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Mick@ArecaDesign
Participant
April 14, 2020
Question

Display green screen videos in PDF

  • April 14, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 1360 views

I would like to have a green screen presenter appear to be stood on the relevent pages on a PDF document.

Is this possible?

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Legend
April 14, 2020

Very difficult due to the removal of features in Acrobat and Reader, and the total lack of support for rich media PDFs on third party and mobile apps.

 

  • You can embed a rich media "video" and set it to open in a floating window, but you cannot control where it is on screen, it will always have a thick black border, and you can't get rid of the background.
  • You can still - just about - embed a rich media "SWF" object, which could be rendered on top of the page and without any enforced borders, but it would then scroll with the viewport. If you set it to float, you'll get those boarders back. It is theoretically possible for custom-coded video playback SWFs to load a .FLV file with an alpha channel - but Adobe killed off all the tools required to actually make them.

 

Adobe's development and feature policy is simple and has been set in stone for years. PDF is for "documents", and don't even think about making a document do anything jazzy and animated. HTML, ePUB or native mobile apps are for everything else. What you really want is a PDF equivalent of the HTML5 <video> object and dynamically-positioned page content, but that's not going to happen.

Mick@ArecaDesign
Participant
April 14, 2020

Thanks Dave - it certainly would seem so.
It seems fairly obvious to me that a PDF about training (for example) is perfect for a green screen presenter or animation to pop-up to enhance the written word on the page. Ha well, worth asking.
Cheers
Mick