Ever since Acrobat 4, we have been able to place movies into PDF documents.
And for a long time in InDesign, we have been able to insert movies for export into PDF documents.
And there has always been the option to link to a URL to insert the movie instead of inserting the movie into the ID/PDf file.
When I first learned about the URL option for importing movies, I was told that the option was only useful if you were going to run the movie over a company intranet. (In-TRA-net. A local-area-network where employees are basically on the same bandwidth.)
The URL option was available, but not viable, back in those days since so many people didn’t have permanent web connections, and many would only be on low bandwidth modems.
So year after year I continued to recommend not using the URL link for movies without realizing that millions of homes and business had gotten high-bandwidth web connections.
Then I saw David Blatner do a demo of why you might want to use the URL link options for a movie.
The obvious reason is that the PDF is much, much, MUCH smaller when it doesn’t have a movie embedded in it. (You pretty much always want to embed a movie to ensure that it stays linked to the PDF and that users can steal the movie for their own uses.)
But then he mentioned something I had NEVER thought of.
Let’s say you link to a URL that is for the weekly movie about your company.
The URL might be something like https://www.companyname.com/weeklymovie.mov
Then, back on the companyname.com web site, you can have different movies posted each week. The people with the PDF can click for the movie and get a different movie each week.
This weekly update of the movie would not be possible if the movie was embedded on the locally-saved PDF file.
A few weeks back, I mentioned this technique to David and told him that I thought it should be a post on InDesign Secrets.
He agreed. But then he came up with an EVEN better concept for using a URL-based movie.
Instead of an actual, multi-frame movie, David suggested that you can have a single-frame QuickTime movie. Now, what does a single-frame movie look like?
It looks like a graphic in the PDF.
And what that means is you can have graphics in your PDF that update automatically when the PDF is opened. This is something that you can’t do with ordinary graphics.
The major downside to this technique is that if the user is not connected to the web (on a plane? in a prison? at the bottom of a mine shaft?) the movie will not play. And any still movie graphics won’t appear.
But the concept is brilliant. And in these days of ubiquitous broadband web connections, it is a good option to consider when adding movies to PDF files.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on November 27, 2008
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
