Why you should avoid video in PDF (and which formats to use instead)

hi this is justin from ajar productions in this video i'm going to show you why you should avoid using video in pdf and what you can use instead that will actually consistently support video in the output so here in indesign i have a video that i placed using file place just like i would with any of my artwork and i've used an mp4 file because that is what's going to be consistent across different browsers different operating systems which most software is going to render by default you can certainly convert a video using adobe media encoder to this format now i'm going to just go up to file and choose export and i'll choose pdf and make sure that i select the adobe pdf interactive versus the print option and i'll save it and you notice i get this warning i also received a warning like this when i open the document it says that this contains media content and it may not have playback controls so this is something that's important to note once upon a time in the indesign media panel you could set what your controller should look like and you can't do that anymore because it's no longer flash based so i'm just going to leave everything as is going to make sure it includes the media there and i'll go ahead and export and it's going to warn me again that there's a video in here and no controller will be displayed so i'll just go ahead and export and that will open it in acrobat on my system and you'll notice that the video doesn't have any playback controls i can't i don't even have an indication that it's video except when i hover over it it says click to activate so i'm going to go ahead and click and then what it does is give me a warning it says this is disabled by default and i have to enable it so already if you're going to send this to a potential client this should be a red flag for you my experience is people have trouble following instructions especially detailed ones let alone simple instructions and so this creates a lot of friction in the playback experience already this is just assuming that the person on the other end is opening this in acrobat so i'm going to choose the options and say trust this one time and it'll let the video play so now you can see what this looks like playing in acrobat now this is already a huge improvement over how this used to be because this was flash player based used to be embedded when the flash player was basically killed they took the flash player out of acrobat you wouldn't get any media playback like this so this is an improvement over that but the other challenge with pdf is that you don't know what people are going to open your pdf in because there are tons of applications now that can read pdfs for instance i often open pdfs in the browser and so here in chrome i have the same document and uh there's no video i have the thumbnail and i can't i can't do anything i click on it nothing happens so there's absolutely no playback the the media is gone at least i have the image now you might say wait a minute that's a web browser it's not really a robust pdf reader so let's look at another option on mac a lot of times people will open pdfs with preview what do we see in preview there's absolutely nothing there not even the poster image for the video so that's the basic reason why you should not count on exporting video in your pdf even if it seems to be working for you in acrobat because the best case scenario is that they figure out how to enable in acrobat and i can see the video there but you can see there are all kinds of scenarios where they just don't get to see the video and it doesn't make you look very good to your clients so let's go back to indesign and talk about what you should do instead the simplest thing you could do is to use publish online so you just go to file and choose publish online and you can export your document using publish online so let's take a look at what that looks like when you click publish here's my publish online document in the browser it actually seems to have the video so i can i can click play and watch the video the playback controls display one way i don't have any control any flexibility over how that appears but at least the video works and so this is a huge improvement over pdf and i can share this url with anybody now there is one limitation this url is always going to look like this it's always going to be on adobe server so if you want to publish the content in a way that it can be read by anything if you want to control what the player looks like let's take a look at another solution right back in indesign i have our product in five installed and now within five you get an additional set of controls for video so let me actually go to the media panel which is part of indesign it can be found in window interactive this used to have a drop down for different playback skins if you want to have different versions of video controls and they took this out because that was flash based so you still have some useful things here but what in five does is add additional controls if you go up to the n5 menu and down to interactive widgets and choose video you see you get a whole bunch more options here and we can actually choose a different controller skin so for this one i'm going to choose big play button no controller so that just gives the user the ability to initiate the video but doesn't have all those other controls and we can of course allow them to have all the controls we could also hide all the controls and have it autoplay and even have it like a background video so with that in mind let's go ahead and export within five and to do that i'll just go up to n5 and choose the easy export wizard save the document and i'll just treat this like a micro site and click next and say i want pixel perfect text and i'll just call this video and export and infibe will go through all the page items transform them into html in this case it's also going to optimize the output and then when it's done i'm just going to click open a browser so now i have this version this is on my local hard drive so i can copy these files and put them anywhere i can put them on my own website and i have a custom set of controls here i have a big playback button that is indicating to the user that this is a video and i can click it and play and it works super easily i didn't have to code i just placed that in indesign and export it within five so hopefully now you know why you should avoid video and pdf and you know what else you can use going from indesign so if you found this video helpful please give it a like on youtube and if you want to see more about the limitations of interactive pdf and what you can use instead check out my other more comprehensive video on interactive pdf and i hope to see you there on another video soon thanks so much for watching

Channel: Ajar Productions

Views: 46,104

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Id: F89HdXNV1pk

Length: 7min 7sec (427 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2022