When showing interactive videos, you may want to draw the viewer's attention to specific points in it. It can get awkward if you have to rewind the video, get to the specific time code and start again. You can do this much more efficiently in InDesign by creating nav points in a movie. This online video teaches you how to create buttons or nav points to easily jump viewers to the desired time code.
When you're showing a video in an interactive document, like an interactive SWF or PDF, often you want to point people's attention to specific points in the video. Like, if you had an illustration or a chart, you might want to drag out call outs, right? With a little line saying, look at this part and look at this part. Well, it's kind of awkward in a video to say, go to time code oh, two, nine, three and take a look at xyz. Instead what you can do is create buttons that jump people to those time codes. Those are called nav points and you can do this in Indesign.
Let's look at the final effect here and then we'll see how we built this in InDesign. This is a video that I took of my two new dogs that I just rescued, of them play fighting on the deck. What I want to show you is Bella, that's Bella, coon hound, where she gets the upper paw. And Barkley, that's the little terrier mix, Barkley dominates. And if I just play the video. It takes a while to get to those points. So I'm going to stop, rewind, and this time I can just say, let's jump to where Bella gets the upper paw. There we go. And now, let's jump to when Barkley dominates.
Boom, there he is. Course I'm doing a silly little example, here. But if you're doing a video that has chapters or sections, you'd might want to create little buttons or icons that will help people jump to those specific chapters or sections in a single video. So how was this done? Let's jump back into InDesign. I placed the video, as usual. You just choose File, Place. Place it right in here. And then, in the media panel, it shows a preview of the video. And I chose a poster image from the current frame. And then what you need to do is you need to create nav points.
And you do that right here, so you scrub through the video until you get to the point where you want people to jump to. So I'm going through here looking for the part where Bella's paw is on top of Barkley. And it's com, there it is, that's, that's close enough. And then when you get there, let me detach this from here, in the Navigation Points area, you click plus. And it adds a point there, and I'll just call this Bella paw because we're going to refer to this in a bit. And you can continue adding nav points that way, let me scrub forward, and see if I can find the part where Barkley's on top, that's close enough right there.
And I'll just click the plus symbol, and call it Barkley. And then for controller, you know, while you're here, you want to put some sort of controller so people can play and pause and rewind the video. I'm just going to choose skin over all, which is the one I have in the PDF example. So we have our nav points, now we just need a way for people to get to those nav points, and we do that with buttons. Now I just drag these buttons right out of the button library, if you change to the workspace for interactive for PDF you can grab those. If you dragged and dropped them, and they're already ready to go with rollover states, then you select one of these buttons and you open up the Buttons and Forms panel.
Every button from that library has a default action that's go to page. And we don't want this to go to any page. So we're going to delete that action. That's for sure, and instead we're going to add the action that has to do with video. Now if you look through here for one that says go to nav point, you're not going to find one. Look for just the word Video. Then after you get to Video, you can see down here under Options what you can do. So you can have a button that plays, one that stops, one that resumes. But we want to play from a navigation point. So choose that as the option and then choose one of the navigation points you selected.
See, pretty simple. Let's do the same thing for Barkley dominates. Don't forget to delete this action. If you forget, you're going to get an error in the pdf. It's going to say, sorry there is no such page. So I'll delete that. And when I add the action video. Go to nav point. This one would be Barkley. And that's about it, that's all you've got to do. So here's the final result. That looks just about the same. Everything has been set up. Then you export to pdf. Of course you want to export to interactive pdf. I just command or control e, which is export. You want to choose Adobe PDF Interactive.
Let's put this on the desktop. And I'll say two. And it's only a one page document, but just to be safe I always say pages. And usually all of the defaults are fine. You click okay. And it opens up in Acrobat. I'll put fit in window, lets give it a go. I'll click the green button for we want to jump to where Bella get's the upper paw. There we go. And then jump to where Barkley dominates. That's it. Very easy to create navigation points and then export them to an interactive PDF or SWF file.
Updated
12/23/2020Released
8/25/2011New techniques will be added to the collection every other week, so check back early and often. Find more tips and tricks at indesignsecrets.com.Note: Because this is an ongoing series, viewers will not receive a certificate of completion.
Skill Level Intermediate
Duration
Views
Q: Why can't I earn a Certificate of Completion for this course?
A: We publish a new tutorial or tutorials for this course on a regular basis. We are unable to offer a Certificate of Completion because it is an ever-evolving course that is not designed to be completed. Check back often for new movies.
Related Courses
-
InDesign CC 2018 Essential Training
with David Blatner6h 30m Beginner -
InDesign: Interactive PDFs
with David Blatner2h 27m Intermediate -
InDesign CC 2018: EPUB
with Anne-Marie Concepción4h 35m Intermediate -
InDesign CC 2019 Essential Training
with David Blatner5h 23m Beginner -
InDesign Quick Start
with David Blatner22m Beginner
-
This Week's Secret
-
Introduction
-
Welcome to InDesign Secrets1m 10s
-
-
December 2020
-
November 2020
-
October 2020
-
September 2020
-
Use one frame, not many4m 37s
-
August 2020
-
July 2020
-
June 2020
-
May 2020
-
Threading filled frames3m 14s
-
Custom page numbering tricks5m 13s
-
November 2012
-
October 2012
-
061 Embedding images7m 44s
-
-
September 2012
-
057 Text wrapping6m 54s
-
-
August 2012
-
July 2012
-
June 2012
-
May 2012
-
April 2012
-
March 2012
-
January 2012
-
April 2020
-
Making speech bubbles3m 32s
-
Working with ligatures5m 9s
-
February 2012
-
December 2011
-
016 Running a script9m 33s
-
November 2011
-
October 2011
-
August 2011
-
September 2011
-
March 2020
-
February 2020
-
Auto-expand acronyms4m 39s
-
-
January 2020
-
December 2019
-
November 2019
-
October 2019
-
409 Copy and paste effects4m 39s
-
-
September 2019
-
408 The master page trick1m 46s
-
August 2019
-
July 2019
-
June 2019
-
May 2019
-
April 2019
-
March 2019
-
February 2019
-
376 Make cast shadows3m 35s
-
-
January 2019
-
November 2018
-
December 2018
-
369 Shared CC Libraries tips5m 15s
-
October 2018
-
360 Find spacing problems4m 50s
-
363 Export all text8m 16s
-
-
August 2018
-
351 Change default fonts5m 51s
-
352 Best default RGB4m 45s
-
-
September 2018
-
July 2018
-
May 2018
-
343 Border spacing fix4m 59s
-
June 2018
-
346 Export to HTML55m 38s
-
April 2018
-
February 2018
-
March 2018
-
January 2018
-
325 Link text frames6m 10s
-
December 2017
-
November 2017
-
September 2017
-
October 2017
-
313 Quick Apply preferences6m 35s
-
August 2017
-
July 2017
-
May 2017
-
290 Work with scripts3m 35s
-
June 2017
-
April 2017
-
286 How to format ellipses5m 39s
-
March 2017
-
281 Share a CC library7m 10s
-
January 2017
-
February 2017
-
December 2016
-
271 Add images to an index4m 39s
-
November 2016
-
September 2016
-
October 2016
-
260 Batch process images7m 33s
-
263 Sync master pages5m 51s
-
-
August 2016
-
July 2016
-
June 2016
-
April 2016
-
May 2016
-
240 Side-by-side tables5m 35s
-
March 2016
-
February 2016
-
228 Setting text at an angle6m 24s
-
December 2015
-
January 2016
-
222 Adding paragraph shading1m 50s
-
October 2015
-
November 2015
-
September 2015
-
July 2015
-
August 2015
-
204 Creating a8m 14s
-
205 Managing scripts5m 38s
-
May 2015
-
189 Placing InDesign files5m 14s
-
-
June 2015
-
193 Printing tracked changes5m 41s
-
-
April 2015
-
186 Making long shadows5m 41s
-
February 2015
-
March 2015
-
January 2015
-
December 2014
-
November 2014
-
October 2014
-
September 2014
-
August 2014
-
July 2014
-
148 Cropping with paste into5m 18s
-
-
June 2014
-
May 2014
-
141 Inserting glyphs6m 42s
-
April 2014
-
March 2014
-
February 2014
-
January 2014
-
December 2013
-
November 2013
-
October 2013
-
September 2013
-
August 2013
-
105 Working with MiniBridge5m 45s
-
106 Customize your QR codes6m 17s
-
July 2013
-
June 2013
-
May 2013
-
April 2013
-
March 2013
-
February 2013
-
December 2012
-
069 Ten uses of the Story Editor11m 39s
-
-
January 2013
- Mark as unwatched
- Mark all as unwatched
Are you sure you want to mark all the videos in this course as unwatched?
This will not affect your course history, your reports, or your certificates of completion for this course.
CancelTake notes with your new membership!
Type in the entry box, then click Enter to save your note.
1:30Press on any video thumbnail to jump immediately to the timecode shown.
Notes are saved with you account but can also be exported as plain text, MS Word, PDF, Google Doc, or Evernote.
Share this video
Embed this video
Video: 133 Creating nav points in a movie