Animating video frames

- Did you know you can apply InDesign animations to video frames? I know, crazy, right? Well, you can get some really interesting effects doing that. Let me show you an example. Let's take a look at this in the preview panel. (dance music) Notice how the whole video came from nowhere, and scaled up to be in front of the screaming crowd. It's pretty easy to apply animations to video frames, but there is a little trick you need to know about.

Let me show you what that is. Let's take a look at our timing panel for this page. The first item we have here is just a sound file, it's actually sitting over here, and that's what gives us the screaming noise from the crowd. The next item is the animation of the video, but notice there are two videos listed here apparently, what's that all about? Well, let me show you. I'm gonna turn to the second page of this file, and we'll place our video file. I'm gonna turn the background off, so we can see what's going on a little bit more clearly.

To bring videos in, we just use the File, Place command, just like we would for an image. And you wanna use mp4 format videos when you put them into InDesign. So I'm going to bring my video in, click on the page, and then I'm actually gonna scale it down a little bit to 75%. Now, I'm gonna apply a frame around this just so it pops out a little bit more, so I'll give it a stroke, black stroke, and we'll make it a little bit wider, about 10 points, and actually I think I'll make this a little bit lighter so we can see it more clearly. There. That'll do.

I just want you to be able to see the frame as distinguished from the video. Now I'm gonna select this and apply an animation as I normally would. I'm gonna come into the scaling field, and I want this to start at zero percentage, and I want it to scale to the current appearance. We've used that setting a lot. And let's take a look at what happens. I'll view it in the preview panel, and the scaling occurred, but the movie's not playing.

Hmm. Well, let me offer you a clue to what's going on here. Let's open the timing panel again. And here, we have what is apparently our movie, but if we go to the Event menu, we also have an Unassigned, and there's the movie again. Well, this is actually the movie that we placed, and it's unassigned because we haven't given it any start event. And like sound files, we can only give movies start events through the media panel, or with buttons.

So, let's get this movie to play on page load. I'm gonna click on the movie, and then I'm gonna open the media panel, and set it to play On Page Load. When I do that, things are no longer unassigned. The video was originally unassigned because it had no start event, but now it's set to the start event On Page Load. What's a little bit confusing here is one of these represents the frame that's animated, and the other represents the video.

But they have the same name, and if you change one, it'll change the other. So the trick here is to set your video On Page Load as a start event, and then simply find this double entry, if you will, in the timing panel, and set it to link. Now the frame and the video will play at the same time. Let's take a look. There we go. (dance music) Animating video frames is an interesting option to add to your projects.

Videos show up separately in the timing panel from their frame, which is actually what's animated. Link those two up, and you're good to go. Enough fun to make you get up and dance!