This Adobe Creative Cloud tutorial was to explore more advanced features of creating an interactive PDF. These extra skills would help us in producing out PDF's if we wanted to include video references in our future research and or development.
We began by reproducing the pervasive percussion album cover using a new blend of tools. A new tool which I found out was to be able to select the exact colour of an image and applying this to text and shapes in the document. This made finding the exact colour of the document very easy. This tool is similar to the Eyedropper tool in photoshop, however in indesign you need to hold the mouse button down and let go when over your chosen colour.
Here is my version of the Pervasive Percussion Album (Below)
After this brief introduction to the session, we then looked at creating a table of contents, which is basically a digital contents of all the pages in the document. The reason why this is an effective tool, is because it saves time on constructing a contents page manually, and can be updated if the documents layout changes. This is also where I found the help tool effective as it guided me to the table of contents, as I was unable to find it.
This part of the session I looked at including video within a interactive PDF. We used a video suppled on unlearn called Swing of change, which was an animated film. Quite simply to have video in indesign you have to simple place it in the document, however to have a fully functional video, with a pause and start button, you are required to mark some options in the media tab. Features in this menu include the ability to have the video play instantly as you go to the specific page the video is on and also create a display window of a particular frame, if the video fame currently is bland. Something which I did find useful however, is that to be able to see videos in the document PDF, it has to be opened in Adobe Acrobat reader.
Overall I gained the ability to add videos into indesign, which in my opinions a very important skill to have when constructing digital media. I also found out that Indesign is much more than a research and publication software, as it can be used to create many sources of media. I am very happy with the PDF I produced and although it's not a publication worthy outcome, I think that the skills acquire fro this session are very important, which I will apply to my future project documents.
