Movies and sounds, Add movies and sound files to documents, Add a movie or a sound file – Adobe InDesign CS4 User Manual
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USING INDESIGN CS4
Dynamic documents
Movies and sounds
Add movies and sound files to documents
You can add movies and sound clips to a document, or you can link to streaming video files on the Internet. Although
media clips cannot be played directly in the InDesign layout, they can be played when you export the document to
Adobe PDF or when you export the document to XML and repurpose the tags.
A poster is the image that represents a media clip. Each movie or sound can appear with or without a poster. If the
poster in InDesign is larger than the movie, the poster is clipped to the size of the movie in the exported PDF
document.
QuickTime 6.0 or later is required to work with movies in InDesign. You can add QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, and SWF
movies. However, QuickTime no longer offers full support of SWF files. You can also add WAV, AIF, and AU sound
clips. InDesign supports only 8- or 16-bit WAV files that are not compressed.
Keep track of the media files you add to an InDesign document during the production cycle. If you move a linked
media clip after adding it to the document, use the Links panel to relink it. If you send the InDesign document to
another person, include any media files you add.
For other users to view media in a PDF document, they must have Acrobat 6.x or later to play MPEG and SWF movies,
or Acrobat 5.0 or later to play QuickTime and AVI movies.
See also
Add a movie or a sound file
1 Do any of the following:
•
Choose File
> Place, and then double-click the movie or sound file. Click where you want the movie to appear. (If
you drag to create the media frame, the movie boundary may appear cropped or skewed.)
•
Drag the media file from Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac
OS) into the document.
•
To convert a frame into a media clip, select the frame and choose Object > Interactive > Movie Options or Sound
Options. This creates an empty movie or sound frame. (After you add a movie using this method, you may want to
choose Object > Fitting > Fit Frame To Content so that the frame is the same size as the movie.)
When you place a movie or sound file, a media object appears in a frame. This media object links to the media file. You
can resize the media object to determine the size of the play area.
If the center point of the movie appears outside the page, the movie is not exported to PDF.
2 To change movie, sound, or poster options, double-click the media object.
To preview a media file, hold down Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) and double-click a movie or sound object
using the Selection tool.
3 Export the document to Adobe PDF. Make sure that the Interactive Elements option is selected in the Export Adobe
PDF dialog box.
Updated 18 June 2009