Support Topics: Video: How to: Create a poster frame for a Quicktime movie
What you would use this for: While it's not necessary, we recommend
the use of a poster frame. A poster frame is a single image,
that when clicked on will download the Quicktime movie.
This allows your visitors the option to view the movie instead
of having it forced on them. This will help with your bandwidth
usage as well. You will need Quicktime Pro to follow this
tutorial.
To create a poster frame, you can either take
a single image from your movie or create an image in a graphics
program. In this example we'll be using an image taken directly from the movie we're showing on the site.
Below is an example of a movie with a poster frame. See that the movie doesn't automatically load, but instead displays a picture representing what the video is. Click on the movie to begin.
What You Need:
Quicktime Pro (Quicktime external link)
1. To take an image from your movie, open
the movie in Quicktime and select a frame you'd like to
use by using the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the play head of the Quicktime
player to a suitable frame of your movie. Once you've selected
the frame you'd like to use, go to File > Export in the
menu bar.
2. From the export dialog box, select "Movie
To Picture". Also, add pf to the end of the file name. In this example our movie is called "example_movie.MOV", so we'll rename this still picture as "example_moviepf.PCT". Click Save.
3. Once you've saved the file, you'll now want to open it back up in Quicktime. Go to File > Open... and then choose your .PCT file. Click the Open button.
4. With the picture now open in Quicktime, go under File > Save As... and choose to save the file as a self contained movie. The extension of this saved file will now be .MOV. So, you should now have your original quicktime movie (example_movie.MOV) and your poster frame (example_moviepf.MOV).
Now
that your Poster Frame is created, what do you do with it?
Click here for instructions on embedding your Quicktime movie into your web page.
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