How do I add video in Twixl Publisher apps ?
Movies or audio files can be embedded in the publication via the Window -> Interactive -> Media palette. You can add a movie in H.264 format or an audio file in MP3 format.
Due to a limitation in InDesign, movie files need to have the extension ".mp4" and not ".m4v". If you have H.264 encoded files with the m4v extension, you can just change the extension from .m4v to .mp4.
You can place any text block or image object(s) on top of the movie, as a poster frame, e.g. "Click to play movie" or a movie player icon as an indicator for the user. Likewise, if you insert an MP3 audio file, you can place any type of button or text object on top of it. Clicking that object on the iPad will play/stop the sound sample.
You can also add an http link to a movie using the 'Place a video from a URL' option from the media palette. Obviously, if you select this option, the iPad user needs to be online when trying to access the movie.
In the Twixl Publisher palette, you can control the relevant
options for movie clips.
Appearance options
"Show Movie Controller": provides the user with the standard movie
controller options to play/pause etc.
Behavior options
"Loop": provides a continuous playback of your movie clip.
"Play on page load": will automatically start a movie clip when a
user navigates to that page.
"Play Full Screen": will automatically play the movie full screen
when started (movies that don't automatically play full screen can
always be zoomed using the movie controler options)
Tip about converting movies
A number of solutions exist for converting video to the H.264
format, optimized for iPad. The freeware Miro Video Converter is an
easy-to-use free tool that allows most conversions.
Reducing the file size of video Video files may easily account of the bulk of the total size of your publications. Videos will inflate your magazine.
For re-encoding video files you can use a tool like Adobe Media Encoder (when you want control over all video encoding settings) or otherwise the freeware Miro Video Converter (when you want a simple and quick conversion).
You can then convert to H.264 video (mp4) with a suitable framesize. In Miro, I just pick the MP4 profile to get good results by preserving the video pixelsize. This can reduce your video files up to 1/5 of the original size while preserving the same visual quality!
In motion video you can choose a much lower pixel dimension for the video than it has during playback (= placement size in InDesign) because our eye forgives many details when it comes to moving images (opposite to the behaviour in still images). Try this with half the video size than it will have during playback and you will be amazed how good the H.264 codec can be.
Note
You may get an error about "Media files not being supported by
Flash", but these warnings can be ignored.