In part one of this little series on new features of Live Maps, Steve Lombardi, a Live Maps program manager, showed us around Live Maps Collections, and MapCruncher.  In the second part, we’ll talk about exporting a Live Maps Collection to a file that can be imported into your Nav device.

First a little more on process.  After posting our first video, I got a nice note from Michael Palermiti from Windows Live reminding me that I could upload videos from the Gallery, and it would take care of compression.  This video was small enough (<100mb) that it didn’t need compressing, but using Windows Live Photo Gallery definitely saves some steps (although the processing time is still the same, it takes a long time to process the videos once they’re up on Soapbox, a half hour or more).  Here’s how you do it:

• Open Windows Live Photo Gallery and select your video (you may have add the location)
• Click on Publish to MSN Soapbox (you need to be signed in to the correct Windows Live ID in Photo Gallery):
  
• Upload the video
  

Uploading of course depends on your internet connection, etc.  Here on Comcast cable, it takes a bit (upload speeds are much slower than download).  Then it takes a while for Soapbox to “process” the video.

OK on to the video.  Thanks for the feedback on showing who we’re talking to, I was concentrating on getting a usable “screencast”.  We’ll do it next time.  I did take a photo of Steve, with the Xacti video cam (basically it’s two buttons: record video, or shoot a still pic, very simple).  The camera comes equipped with a hella flash, which might explain Steve’s somewhat startled look:

Steve just posted a tutorial on how to export Collections to files, on his Live Maps / Virtual Earth blog.  The examples aren’t exactly the same, but you can follow along.

Next, we’ll take a look at making a Live Maps 3D Tour, and labels for Birds Eye imagery.  Oh, and yes there’s still one more to come after that, and no I can’t tell you what it is, yet ;)