From the course: InDesign Secrets

298 How to embed a YouTube video - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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298 How to embed a YouTube video

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- [Instructor] As you know, InDesign is not just for print. You can create amazing interactive documents too. Like sales presentations, ebooks, or magazines. And one of the most common questions I hear when people are creating a digital onscreen publication is can I put a YouTube video into it? Well, it's a good question, because there is no obvious way to import one. You can't use the place command from the file menu of course, because this only lets you place files from disc, and the YouTube video is not on my disc. You might try the media panel, and in fact if I go to the window menu and then choose interactive and then media, you'll see that there is an option inside the media panel menu for video from URL. Unfortunately, this only works when you point to a video file on a server. And it only works with a small number of file formats. So, YouTube videos don't work here. Let's go ahead and close that. The good news is, there is a way to get a YouTube video in, and it's actually really easy. The trick is to simply copy and paste. Here, let me show you. First, before I switch to YouTube, I want to check what size of video I want. That is, how large do I want it on my page? And it's important to do that first because it's a real pain to resize it once it's on the page in InDesign. So I want to place it here, on top of this white frame. And I can see that this frame is 300 pixels wide. I can see that by looking up here in the control panel. Now, if your control panel doesn't show pixels, you want to change it so that it does. And you can do that by right clicking on the horizontal ruler across the top of the document window. When you right click, you see a list of a bunch of different measurement systems that you can use. I chose pixels. Alright, I want my video to be about 300 pixels wide. So now I'll switch over to my web browser, and I can see a video that I want to use. To drop this into InDesign, I need to copy the embed code, and it's really easy to find that on YouTube. You simply come down here and click Share, and then click embed. Now, before I copy that embed code, I need to change the size of the video. So I'll click show more. Now I'll scroll down here a little bit, and I can change my video size from one of these other sizes to custom size. Now I simply type in the value I want. I want this to be 300 pixels wide, and when I hit tab, it figures out the other field for me. There are of course a number of other controls you can set in here, but for right now I'm simply going to scroll up, grab this text up here by pressing command A or control A on Windows, copy it to the clipboard, with a command C or control C on Windows, and then switch back to InDesign. Alright, now all I have to do is paste with a command V or control V on Windows. And at first I just see this little gray square in the middle of the page. Or, you might just see the cursor spinning. But wait, it sometimes takes like 20 or 30 seconds, but InDesign is doing its magic behind the scenes, and you just have to wait for a bit, and then, the video shows up. Well, technically you can't see or play the video on the page, but it does give you this preview. But check this out. This will play inside the EPUB interactivity preview panel. And I can find that by going to the window menu, choosing interactive, and then choosing EPUB interactivity preview. There we go, it shows me a preview of this interactive document, and there's my YouTube video right in the middle. And if I click that play button, it will play inside this panel. Isn't that great? So, okay, the video is on my InDesign page. Let's go ahead and close this panel, and I'm simply going to move this frame into position. Great. So now, how do I get this out of InDesign? Well, the video is inside, it's embedded in HTML, right? So for now, as I'm recording this, HTML like this isn't working in PDF files yet. I'm pushing Adobe to enable that, because it would be really cool. But you can export HTML inside a fixed layout EPUB file, or using Publish Online. Actually I should say that external videos like this do have trouble in some EPUB readers, for example Apple iBooks, but it does work inside Adobe's own EPUB reader called Digital Additions. Ultimately, I find the best option is exporting to Publish Online with this button up here. Now if you haven't used this feature before, and you want to learn more about Publish Online, Diane Burns has a whole title on this feature here in the online training library. In this case, in order to save time, I've already exported this as a Publish Online document, which you can see over here in my web browser. There you go, there's my page from InDesign, there's the video, and it plays great. Oh, and I should add that it doesn't have to be YouTube. If you use Vimeo or another video sharing service, that copy and paste embed trick also works. Video inside digital InDesign documents isn't perfect yet, and I'm looking forward to when it works with more outputs. But the fact that I can embed that code into InDesign is awesome when it comes to making rich interactive pages.

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