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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T20:31:08+00:00

I’m completely new to ArcGIS and ArcMap, but someone suggested this program to me

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I’m completely new to ArcGIS and ArcMap, but someone suggested this program to me for a project I’m working on.

I would like to animate individual entities on a map, and was wondering if it is possible to do so in ArcMap. I asked this earlier here and a member directed me to a tutorial on animating in ArcGIS. The animation in the guide was over a map spread (ie. each pixel on the map displays, say, a different color to indicate population data in the area). However I realized that if I zoom in a lot, eventually the image will degenerate into pixels, which is why I need an actual object to mark a certain point. I checked some online tutorials and it seems like we can place markers on the map. Can someone tell me if it is possible to animate these markers (for example via a for-loop)? And if so, could you point me in a direction where to start?

Thanks in advance!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can animate layers in ArcMap is the short answer. Its not as simple as using the timeline feature in Google Earth for example though. But then ArcMap is much more than just a visualization tool.

    This help page on the ESRI web help looks like a good place to start.

    I’m not 100% sure what you mean by the image degenerates into pixels. Are you saying that the markers were single points in the layer. Unlike Google Earth you are not confined to simply plotting points on the map. You can draw completely arbitrary shapes in ArcMap, which can be defined to cover actual areas of the map, so when you zoom-in the shape gets larger.

    The way you need to load data into ArcMap to produce an animation isn’t too simple. There might be other ways to do this, but the way I know of is to generate a NetCDF file. This file contains a 3D matrix of layer data, where each layer is separated through time. Because you generate a matrix, you are effectively placing a raster image over the map. Thus if you want to cover a large area, each matrix becomes large, and you multiply that by the number of time slices you wish to animate over.

    Once you have a NetCDF file with your data in however, getting ArcMap to animate it and produce say a .avi file is pretty simple.

    You could try just loading some of the example NetCDF datasets into ArcMap to see how/if they will work to get you started.

    Hope that helps.

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