How To Make A Poster Movie

Creating Poster Frames

A poster movie allows you to put in a "teaser" for your movie on a web page without loading the entire movie. This is great for people that have dial up access to the internet. The end user can then decide to download the movie when they are ready to watch it. It also allows your webpage to load quickly.

Step One - Create the Poster Frame

First you need to create a poster frame that will hold the place in the web page in the spot you want the QuickTime to load and play, called the target.

To do this you can use a frame from the movie or use a program like Photoshop or wwwART to make a single frame movie. I like using a combination of an image and some text that explains that the user must click on the movie to get things playing.

If you want to use an image from the movie, stop the movie on the frame you want to use and simply drag the frame to the desktop. Now you can edit that image in PhotoShop and add the text.

I try to make the image the same size as the movie. Remember that your QuickTime movie might use a movie controller. While your poster movie will not so you can make the poster a little taller. For example I made my poster movies 256 x 208 because the QT movie itself was 256 x 196 plus the 16 pixels for the controller.

Once you create the image that will serve as your poster frame you need make sure that it is saved in qt format and ends with .mov

I just took the .jpg that I created in Photoshop and opened it in the qt player and saved it as a self contained QuickTime movie.

Step Two - Insert the PosterFrame

Now that you have your "poster frame" you can insert it just you would a regular qt movie in your webpage software.

I use Claris HomePage so I can add the href tag by double clicking on the inserted poster frame and then clicking on the extended tab… and adding the following tag.

href="thenameofyourmovie.mov" target=myself

Of course you would change "thenameofyourmovie.mov" to the actual name of the movie you want to play in the place of the poster frame.

When I view the source of the page this is what it looks like..

The movie MUST be stored at the same directory level as the poster movie..

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