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jojwn85
Participant
March 6, 2013
Question

Poor quality video in interactive pdfs

  • March 6, 2013
  • 2 replies
  • 15692 views

I'm having problems embedding video content in a pdf whilst retaining its quality. I have a presentation document at A3 size in indesign, on which there is a video on the page at 400x224mm (or 1138x638px if I change the unit of measurement.

We have been getting frustrating results when using a .mov with h264 codec where frames are dropping and the quality is very poor compared to the original. We have tried plenty of iterations, sizing the video to the exact proportions of the box it is placed in, larger HD sizes, using f4v, and altering bit rates, but with similar results.

The odd thing is that when it plays in a floating window, the quality is much improved which suggests it is not the computer struggling, but something to do with acrobat's interpretation of the scaling.

A final complication is that we discovered that using a mpeg4 codec with a .mov seems to be much more successful, but one of our requirements is that it can be embedded both through indesign and directly into a pdf from acrobat, and acrobat tells me it is not a supported format.

It's been a really frustrating process and I'd really appreciate if anyone can suggest a supported file type that will give us the quality required.

Thanks in advance

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

ColbyFulton
ColbyFulton
Known Participant
September 4, 2014

Yeah the quality and framerate are crappy. I wish Apple Preview would play videos! My video is only 68 MB and it's playing off a SDD hard drive. Should be crystal clear! Bad job Adobe. Not a professional result.

    D
    Dave Merchant
    Legend
    March 6, 2013

    See my reply to this previous question

    http://forums.adobe.com/message/5111409#5111409

    J
    jojwn85Author
    Participant
    March 6, 2013

    Thanks for your swift response Dave, really appreciate the help.

    We looked into using a floating window, but the documents are for sending out to clients without knowing what size of screen it will be viewed on. This meant that in certain circumstances the poster frame would sit larger on the page than the video itself, creating a bit of an odd composition.

    The widget sounds very useful, although I'm hesitant as it would need to be rolled out across a large number of computers in our organisation. So I'm keen to explore any other alternatives (if there are any!) first.

    You mentioned:

    "The default video player widget embedded into PDFs by Acrobat and InDesign always scales the content proportionally to fit the Flash Player viewport, so if the video is smaller than the actual pixel dimensions of the viewport it will be enlarged.'

    Since we tried creating the video at the exact dimensions of the media box do you know why it is still rescaling it? I've heard there's a bit of a discrepancy between indesign and acrobat with pixels vs vectors, but have never quite got my head round it.

    Let me know if you can advise further,

    Thanks

    D
    Dave Merchant
    Legend
    March 6, 2013

    My videoPlayerX widget does not need to be deployed to people watching the video, only to the person creating the PDF in the first place. It's embedded in the document.

    As to why it's scaling in the first place - PDF pages use physical dimensions (in Points, 1/72 of an inch). There is absolutely no concept in the ISO PDF specification of "1:1 pixel scale" as there is in Photoshop or InDesign. We cannot make a "1024x768 pixel" page even if we wanted to.

    If you create a "Web" format INDD layout it appears to be measured in pixels, but if you export it to PDF it's saved with regular physical-paper dimensions - look at the document properties in Acrobat or Reader. Viewing the PDF at "100%" in Acrobat means nothing if the measurements are in pixels, as it is speaking in physical units (trying to match an 8-inch page so it's 8 inches wide on your computer screen). Of course it's never accurate as Acrobat has only a vague idea how wide your monitor really is. Even if it were capable of doing perfect physical scaling of the page, 99.99999% of the time the pixels in an embedded video or bitmap will not line up with the pixels on your screen - they will be scaled and/or offset, which triggers the resampling algorithm.

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