Press play. That is a real file: a GPX went in, that MP4 came out, and nothing was edited afterwards. No screen recorder, no video editor, no account anywhere.
Every clip on this page runs at the speed you would get yourself. That is worth saying because it was tempting to cheat: each one films a six kilometre stretch of a two hundred kilometre Alpine stage, rather than squeezing the whole stage into half a minute, so the camera moves at the same pace your own route will. They have sound, too, if you want to hear what the music option does.
The clip above is Flyover, the default camera, on the switchbacks of a climb. Route Video takes the route you already have loaded in PitStopper and renders it as a video over 3D terrain. It has grown a long way since the original flyover, which was something you watched in the browser and could not keep. This is a thing you export, post and send to the people you rode with.
What you get
Load a GPX or FIT file, open View -> Route Video, press Record video. A minute or two later your browser saves an MP4.
Three formats, because the places people post are different shapes:
- Landscape 1080p (1920x1080) for YouTube and for sending to people.
- Portrait (1080x1920) for Stories, Reels and TikTok.
- Square (1080x1080).
And 24, 30 or 60 frames per second. Sixty costs more than twice twenty-four, because the encoder sizes its bitrate to the frame rate as well as the picture.
One thing worth being clear about, because it is the difference between this and pointing a screen recorder at your browser: every frame is rendered in full before it is encoded. The recorder waits for the map to finish drawing each frame, including tiles that have not arrived yet, and only then hands it over. So the file is smooth whatever else your computer is doing, and nothing that happens on your desktop while it runs can end up in the video.
Eight cameras
The camera is the setting that changes the character of the video most, so it is worth trying more than the default.
| Camera | What it does |
|---|---|
| Flat map | A plain 2D view from straight above. The clearest, the least dramatic. |
| Overview | Sits back and tilts a little. Good for short routes. |
| Bird's eye | High and steeply tilted. The terrain reads well from here. |
| Flyover | The default. Follows from behind and above, looking ahead down the route. |
| On the bike | Down at road level. Best where there is something to look at. |
| Close up | Tracks the line tightly, so the shape of every bend shows. |
| Orbit | Circles as the ride goes on. |
| Drone | Follows the shot list below it. |
Here is Orbit over satellite imagery, working along a valley in the French Alps. The camera circles as the ride goes on, so the same village is seen from three sides in half a minute:
Camera changes
You are not stuck with one camera for the whole video. Scrub to a point, press Add here, and pick a camera to use from there on. The camera chosen above is used until the first change. A long tour can open wide, drop to road level for the interesting climb, and pull back out for the run home.
Pace
Three ways of spending the video's time:
- Fixed speed covers the route evenly.
- As ridden uses the timestamps in a recorded file, so the video slows down where you did. On a ride with a long lunch stop this is either the best setting or the worst one, depending on your feelings about lunch.
- Highlights hurries the flat bits and lingers on the climbs and at POIs.
Opening from space
Turn on Open from space and the video starts at continental scale and dives to the start of your route. Add an Opening title and a sentence or two of Opening words and they appear on a card over that first shot, gone by the time the camera arrives:
Both text fields are empty by default, so nothing appears unless you write something. The card follows your typing as you go, which saves rendering a video to find out that your title was too long.
The map, and the light on it
Style is Outdoor, the drawn map, or Satellite, which is photography. Satellite tells you far more about open country and mountains. Outdoor is much easier to read in a town, and it is the one to pick if the names of places matter to your video.
Light can be fixed at morning, midday or evening; taken from your ride when the file has timestamps in it; or set to changing through the ride, where the sun moves across the sky as the video runs. On a long day out that last one is quietly lovely.
3D terrain is what makes any of this worth doing, and the vertical exaggeration slider under it decides how much. Hills need some exaggeration to read on a phone screen. Past about 2x it stops looking like your ride and starts looking like a different planet.
Buildings raises 3D buildings out of the map as the camera gets close to a town. Fewer labels quietens the map so the route is the thing being looked at rather than one line among a hundred place names.
What goes on top
Everything here is optional, and the defaults are a reasonable video on their own.
- Show POIs, with Progressive POIs so they appear as you reach them rather than sitting on the map from the first frame.
- Name POIs & climbs labels each one as you pass it. Name places, passes & summits captions the towns and cols you go through, which turns a line on a map into a route with a story.
- Elevation draws the profile along the bottom with your position moving along it.
- Route legend puts a small diagram of the whole ride in the top right corner with a dot showing where you are. It keeps the shape of your route rather than stretching it to fill the box, and it corrects for a degree of longitude being shorter than a degree of latitude, so a north-south ride looks like a north-south ride.
- Distance & elevation is the running readout in the top left.
- Ride data adds heart rate, power, cadence and speed tiles, when the file you loaded has them. A FIT file from a bike computer usually does.
Music
Eight tracks, ordered calmest to briskest, from a ukulele piece called On the Road, Looking at Your Feet up to drum and bass. Pick one and it plays straight away, so you can hear it against your route before committing to a render. The finished video loops or trims it to the exact length of your film and fades it in and out.
All eight are free for you to use, including on a channel that earns money. Six are public domain and ask nothing at all. The other two are Creative Commons Attribution, and their credit is added to the end card for you, because that is what the licence asks in return.
Anything with a NoDerivatives, NonCommercial or ShareAlike clause is deliberately not on the list, and that is a considered decision rather than an oversight. Setting music to moving images counts as adapting it, so NoDerivatives rules a track out however freely it is otherwise given away. We have no way of knowing whether your video ends up monetised, so NonCommercial is unsafe. And ShareAlike would put your video under the same licence, which is not a bargain we can make on your behalf in a dropdown.
They are all levelled to the same loudness too, so moving down the list changes the mood and not the volume.
The track itself
Track colour does what it says. Fade the trail behind you dims the line already covered instead of leaving it solid all the way back to the start, which on a two hundred kilometre route is the difference between a video and a diagram.
The player, and one setting hiding in it
Play and pause with the button or the space bar, skip ten seconds either way, drag the bar. The counter beside it shows where you are and how long the finished video will be, so you know what you are about to record before you record it.
The speed chooser next to that is the one people miss. It does not only speed up the preview: it changes the length of the recorded video. A route is given between one and four minutes depending on how far it goes, and 2x halves that. If your video feels too long, that is the control.
What it costs, and where it strains
Being honest about the edges, because they are real:
- It asks a lot of your graphics card. Rendering at 1080p60 on a laptop is genuinely demanding. If a recording stops partway with a message about the graphics card running out of room, that is what happened: try a smaller format, drop to 30fps, or close some other tabs. The message is deliberate. The alternative to stopping is a video that looks fine in the progress bar and turns out black.
- It takes a while. Every frame waits for the map to finish drawing, so a long video at a high frame rate is a few minutes of your computer working. Leave it be.
- Do not hide the tab. A hidden tab gets no animation frames and MapLibre draws on them, so recording pauses and waits for you to come back rather than shipping half-drawn frames. That is the right behaviour, but it does mean the render does not progress while you go and do something else in another window. Another window is fine. Another tab in front of this one is not.
- Satellite imagery has its limits. Zoom in far enough anywhere rural and you reach the resolution of the photography.
- The elevation is your file's. The profile and the readout come from the elevation in the GPX or FIT you loaded, not from a lookup. A file with poor elevation makes a video with poor elevation.
What changed since the flyover
If you read the flyover post back in January, that feature was something you watched. This is something you keep:
- Recording to MP4 at 1080p, in landscape, portrait or square.
- Eight cameras rather than one, and a shot list to change between them mid-video.
- Satellite imagery as well as the drawn map.
- Light fixed, taken from your ride's timestamps, or moving with the sun as the video runs.
- An intro, an outro and an end card, optionally opening from space, with your own title and opening words.
- A route legend, place captions, and ride-data tiles from a FIT file.
- Music, with the credit handled for you.
- A clock telling you how long the finished video will be before you commit to it.
Where the details live
The help page has the full settings reference, and Visualize Your GPX Route in 3D Terrain covers the interactive 3D view that Route Video is built on top of.
It is free, there is no account, and nothing you load leaves your browser. If you make something good with it, we would like to see it.
