What is a poster movie?
A poster movie is a still image that can be used to link "in place" to a QuickTime movie. When a user clicks on the poster movie, the linked QuickTime movie will begin playing in its place.
For examples, click on the 2 poster movies (images) below.
Video created from the iMovie Tutorial clips and audio files.
The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife
Marilyn Sides
Poster movies can be used with any QuickTime movie, but they are most useful on web pages that contain multiple QuickTime movies.
Because QuickTime movies are often large in file size, they can take a while to download. Including multiple QuickTime movies on your web page can cause the page to load slowly, especially off-campus where users may have slower modems.
By using poster movies, you can create a web page with multiple QuickTime movies that loads much faster. Instead of waiting for each of the QuickTime movies to load, the browser only has to load the (much smaller) poster movies.
When a user wants to watch or listen to one of the QuickTime movies, she can simply click on the poster movie and the linked QuickTime file will begin downloading.
Providing a faster loading page will allow users to move through your site more easily and by using poster movies, you allow your users to select which QuickTime movies they would like to wait for rather than forcing them to wait for all of the available movies to load.
To create a poster movie
Note: To create poster movies, you must use the application QuickTime Player Pro (not the free version of QuickTime Player.) The professional version of QuickTime Player is available on all of the computers in the public clusters and the Knapp Media & Technology Center. The free version of QuickTime Player installed on faculty/staff office computers and provided for student personal computers will not have the necessary features for creating a poster movie.
- Create an image in Photoshop or Fireworks, or use iMovie to save a frame of the movie you want to embed in your webpage. Save the image file as a .gif, .jpg, or .png file.
- If you are creating a poster movie for a QuickTime audio file, you can choose any width for the image, but the height must be 16 pixels (the height of the QuickTime controller.) The example above is 240 pixels wide by 16 pixels high
- If you are creating a poster movie for a QuickTime video file, the width will be the same as the width of the QuickTime movie and the height will be the height of the movie plus 16 pixels (to allow for the QuickTime Controller.)
- Once you have created your image, launch QuickTime Player.
- From the File menu, choose Open Movie in New Player... and browse to your poster movie image.
- From the File menu, choose Export.
- Name the file poster.mov (or some other appropriate file name making sure that it ends in .mov)
- From the Export pull-down menu choose Movie to QuickTime Movie.
- Click Save.
- You have now created a poster movie.
- Quit (or Exit) from QuickTime Player.
You can use the same poster movie for all of the QuickTime movies on your site, or you can create a different poster movie for each one.
To insert the poster movie into your web page:
Click here to return to the Insert QuickTime section of the Media & Menus Dreamweaver documentation.