Playing Movies and Sound

In addition to having a button that opens a movie or sound, you can simply place a movie or sound file in your InDesign document. (Once placed, you can size a movie file like any other placed graphic.)

New Feature ‚  

The ability to add movies and sounds to documents is new to InDesign CS.

Note ‚  

InDesign can open QuickTime and Microsoft .AVI movies only, so be sure to have a version in that format. For sounds, it supports the Apple AIFF and Microsoft .WAV formats.

To control how a movie behaves and what control the reader has, choose Object ‚ Interactive ‚ Movie Options, shown in Figure 33-7.

Figure 33-7: The Movie Options dialog box.

New Feature ‚  

A new, faster way to set movie and sound settings is to double-click the frame containing the movie or sound; you'll get the Movie Options dialog box or Sound Options dialog box, as appropriate.

Move Options

The options in the Movie Options dialog box are straightforward:

• In the Source section, select whether the movie file is copied into your document or simply linked to a URL on the Web or on a CD. If you're embedding the movie file and plan to export the InDesign document to PDF format, be sure to check Embed Movie in PDF ‚ otherwise the PDF file won't have the movie available.

• In the Options section, you can change the Poster ‚ the on-screen image inside the frame containing the movie. The default, Default Poster, lets Acrobat choose what displays (usually, it's the first frame of the move). You could also select None (for a blank frame), Standard (for the Adobe logo), Choose Image as Poster (in which case you would select an image using the Browse button, such as perhaps the QuickTime logo), or Frame from Movie (to select a specific frame from the movie; not all movies will let you select this option).

• You also set the Mode ‚ Play Once Then Stop, Play Once Stay Open, and Repeat Play ‚ to determine the movie's playback action. Note that the Play Once Stay Open option lets the user choose to play the movie again.

• The Play on Page Turn option, if checked, plays the movie when a reader moves to the page containing it (as opposed to going directly to the page through a hyperlink).

• The Show Controller During Play option displays the QuickTime movie controller to adjust sound volume, pause and resume play, and rewind and fast-forward the movie.

• The Floating Window option puts the movie in a window that the reader can move. If selected, the dialog box also makes two pop-up menus accessible: Size, which determines the size of the window relative to the move frame size, and Position, which places the floating window on the page.

Sound Options

The options in the Sound Options dialog box (shown in Figure 33-8) are likewise straightforward:

• You can change the sound by clicking the Browse button to the right of the filename and then selecting a new sound.

• Using the Poster pop-up menu, you can change the placeholder image that appears on the page where you placed the sound. Your options are None to have no placeholder image, Standard to have the Adobe logo, and Choose Image as Poster to use an image of your own choice (use the Browse button to the right of the Poster pop-up menu to select the image file).

• If checked, the Play on Page Turn option automatically plays the sound when someone moves to this page in the exported PDF file.

• If checked, the Do Not Print Poster option hides the poster icon when someone prints the PDF page containing the sound.

• If checked, the Embed Sound in PDF option ensures that the PDF file exported from the InDesign document includes the sound file.

Figure 33-8: The Sound Options dialog box.