Replacing the Standard Poster for Video and Sound Files

Mike Rankin

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If you create interactive PDFs from InDesign, you probably know that you can place videos and sound files in your documents. And when you include videos and sounds, InDesign uses something called a poster, which is the static image that displays before the video or sound starts playing.

If you use recommended video formats like MP4s, you can select a frame from the video to serve as the poster, or you can pick a separate image, or use the default poster image provided by InDesign.

The standard poster is nothing much to look at.

So it’s unlikely you’d ever really want to use it, which is a shame because you can’t beat the convenience. If only you could replace it with a nicer icon or image…

Actually, you can. The standard poster images for videos, sound files, and SWFs are located in the InDesign application folder, in Presets > multimedia.

Just replace these bland, generic images with your own icons or other images, using the exact same names: StandardMoviePoster.jpg, StandardSoundPoster.jpg, and StandardSwfPoster.jpg.

You can go with something that adds a little more personality.

Or a lot. I’m not here to judge.

Ok, sure, that’s probably way too much personality, but you get the point. Pick something that you and your audience won’t mind seeing over and over again, since the whole point is to efficiently use one image repeatedly.

Note that if you’ve used a standard poster in any of your documents, and then you change the image in the multimedia folder, you will see a modified icon on the posters in InDesign, indicating they need to be updated like any other placed image.

And you can always choose a different image for a specific video or sound poster using the Media panel or Links panel.

It’s also a good idea to save backup copies of the original standard posters in case you ever need to revert back to them. The easiest thing to do is just rename them (like StandardMoviePoster-ORIGINAL.jpg) and keep them in the multimedia folder so you don’t lose them.

Just remember that if you use a large poster image (i.e. larger dimensions than the movie), the poster will be clipped to the size of the movie in the exported PDF. For reference, the default standard movie and SWF posters are 640 x 480 ppi, and the default standard sound poster is 250 x 250 ppi.