Sony Vegas: How to create a multi-screen channel trailer?

Recently a friend asked me to create a trailer for his Let's Play Gaming Channel. So I got the idea to create a wall of TVs where each screen shows a different game he is playing with the camera moving around from one screen to another...

Even though I'm quite familiar with Sony Vegas, I haven't done something like that before. That's why the whole process was so interesting and the result so satisfying. That's how the final version looks like:

Not too bad, right? So let's go step by step explaining on how to make such a trailer.

1) Creating a TV wall

For doing that you either look for a fitting image online or create your own one. Make sure you can it has about as many screens as video clips you want to use. Once you've chosen a picture you put at the bottom of your project. 2) Put the clips on the screens

I downloaded like 12 videos of different games from my friend's channel. Then I started one by one, putting a video file above the TV wall template and minimized them by clicking on the icon at the edge of the clip in the timeline to open a window. Then you can accurately adapt the size of the clip and move it around to match on one of the TVs of your template.

That step you do with every clip until your TV wall is finished. That wall full of screen may looks like this.

3) Rendering the TV wall video
Following that I rendered like a 30 second clip of that wall. This new file I copied into my project.

4) Let the "virtual camera" run Now you work with your newly created TV wall clip in your project. Click again on the small icon at the bottom of your clip (see first screenshot in Step 1).

At the bottom of that menu you see a timeline where you can set time markers. Now you can decide where to place the "F" window at each second.

You can zoom in, zoom out. Experiment a bit which works the best for you. In my case it worked best not to leave the gaps too big as moved the "F" window slowly from right to left to show the channel logo at the end.

And that way you can create this kind of trailer video. For music I chose to use a fitting track in the YouTube Audio Library.

I hope I could help or inspire you to create a nice channel trailer.

Btw. I also made a tutorial video about it, if you wanna see a deeper explanation: