New Videos
Wow! Lots of new videos to make it easy to learn and apply the wonderful new georeferencing capabilities in Manifold. See the Videos page for the full collection of Manifold videos.
5 Minute Tutorial - Editing with Clip -
Spectacular new editing commands in Manifold Release 9 provide super easy, fast, and powerful interactive editing, the fastest and easiest way to edit vector layers in any data source.
The new Clip interactive editing command makes it easy to create areas that automatically follow boundaries of existing polygons, to create complex new areas. It's also easy to create new lines that are clipped to complex boundaries. See how in this short video.
Also see how to combine the Clip command with the new Merge editing command to edit polygons "in place" in whatever data source we want, including ESRI geodatabases, PostGIS, data sources, GPKG, shapefiles or any of hundreds of other data sources. Super! Works in the free Manifold Viewer too.
Newsflash - Merge, Clip, and Split - See a three minute, temporary video showing how to use fast and easy, new editing commands.
- Merge - Instantly combine multiple areas, lines, or points into a single area, line, or point with fast choice of how attributes should be merged.
- Clip - Create a new area or a new line and in the same step clip the area or line precisely to the boundaries of overlapping areas, either inside the overlapping areas or outside.
- Split - Draw a line and instantly split existing areas and lines, with fast choice of how to split attribute values.
5 Minute Tutorial - Create a Multiband Landsat Image -
Landsat data provides images in individual bands, such as Bands 4, 5, and 6, for visual red, near infrared and shortwave infrared. Creating large, multiband Landsat images using many Landsat tiles can involve combining dozens of individual band images.
Manifold Release 9 is perfect for the job, because it can handle many large rasters effortlessly, merging them instantly, and then combining bands into false color RGB multiband images. Manifold does all that with easy to use, point and click dialogs. No need for programming.
This fast-paced video shows how in under five minutes of workflow, including importing the original Landsat data downloaded from USGS. All this works in the free Manifold Viewer too.
5 Minute Tutorial - Scrape an ESRI Feature Server -
Working with web-based ESRI feature servers? If you want your own copy all the vector features (points, polylines, polygons) those servers provide that's easy to do with Manifold Release 9.
This video shows how to connect to a typical ESRI feature server, how to drill down and open the feature layer desired, how to copy all the features and to paste them into the local project. It's all a simple matter of point and click, copy and paste. All this works in the free Manifold Viewer too.
5 Minute Tutorial - LAS Point Statistics by Area -
Save thousands by using Manifold Release 9: The "LAS Point Statistics by Area" tool in Spatial Analyst for ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro adds attribute fields to polygon features for LiDAR points that fall within those polygons, adding the minimum, maximum, and mean Z values in each polygon, as well as the point count of LiDAR points in each polygon, and also the standard deviation of Z values in each polygon.
The video shows how to do the same thing in just a few clicks in Manifold's point-and-click Join dialog. No need to buy Spatial Analyst. Manifold includes the Join dialog and thousands of other capabilities, all for only $95. Save thousands of dollars and enjoy easier workflow too!
Manifold also is much easier than using expensive products like LAStools, and costs far less in labor than writing your own code in Python, PDAL, or other lower level tools. All this works in the free Manifold Viewer too.
5 minute Tutorial - Georeference Many CAD Layers -
Georeferencing CAD layers is a common task in any GIS. Manifold Release 9 makes it a lot easier with fast, simple workflow that avoids extra effort and lets us recycle what we've already done.
This video shows how we can add a few control points just once and then georeference an entire stack of CAD layers imported from a DWG without adding more control points or repeating any work. If the DWG contained a hundred layers we could do them all!
This is much easier than the complicated, more labor intensive procedures in ESRI or other GIS packages. All this works in the free Manifold Viewer too.
Georeference a Scanned Paper Map -
In only five minutes of actual work we use Manifold Release 9 to georeference a 157 MB scanned paper map so it can be used as a layer in GIS. The scanned map is a historic map showing Davy Crockett National Forest in Texas, downloaded from the Library of Congress website.
Compare Manifold workflow to ESRI workflow and you'll agree it's a lot easier, quicker, and less confusing in Manifold. Fast GIS is fun GIS!
Georeference a Whole World Image -
We see a map we like on a web site so we make a screenshot. How to use that map in GIS? Easy! We georeference it using Manifold. The video shows how to georeference an image scraped from the web that shows the geology of continents as they were 200 million years ago.
We mark four control points in the image, then we roughly mark four corresponding control in a Manifold map using Bing as a background layer. In the Register pane we edit the coordinates of those control points to be even +/- 90 and +/- 180 degrees, and then we press Register. Done!
The video also shows how we can import and georeference a second image similar to the first, without needing to add any control points, just re-cycling the ones we created before. Less work is great!
Previous What's New Pages: See the previous What's New page for prior news.