How To Add Video To Adobe InDesign CC Documents

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to look at how to add video like this stuff in the background, that you put in yourself. And we'll look at those guys here where we're doing YouTube video. Hey, it's me, I'm saying "Hi" there. So we're going to add a video from myself and video from YouTube, and Vimeo. All sorts of video. And we're going to publish it online in our Interactive Catalog.

To add those two videos, we'll do our own video first. We're going to go down to our 'Chairs & Benches' page, so page 3. We need to find this Media Tab, if you can't find it over here go to 'Window', 'Interactive', and go to 'Media'. So in here, I'm going to, this little button down the bottom right here, and we're going to do video but you can totally do an mp3 file if you just want audio. We're going to go to 'Exercise Files', go to '04 Interactive'. There's only one mp4 in there. I got this from this website here, shared up to PexelsVideo. So videos.pexels.com, I'm probably not saying that right but there are free commercial use stuff, library stuff in here. Oh, awesome!

So I've used some stuff, let's jump back into InDesign. So, 'Video.mp4', let's click 'Open', and your cursor becomes loaded, what I'm going to do is drag it out to any odd size because I want to resize it afterwards. So it's too-- it's not quite how I want it. So I'm going to right click it and use our 'Fitting' and this, 'Fit Frame to Content'. So the box is the same size. What I want to do, I want to use it like a bit of a graphic in the background, I'll make it nice and big. And I'm going to kind of crop it in, and then maybe double click the center and move it across a bit. So we're doing some kind of cropping. Because it's kind of an abstract style video, it's kind of blurred out, I'm okay that it's just kind of cropped in a bit. You might not have the luxury to do that.

The other thing to do is, this is on a wrong layer now. It's because, over here, my Layers panel, we were working on that navigation earlier. So it's ended up in the wrong page. What I can do is, with it selected I can grab this dot, and just drag it down to this layer here and say, you're now in the main content, because I want the navigation to be above it. Now what I'm going to do, I'm going to clear off and lock that Navigation layer, so I don't wreck it. So I've got a video here. You've got some basic options. You can go over here and say-- there's a 'Play on Page Load' that's what I want, because I don't want to control this. If you do want to control this 'Skin Overall, we'll leave them on just so you can see them. I don't want them, so I'm going to get it to play by itself otherwise if you don't have controls, it's not going to play.

Next thing to do is preview it. There's EPUB Interactivity you can try, click on the first page, hit 'Play' and because we're on page 3, it should play page 3. There's my little navigation, slightly appearing over it, and there's my video playing. This will work when I hit 'Publish Online'. Takes a little time to publish online, so I'm going to leave that but you can see in here. I put the controllers in, watch this, if I roll up over there's a little Playhead that appears. So you can go and turn those on and off by closing that down, click on this guy, and go to 'Media' and with it selected, you can decide, actually I don't want any kind of play control, just want it to play by itself.

The one thing to know about using videos in your page is that the document can become quite big, and take a long time to load. What you might find easier is to use, say Vimeo or YouTube videos rather than your own videos that you floated into here. Both YouTube and Vimeo have great servers all over the place and they do that lovely buffering thing. You can adjust the quality of them depending on how fast your internet connection is. So there's some perks for using YouTube, especially if you've got lots of video, you don't want lots of videos bloating out your Page Load and it taking a very long time.

So first of all we need to jump out to YouTube or Vimeo. So in YouTube, find a video, any video, as long as it's got a picture of me in it. Once you've found it what you're looking for is the 'Share' option down here. And in the Share option, there's one called 'Embed' and that's the trick that we need. So there's a couple of things we can do in here before we get into InDesign. We came down here to say wherever we want to have those suggestive videos at the end I don't want those to appear at the end of my video. Do I want the video title? Can you see along the top there? I'm going to turn that off, I don't like that there. So I'm going to have the player controls to play or pause, that's totally going to be there and that's the main perks of it.

In terms of the height and width it's harder to change it in InDesign later on. So if you know the height and width you want it to be you can type it in here. There is a way of adjusting it, and then design afterwards, I'll show you how. Let's click 'Copy', jump back into InDesign, and all you do is go 'Edit', 'Paste', I'm going to use the shortcut. And that little kind of cube appears for a little while and eventually it turns it into a YouTube video, there it is, cool. So I don't have a space for it here, I should. I was just going to make this text up here, and you're going to be coming down there. You can preview it in your EPUB Interactivity. Go to, on the right page, we're going to hit 'Play'. Give it a second, that's going to play, there's my YouTube clip and it plays in here. Now it doesn't play properly in this little clip here, it does when you publish online.

One of the things I want to do before you go is, let's say you want to resize it. If I resize it just like I do in image, to fit, unfortunately it will, when I go back to my EPUB Reader - I've made it that big, watch this, if I hit 'Play' - it goes back to its original size. So it's kind of coded to be that size. So what I'd like to do is, I'm going to scale that up to the size I want. Here we go, so I want it to be about that sort of size. I'm going to take these dimensions here. So '782' + '445'. And what you do is, right click it, go to 'Edit HTML' and you need to type these in here, at least be proportionately high. So 782 x 445, click 'OK'. Now, if I go into my EPUB Interactivity preview thing it should be the right size. So you can either do that in YouTube before you bring it in, or you can right click it like I did, and edit the HTML.

If you're using Vimeo, it's the exact same option in Vimeo. So, in Vimeo here, remember you're only allowed to pick videos that have me in them. Then find the video you like, click on 'Share', see this little dart? And in here, you're looking for the same thing, you're looking for Embed. Vimeo has a nice little option, it says 'Show Options', and you can decide on your height and width here before you go into InDesign. The same sort of thing, you can 'Auto play' it. Do you need the text, does the video loop? Select all of this, copy it, and just paste it into InDesign.

All right buddies, that is using video inside Publish Online in Adobe InDesign.