Edward Troxel's Excalibur has a "picture wall" feature, I believe, and I think one of the VASST plug-ins does too. It's possible that one or the other would further develop the script to all for what you do. I'd contact Mr. Troxel to see; worth a try.
Possibly someone else on the site could do a script for you that will do what you want to do.

Jack

I created what you describe. My technique worked but it was tedious.

1. I created the picture wall using track motion.
2. I made the nine tracks children to a parent track.
3. I used the parent track to pan and zoom around the video wall.
4. However, when you zoom in with track motion you will get pixelation because it sets the resolution of the entire video wall to project resolution, so...
5. And this is the tedious part - at the point where I became fully zoomed into a cell I overlayed the TM'd cell with a full resolution track that contained a copy of that cell's event.

In the end, it looked amazingly good, but was a lot of work to get the transition between the track motion cell and the full rez overlay perfectly aligned.

HTH.

/jerry

I've done something like this and it is just hard slog no matter if you use AE or Vegas. It's arguably a bit easier in AE where you can keep it all in the one project and it might have been a lot easier if my skills with Expressions were better.

So, only way I could find to do it easily in AE or Vegas was to make each tile a project and then nest all of those into a master.In the child projects do the event/pan crop to handle the actual zoom so your images don't turn to mush and then in the parent project use track motion to handle the size / position of the tile.

Bob.

Never tried this, but...could you duplicate the track of the tile you want to zoom into, move that to the top, zoom. Delete. Do the same for all the others?

There is the Videowall from DaviTools http://www.davitools.com/videowall/homevw.aspx
I have not tried to zoom in/out, as you describe, but it might be helpfull - at least as the 9 screen videowall where you can zoom in via PanCrop from a track above.

Originally it was made for Vegas Pro 8 and 9 - but here http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/893821 is a description how to add it to later versions. I can "see" it in Vegas 11 32 bit - but have not used it for a while.

Coincidentally I was just playing with this utility last week. I does a good job of laying out your tiles. and it lets you overlap them them if you like. But it does nothing more than that. If you overlap your tiles, it's up to you to figure out how to isolate and display each one at the top of the Z axis. And if you simply tile them, it's up to you to perform your own Zoom-In, Zoom-Out actions, and control the Z axis.

It is a useful utility, but in my limited experience working with it, it only perform the first step in possibly a half dozen or more steps that must be done for this kind of an effect to work properly.

I think Arthur's suggestion is the easiest, simplest, and fastest. It's the way i'd do it. 9 tracks stay static and therefore zero effort. Only the top track zooms in and out, with each picture sequentially on the track.

I did this on a video last year (it was actually a "photo album" type video of old pictures to celebrate my grandmother's 90th birthday. I played around a lot with the mechanics of this before jumpin in to all the album "pages" (screens).

The Track Motion deal suffers, as was pointed out, from the resolution hit.

The easiest way for me, from both a final look and a "keep the veg file organized" perspective was what Arthur S and Chienworks endorse. The top video track is your "live" or "zooming" track, then you have 9 others for each part ofthe the grid (I even titled my tracks R1C1, R1C2, 1R3C, R2C1,...). I also created the corresponding position of each and saved them as presets in the pan/crop window. I would copy the event that was to be zoomed in to the top track, zoom it and return it, then copy the next event to the top track, and so on. It is a bit tedious, but once you do the first couple, it doesn't take long to do the other seven.

This was actually a bit more difficult with oddly sized still photographs, since I could rarely use the same saved positions or pan/crop settings. The other thing that makes this difficult is if you want one tile to start zooming in (to fill up the frame) before the last one has zoomed all the way out (to its tiled position). This is reasonably easy to overcome, too - just use two top tracks and figure out which is to be on top.

Another tip, which you probably already know: make sure to put your fx's for each event pre pan/crop.

Arthur, I'm either not following your suggesiton, or quite possibly what the OP is trying to achieve. Here is a short excerpt from a pan/zoom on a video wall I created using the technique I outlined above. If your technique would work for doing this I'd love to hear more because it sure sounds easier.

/jerry

Jerry,

I can't speak for Arthur, but what I was suggesting is different than what you have. The OP's question might be more in line with your suggestion.

The difference between the two is zooming INTO the "wall" (in rereading the OP's question, I think this is what is asked) or zooming the video OUT OF the wall. My description, and I think Arthur's, achieves the latter, while yours achieves the former.

Wow. Lot of responses.

Actually, I was talking about having the track zoom away from the wall to fill the screen, then fall back into position and the next doing it...

I think I did it before using an envelope on each. That way you can make the higher levels go away without having to move anything to the top.

I got it working fairly quickly (it takes longer to explain it than to do it ;-)

1. Place your 9 video streams on 9 tracks.
2. Assign each track's compositing mode to "3D source alpha"
3. Now track motion is using the 3D source alpha mode (instead of the default 2D)
4. Do a little math to calculate where each video should be scaled and placed.
5. For my sample project in SD 720x480 NTSC, width and height should be 1/3 so 240 x 160.
6. Next set the position for each track (x and y) to appear in the grid:

- upper left: x-240 / y160
- upper center: x0 / y160
- upper right: x240 / y160

- mid left: x-240 / y0
- mid center: x0 / y0
- mid right: x240 / y0

- lower left: x-240 / y-160
- lower center x0 / y-160
- lower right x240 / y-160

The "trick" is to allow each video as it's brought forward to be "on top." Just set the "z" value to "0" with interpolation set to "hold" for the first keyframe on each track, then set a keyframe to begin the zoom motion with "z" set to -1 with whatever interpolation you want -- probably smooth. This will assure that the clip will be in front of the others regardless of which track it's on.

Now, just set another keyframe a second or two down the timeline to show the video full screen, by setting the width to 720 and height to 480. Also set the x and y to "0". Now the clip is playing full screen. When you want to return the video back to the video wall, just set another keyframe (it will default to the settings of the previous key frame). Then copy the keyframe that was used to position the video in the wall (it should be the first keyframe you set "Z" to "-1") and paste it next on the timeline at however long you want the zoom back to take. Next, you will need to set a keyframe right after this one with "Z" set back to "0". That will assure that this clip will not "be in front" again.

Video Wall Veg file (using NTSC color bars)
Video Wall Veg file (with added Parent track for rotating entire "wall")

Jim