5 Best Earth Zoom After Effects Templates of 2025

Create stunning earth zoom-in and zoom-out effects on any location in the world with these 5 best Earth Zoom After Effects Templates.

Shooting an Earth Zoom effect practically can be quite challenging as you need to attach a camera to a rocket that can go to outer space. While Elon Musk could do that, you and I can’t even imagine.

So what’s the next possible way for people like us (lazy and probably broke) to create Earth Zoom Effects? The answer is by using an Earth Zoom After Effects template.

Such templates are quite good at generating earth zoom effect animations with the help of a map generator tool or script that can directly import maps from Google or Bing Maps through location coordinates. You can further customize the maps by inserting information, call-outs, markers, and pins.

Let’s take a look at some of the best Earth Zoom After Effects templates that can help you create stunning Earth Zoom effect animations for films, television, video games, and other visual projects.

An active internet connection is required to use any of the listed Earth Zoom After Effects templates as the maps are downloaded through Google Maps.

1. Ultimate Earth Zoom Toolkit

Creating an earth zoom effect has never been easier with the Ultimate Earth Zoom Toolkit for After Effects.

The templates come with a map generator script that can automatically download and import map images directly into After Effects.

You can enter up to 10 location coordinates in the map generator.

Once downloaded, the Ultimate Earth Zoom Toolkit can combine all map images so that you can zoom in and zoom out from one location to another. The template comes with an intro zoom effect with a pre-rendered 3D satellite view and an outro logo reveal scene.

It also features an extensive library of more than 100 hi-tech on-screen graphic elements such as:

• Animated Texts
• Media Placeholders
• Info Boxes
• Call-outs
• Markers & Pointers
• Navigation Icons & Map Signs
• Nuclear & Military Icons

The Ultimate Earth Zoom Toolkit is an all-in-one solution for all your broadcasting, game development, and filmmaking needs.

2. Zoom On Earth Suite

If you are looking for a complete toolkit for creating earth zoom effect animations in After Effects, then Zoom On Earth Suite V2 is a perfect template. It comes with a script that is capable of downloading maps via location coordinates.

Before downloading the maps, you can also choose the map style – Road, Satellite, Satellite + Road, and Terrain.

Using the Zoom On Earth After Effects template is quite simple. You can create an earth zoom effect animation in just 4 easy steps:

1. Open the template and launch the map grabber script.
2. Type in your coordinates, choose the map style and click on the ‘Create Maps‘ button to download the map.
3. Once the map is downloaded, you can move the timeline slider to preview the Earth zoom effect in real time.

The template includes 18 ready-to-use callouts and 24 pin markers. Each pin and callout has a control panel that allows you to change its color. You can very easily add these on-screen graphic elements to the map and finish off by choosing 1 of the 3 animation styles:

• Simple Map Zoom – This is just a basic zoom-in and zoom-out effect where you can set the starting and arriving altitude as well as the zoom duration.
• Vector Earth Zoom – This style works best with the street map style. It starts from the globe and arrives at your selected coordinate showing the road map. You can set the end altitude and the duration of the zoom-in.
• Satellite Earth Zoom – In this style, the animation starts from the universe and zooms in on your desired coordinate, then zooms out all the way and ends with a logo.

3. Earth Navigator

Earth Navigator is a unique After Effects template and a script for introducing your video footage with a stunning animation of the Earth. You can reach up to 10 different locations over the world.

The functioning of the Earth Navigator is fairly simple. You just have to type in your location coordinates and import your footage. The final animation of an Earth Zoom effect will be immediately created, and ready for export.

It comes with several unique features that you can’t find in other Earth Zoom After Effects templates. One feature that we liked most is the Level of Zoom setting. It gives you control over how much you want to zoom in on the map. Similar to other templates, Earth Navigator can also download and import the maps into your animation.

You can even customize the appearance of the Earth by changing the cloud’s opacity, atmosphere amount, sunlight direction, and more.

Another feature that impressed us is the location connection checkbox. You can connect multiple locations to move from one place to another. Just click on the checkbox and the script will do the rest.

You can enable the Smart Rotation checkbox to allow the script to calculate the shortest route for reaching the next location. It does so by changing the rotation direction of the world. Everything is automatic, fast, and easy.

Earth Navigator is a smart Earth Zoom After Effects template with numerous great features, some of which are not available in any other template. It’s a must-have product for every motion graphic designer.

4. Animated Map Toolkit

Animated Map Toolkit is the ultimate world map kit for all your map animations. It is a multipurpose After Effects template that features 4 different map animation solutions. It includes:

• Map Connections – To create unlimited connection lines on maps. A useful tool to show correlations between several places.
• My Route – It contains all the required tools to create a smooth path animation. It’s best for animating point-to-point GPS navigation.
• Country Highlights – It’s an included script where you can input country names to highlight them with effects and colors.
• Earth Zoom – And of course, the Earth Zoom tool to zoom in on any place on a realistic Earth model.

The Earth Zoom tool that is included in the Animated Map Toolkit features a very high-quality earth model that looks much better than any other Earth Zoom After Effects templates. However, there is no automatic map generation script and the process of inserting a location map has to be done manually.

Thanks to the included step-by-step video tutorial, the entire process is fairly simple but does add up to a small amount of extra effort.

Animated Map Toolkit also includes 55 customizable on-screen graphic elements like call-outs, markers, and pins to display text and other information on the maps.

Lastly, many unique settings can be customized to alter the appearance of the Earth model as well as the Earth zoom effect. You can change the direction of the sun, start and end altitude, camera rotation, the amount and opacity of clouds, enable/disable night lights, add a custom background, add a camera shake, and more.

5. Earth Zoom Toolkit Pro

Last but certainly not least on our list is the Earth Zoom Toolkit Pro. It features a unique CEP extension that lets you browse maps directly inside of After Effects. No need to copy and paste location coordinates from external sources.

Once you select a point on the map, simply choose 1 of the 3 map types: Aerial, labels, or Road, then click on the Download Maps and Reanimate button. The script will automatically download all the map images and create a zoom-in and zoom-out animation.

Earth Zoom Toolkit includes 10K Earth Textures, 6 sci-fi environments, 17 animated call-outs, and Earth control settings that allow you to completely change the look of the Earth.

CLICK HERE to learn more about the Earth Zoom Toolkit Pro, its features, and how to install & use it.

While testing the Earth Zoom After Effects templates listed in this article, we’ve concluded that the Earth Zoom Toolkit Pro is the easiest to use and produces much better results. However, all the other templates have their unique features that make them different from one another.