1/13/99 NOTE: The following tutorial, written when QuickTime 3 was still in beta, is no longer completely accurate. You'll only need to follow these instructions for QuickTime VR movies, since the default for linear QT movies is to show the controller. Also, the proper URLs are the QT3 download page and the QuickTime 3 Tools and Utilities page. Note also that you'll need to upgrade to the Pro version of QuickTime 3.

A poster movie is a small, usually single-frame movie that you embed on a Web page. It downloads quickly, but when clicked on can be replaced with the movie that you really want on the page. (This is particularly nice when you want several movies on a page, but don't necessarily want them all to download automatically.)

The one complication that arises is that you often don't want the poster to have a controller, but you do want the "real" movie to have a controller. Apple has instructions on their web site doing what you need to, but it's not all in one place.

So here's our version of instructions to follow when you want to use a poster movie on your web page (and it'll work equally well for regular QT and QTVR movies):

You'll need to have QuickTime 3.0 and MoviePlayer 3.0 (both of which you can get at the QT 3 download page), as well as a utility called Plug-in Helper (which you can get at the QuickTime 3.0 Utilities page).

First, create the poster movie:

  1. In MoviePlayer, open the movie you'd like to put on a Web page. If the image that shows when the movie is first opened isn't the one you want on your Web page, change to the view that you'd like. (This means playing or stepping through a standard QT movie, or dragging to the correct view in a QTVR movie.)
  2. Choose Export from the File menu.
  3. From the pop-up menu at the bottom of the Save dialog, choose Movie to Picture.
  4. Click Save.
  5. Choose Import from the File menu, and, in the open dialog box that appears locate and click on the file that you saved in the previous step.
  6. Change the name so it has an extension of ".mov". We recommend including the word "poster" in the name, too. (e.g. "mymovieposter.mov")
  7. Click the Options button, and in the Compression Settings dialog box that appears, choose Photo-JPEG, then click OK. (This is actually an optional step, but highly recommended to get the smallest file size.)
  8. Click Save. Your poster movie will have been created.
  9. Quit MoviePlayer.

Next, use Plug-in Helper to add the controller=true command directly to your movie:

  1. Open the movie you'd like on a Web page (not the poster movie you just created) in Plug-in Helper.
  2. In the area labeled "Movie User Data ('plug'), use the Add button to add the text "controller=true". (Don't put in the quotation marks.)
  3. Click the Export button, provide a name different than the movie you started with (like "mymovie.mov"), and click Save. (You could replace the existing file, but we don't recommend it.)

Then, author your web page so that no controller shows for the poster:

Finally, upload everything:

You'll find more documentation at the following pages at the QuickTime 3.0 Preview Site:

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copyright 1996-98  Judith L. Stern and Robert Lettieri, jandr@ccnet.com
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