I currently have Acrobat 8 on my machine. Out of Apple Final Cut Pro, I can make Flash Video. On the encoding screen options is a tab for cue points. You can scroll thru your video and set cue points which I would hope are like chapter markers in dvd studio pro. They have an option to be either navigation or event and there are parameters that can set for each one. I really don't have much idea what the specifics of these are.
In any event, I am wondering if it will be possible in Acrobat 9 to build a simple navigation system that would direct the video player in Acrobat to go to a specific cue point and play to the next cue point and then stop. I would be hoping that I could create 5 lines of text for each of the 5 cue points in a video. I would like to link each of these lines to the appropriate cue point to be played.
In effect, I am trying to find a simple way to give a rudimentary dvd type of experience to interacting with the video.
Does anyone have any idea how to do this? I am a neophyte at any Flash scripting if that is necessary. Any help or direction would be most appreciated. I will be upgrading to Acrobat 9 sooner rather than later.
Thank you
You can create a button for each chapter using the button tool (you can also use the link tool or any of the other ways to trigger actions).
1) Create the button (using the "Button Tool" under “Tools/Advanced Editing”) and in the “Advanced Options” select the “Actions” tab.
2) On the “Actions” tab under “Select Action” choose “Multimedia Operation (Acrobat 9 and later)”
3) Click the “Add” button and select the Richmedia annotation that is the movie you want to control [if only one on the page it will be “RM1 (Page X)]
4) From the “Action” drop down select “Play” (do this because if the annotation is paused the seek to time action in the next step will seek but will not resume playback) and press “OK” once
5) Again, choose the “Action” drop down and select “Seek to time” (you will need to know the times of the cue points, you can see them all on the “Video” tab of the “Edit Video” dialog when you view the Properties of a Richmedia annotation in Acrobat 9 (the new Flash video annotation type) and enter the time in the form of seconds (2 minutes and 40.67 seconds would be entered as 160.67).
6) Click “OK” twice to accept the changes to the button
7) Repeat steps 1-6 for each chapter
The steps above will set up buttons that start each chapter when clicked, if you also want the video to stop at the end of the chapter you will add actions to each cue point (described below) but the drawback as mentioned above is that the video will then not play from beginning to end without pausing at the end of each chapter.
1) After embedding the Flash video/movie (BTW you can add cue points to your Flash video in Acrobat 9 Pro Extended when creating the annotation by going into the Advanced Options and adding them on the “Video” tab similar to Flash Video Encoder, this is supported for all video that is transcoded to a Flash Movie) select the “Select Objects” tool (gray arrow) and double click on the annotation to bring up the properties (Edit Video dialog).
2) On the “Video” tab the cue points are in a list, select the second one and click the “Actions” button (there is no reason to have the first cue point pause, that would add a pause at the very beginning of the movie)
3) Select “Multimedia Operation (Acrobat 9 and later)” from the drop down and click “Add”
4) Select the annotation from the list and then from the “Actions” drop down choose “Pause” (this will result in the video pausing when each cue point is reached) and click “OK” two times
5) Repeat for each of the remaining cue points
Setting up the PDF in this way will allow you to navigate through the “chapters” using the buttons you created and the video will stop/pause at the end of each chapter, however you will not be able to play the video (in this annotation) from start to finish without pausing (you can leave out the second set of steps and the video will continue playing after any chapter plays.
This is certainly something for Adobe to look at improving for future releases. There may be additional ways to programmatically listen for cue points and pause only under the condition that a button was used to initiate playback (or to ignore the pause actions if the playback was initiated from the annotation skin as opposed to the buttons) but at this time I am not aware of any, the javascript API does not give access to this. I will ask around a bit and see if I can find a better solution for you.