Unfortunately, you haven't told us anything about the quality of the original picture(s) in your mosaic, nor what steps you took to create these mosaics. I would guess, however, that if zooming all the way in on a particular section makes it appear pixelated, then either a) you have Preview quality set too low, or b) that particular section was smaller than your project's frame size.

Did you arrange all of the photos into one big mosaic image first and bring that mosaic image into Vegas? Or did you import a bunch of pictures into Vegas and then arrange them into a mosaic there?

If the former, what are the dimensions of the mosaic? If the latter, what are the dimensions of the individual photos?

The bottom line is that to maintain the best possible quality, any area that you expect to "fill up the entire screen" should be at least as large as your project's frame size (generally 720x480, but yours may be different).

Rob

This is sometimes referred to as a Superzoom and, yes, After Effects does do this easily. Although I haven't done this in Vegas, here is a technique that mimics the AE approach and might work for you:

1. Place your original mosaic on track 1.
2. Create a high resolution image of the center or your mosiac consisting of your center photo and the immediately surrounding photos, and place it on track 2.
3. Make track 2 a child of track 1.
4. Temporarily set track 1 opacity to about 20% so track 2 shows through.
5. Use the track 2 EVENT's pan/crop tool to adjust the size of your high resolution center photo to the same size as the zoomed out center photo in the original mosaic on track 1.
6. Now set the parent motion on track 1 to 3d and use it to control the zoom in on the mosiac. This will cause both track 1 and track 2 to zoom together.
7. Finally, put a fade offset at the end of your track 1 event to fade from the original mosaic to the high resolution center of the mosiac just as the high resolution center portion is filling the screen.

HTH,

Jerry

I used a photo mosaic program to make the mosaic and it’s made from 4 x 6 pictures that are 150 dpi. My preview quality in Vegas is set to best. I’ve spent hours trying mosaics of all sizes, cell sizes and dpi’s but no matter what I do, when I import it into Vegas and zoom in on center photo, it’s pixilated.

I ran across someone who does this professionally and he said that he uses a photo mosaic program (I have the one he uses) and then imports it into After Effects to fix the center pictures. He also said that no matter what size I make my mosaic, the center pictures will be pixilated. That’s where After Effects comes in.

I was just hoping that I didn’t need to spend the extra money and time to learn a new program just to create this effect.

TeeTime:
On your instructions, you said to create a high resolution image of the center or your mosiac consisting of your center photo and the immediately surrounding photos, and place it on track 2
Are you saying that I should import the mosaic into Photoshop and manually find and replace the center picture and those surrounding it?

Thats is somewhat what I did for a portion of a video I did and used the Mosiac program. Though mine may be zooming the oposite way you are doing. i found it easiest to use the orig pic on another track.
Heres a short example:
Mosiac Sample

CraftyCre8tor,

You should use your original photos to create the high resolution center. You could do this in Photoshop, or presumably your mosiac software, but just create a new mosiac using the center photo and the ones that immediately surround it (probably total of nine photos).

Jerry

"He also said that no matter what size I make my mosaic, the center pictures will be pixilated. That’s where After Effects comes in."

This is not 100% accurate. You could indeed create a mosaic where each individual pic has a resolution large enough to match the output of your video. Problem is that this could mean a really huge mosaic file.
I tried to achieve this but the mosaic was way too big and the computer with 2 gigs ram ran dry. Therefore I used the method where I simply aligned the original center pic over the center frame of the mosaic and zoomed back as I faded from one to the other. It was not perfect, but it was close enough.

Some of you guys are probably getting tired of me linking to this file, but hey, it fits the bill:

epirb ,
I really like that idea you had for those credits. A nice twist on the mosaic use.

Thanks Jim it was inspired by your video.

FWIW...

"...great quality mosaics that look good when zoomed in some of the way, but none where you can fill up the entire screen with the center picture."

To me the key question was asked by bStro, how good is the original? The desired cropped center of the mosaic should look great at full screen all by itself before considering anything else. Cropped & F/Screened in P/Shop, how's it look? And how's it look on your intended hardware -- TV, PC, HDTV or whatever. If that doesn't look good, nothing short of fixing the image is going to make it.

Many of the final vid file formats are OK with fades & dissolves, but occasionally choke a bit on pans/zooms... Using that in a strategy like Jerry's can help.

The way its internal code works, AE's rendering may just be more up to the task or more forgiving, doing a P/Shop resampling routine or whatever, but given good material [in my experience anyway] Vegas can work fine.

If it helps at all... dpi or ppi or lpi in a digital image matter for printing -- not much else. As with an image from a digital camera, you're looking at overall size -- you can convert resolution figures (dpi etc) to 96 in most image editing software, or use jpg which *usually* does it for you -- it also keeps file sizes down.

You really shouldn't need 2 gig ram, though it's nice to have. ;?P In order to keep things manageable using a really huge amount of still pixels, perhaps a whole lot of hi-res pics, render sections of your vid one at a time.

But bottom line I guess is that no matter what your original pic's size, whether 1 or 10+ megapixels, if you keep zooming in, keep hitting the magnifying glass in P/Shop, eventually you're going to see individual pixels. If you don't want that, don't zoom in so far. ;?P

CraftyCre8tor,

Here is a clip I made in AfterEffects using a technique similar to the one I outlined earlier in this thread. This is a spinning ornament that has been covered with a mosaic of pictures (using Alan C.'s excellent FREE PictureWall). You can see that as I start zooming in the quality of the individual images starts to decline. The train video which is the last item to display as it fills the entire frame is at full 720x480 resolution and it looks noticably better. In AfterEffects I was able to pin this full resolution video to the zooming spining ornament to achieve this effect. I think the Vegas steps I outlined would permit something similar if you are only zooming and not spinning in "3d space" as I was.

Jerry

Jerry,

I liked your ornament video!

I think that I'm just going to get After Effects. It will be worth the time and money because it will greatly increase my projects.

By the way, I found another site that had the zoom effect I was trying to duplicate.

Click on the Video Preview located HERE