I did not know Acrobat could do that

I love to have dynamic content. I have often thought about doing more with a PDF file than documents, spreadsheets, and text. Now I can. In this article, I will show you how you can amaze and dazzle your friends, or win a bar bet, by adding cool movies to your PDF’s. As some of you know, you can add links, pictures, 3D… inside of a PDF file, however, I want to expand to digital learning, cool movies, just explore my creativity! (Hey, I work at Adobe, I get all the toys for free! )

In this article, I will use Adobe Captivate to create a little training file (of how to embed it into a PDF, humm that’s a shock!) and how to view the PDF with the Captivate embedded file. Now what is Adobe Captivate? Adobe Captivate (Readers Digest Version here) allows the user to create dynamic training or demos by recording their computer screens and allowing post editing and comment creation. You can also create quizzes, have user interaction.. Hey just go to the Adobe Captivate web site here, for all the cool stuff you can do. Once you have done all the cool stuff Captivate will compile it into an Adobe Flash SWF File (and you know all the stuff you can do with Flash!).Adobe Captivate 3 can generate multiple SWF files. When you create a SWF file to embed within a PDF, it is very important that you be careful to create a single SWF file. Some things you need to avoid include the following animation features in your SWF file, which may generate additional files:

• Flash Video (FLV)
• Full-Motion Recording (FMR) slides

Also if you are creating a quiz do not include the following Captivate question types:

• Question Pools
• Hotspot Questions

Be careful if you want to embed a Captivate or other SWF files that contains skins and/or playback controls. The playback controls are generally generated as a separate SWF file. In Captivate you can embed the playback controls into your main movie by deselecting borders. So what is that? In Captivate you need to deselect the Show Borders checkbox. 

So how the heck do you do that in Adobe Captivate?

1. Open the Adobe Captivate movie file (.cp) in Adobe Captivate.
2. From the Project menu, select Skin. The Skin Editor dialog box displays.

   

3. In the Skin Editor dialog box, select the Borders tab.
4. Deselect the Show Borders option.

   

You are now ready to save the Captivate movie clip as a SWF file. After creating the SWF file from Captivate, you need to create a PDF file, you can do this by using a word processor, Adobe InDesign, or just use the Create Blank PDF function in Acrobat 8 Professional (See here for how to create a blank PDF or get the PODCast here)! Make sure that you keep enough room in your PDF document for the movie clip.

Note: The Professional version is required. The Standard version does not contain the Movie Tool. For readers to view embedded movie clips, they must have one of the following versions of Acrobat Reader:

• Download Adobe Reader 6.0 or higher (for Windows)
• Download Adobe Reader 8.0 or higher (for Macintosh)

Sample files Download:

• Sample_Files_MovieClip_to_PDF (ZIP, 156K)
  (Includes a sample PDF file with a SWF file embedded.)

OK now let’s add the SWF movie to our PDF

1. Make sure you have your PDF opne in Adobe Acrobat.
2. From the Tools menu, select Advanced Editing, then select the Movie Tool. 
3. Take your mouse and draw a two point rectangle in the area that you want the movie to be in your PDF. The Add Movie dialog box will pop up.

Side Note on the Add Movie dialog box

Let me take a second to explain the Add Movie Dialog Box. We want the movie clip (our SWF File) to work with Acrobat 6 or later. Also, embed the SWF file’s content into the PDF file, this makes it easier because the you only have to manage 1 file. If you do not embed the SWF, you have to attach the SWF to the PDF, and that’s for another Blog entry!

Let’s now do the steps to complete the Add Movie dialog box:

1. Select the Acrobat 6 (and Later) Compatible Media radio button.
2. To specify the movie clip, type its file path or URL in the Location box or click the Browse button to locate the SWF file on your computer. Once it’s located, double-click the file to specify the SWF file name and path into the Location box.
3. Select the Embed content in document checkbox to include the movie file in the PDF document. If this option is not marked, the document includes a link to the external movie file.

Creating a poster from a file

After embedding the movie clip into the PDF file, we need to create a way to launch the Movie, a cool and creative way is with a poster image. These can be most standard graphic formats such as JPG, PNG, or GIF files. A poster image is really just placeholder for launching a movie clip. The poster image is the constant in the PDF. So when you print the PDF this is what would show! So you can be very creative with your Poster, today, I will be very boring. When you click the poster image, the movie clip launches.

Perform the following steps to create a poster from a file:

1. In the In the Add Movie dialog box, locate the “Poster Settings” section.
2. Select the “Create poster from file” button, the poster is added at the location where the movie clip will play.
3. Click OK to save the settings for the Add Movie dialog box.
4. Save the PDF file.
5. Close the PDF file.

Viewing the movie clip in a PDF file

Now you are ready to watch your movie.

1. Open the PDF file.
2. Click the poster image to launch the movie clip.
3. The movie clip plays within the preselected area of the PDF file.

A Twist in Players, Use Adobe Digital Editions to enhance the quality of embedded movie clips in PDF files Whoa there Tim, what the heck are you talking about now? An alternative to Acrobat Reader for viewing embedded movie clips, and PDF files! Dude, do you remember who you work for? Well, settle down all of course I remember who I work for, it’s right there on my shirt! But, when using Acrobat Reader to view a movie clip that is embedded in a PDF file, a..well how to put it….distracting little message pops us that says “Manage Trust for Multimedia Message” that requires you to choose one of the following:

• Play the multimedia content this one time.
• Play the multimedia content and add it to my list of trusted documents.

Adobe Digital Editions avoids the display of the “Manage Trust for Multimedia Message” each time a new movie clip is launched from within a PDF file. allowing you to enjoy the bliss of your new multimedia PDF file. So what is Adobe Digital Editions? You can read it on the website, but here is the readers digest version: “Adobe Digital Editions is an engaging new way to read and manage eBooks and other digital publications. It is built from the ground up as a lightweight Rich Internet Application (RIA). Adobe Digital Editions works online and offline and supports PDF- and XHTML-based content as well as Adobe Flash SWF for rich interactivity.” So pretty cool huh, we are always trying to push the coolness envelope around here.

I hope this artical helps you create some killer PDF Files

Keep some life in your life

Tim Huff