Map route animation for video: a line from city to city
A route on a map is how a travel vlog, a logistics explainer or a news piece shows where things happen. By hand it means a map, a path, a moving dot, labels that appear on time and a distance counter, all keyed to each other.
Here all of it comes from one sentence. The route draws itself along an arc with a bright dot at its tip, each city gets a dot and a label as the line reaches it, and at the end the distance counts up to 820 km. The land is a simplified dark shape with a grid, not an exact outline of the country, and the cities sit in route order rather than at true coordinates.
The prompt behind this clip
This exact text produced the clip above, word for word. It is in Russian, and the plugin reads English prompts the same way:
📝
Маршрут на карте России: линия прорисовывается от Москвы через Нижний Новгород до Казани, города отмечаются точками с подписями, внизу расстояние 820 км
Translation for reference (the clip was made from the Russian text above): a route on a map of Russia: the line draws from Moscow through Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan, the cities are marked with dots and labels, the distance 820 km at the bottom.
Settings: Ultra tier, 16:9, 1080p, 60 fps, 8 seconds. The page plays a smaller copy of the render.
How to make it in Premiere
Open your project and go to Window → Extensions → Butter Motion. The panel docks next to your other windows, so you never leave the edit.
Set the chips under the prompt to match your sequence: 16:9 and the frame rate of your sequence, 8 seconds for a route with three stops and the distance at the end. Matching aspect, resolution and frame rate means the clip lands on the timeline with nothing to conform.
Leave Background on With background if the graphic fills the frame. Pick Transparent if it should sit on top of your footage: you get a MOV with alpha (ProRes 4444), and it needs an empty video track above the shot.
Leave the tier on Ultra, the default, in the box left of the Generate button. Flash is cheaper and fine for a quick draft.
Paste the prompt, put in your own text and numbers, and press ↑ (or Cmd+Enter / Ctrl+Enter). The card goes through queued, generating, checking layout and rendering. It takes a few minutes, and you can keep cutting while it works.
On the result screen, choose Unlock customization (free for subscribers) to change text, colours and fonts by hand, or type a change into the Tweak bar ("make the line draw slower").
Press To timeline. The clip is rendered on your computer, imported into the «ButterMotion» bin and placed at the playhead.
What to change for your route
Cities and order. List the stops in the order of travel: "from A through B to C". In this clip each city name is its own text control afterwards.
The distance. The number and the unit are separate controls (Distance value, Unit), so 820 km becomes 510 mi without a new generation.
Exact geography. If the outline and positions must be accurate, pick Transparent and lay the route over your own map: a screenshot, a satellite shot or a map from your designer. The background and the grid are also switches in the controls.
Colours and speed. The route accent, the land, the background, the text colour and the speed are controls on the finished clip.
A route without a map. For a path over a city or an illustrated scene, see the drone delivery example on the Animation tier.
Why not a map template
A map template comes with its own country and its own path, and moving the route and the labels is the slow part. Here the stops, the labels and the distance are in the request, the line is drawn for your route, and the clip renders at the resolution and frame rate of your sequence.
What it costs
One generation at the tier you picked: Flash 7 credits, Ultra 10, Animation 15. Transparency, resolution, frame rate and length do not change the price. For subscribers the controls and the first tweak on each generation are free, and each tweak after that is 5 credits. Rendering and dropping the clip on the timeline cost nothing, and there is no watermark. Plans and credit packs are in the pricing section, the details in How credits work.