looking for open-source stuff, but I’ll take anything as a direction to start looking.
(Unrelated but interesting, I did discover the word Choropleth which is the type of map you see where areas are shaded based on some datapoint like population or income or whatnot).
The easiest way to think about this is not a video, but a sequence of individual images.
Can you draw the data on a map? If so, then automate that, drawing hundreds (or thousands) of individual maps, each of which has the data you want to show for the time period.
Then, turning those stills into a video is easy.
This may be much more tool than you need, but have a look at Cesium. It can be scripted to do all manner of really neat things. It may be too complex, but it can read files that describe actions on the map surface. Depends if you have any programming chops. A simple bit of setup code and a description file in GEO-Json may do what you need.
The software package Tableau has this functionality, at least for most common maps. I’ve made maps of our customer base slowly spreading across the USA. I did it by month over the course of 10 years, the software allows a decent degree of flexibility. u.com/en-us/s/blog/2014/08/capturing-animation-tableau-maps has examples.
The D3 library (open source javascript based visualizations) may have something if you can code.
Personally, I’d probably use PowerPoint. A lot depends on what resolution you require, but animated PPTs can be exported as videos. I’ve done this several times by adding text boxes, graphics, etc., that transition at certain times (including dissolves and disappearances) and simply using the Export function. Again, limited resolution, but it works just fine.
When you say dataset and lat/long, that makes me think it’s at least a hundred points, so you don’t want to plot them by hand on a PowerPoint clipart map.
One very easy-to-use solution for throwing lat-long pairs onto a map is umap, but I can’t think of how you’d animate that.
Using ArcMap Online’s Story Maps tool would probably be the easiest, but it’ll require a bit of learning and probably at least a basic subscription. Microsoft’s MapPoint tool might be worth looking into as well, because it should integrate well with Excel, Access, and PowerPoint.
I bookmark all the webmap creation tools I come across, but I don’t think I’ve come across a tool that will do this easily (meaning without custom coding). Tell me more about how many entries and how much of the world you want the map to show, and maybe I can think outside (my) box.