Review: The Video-Enabled Adobe Acrobat 9

Portfolio documents also open in a web browser, thanks to the Acrobat browser plug-in, so the portfolios can be searched/available online just like a regular PDF document. If the still image representing the video file is appealing, clicking on the Open button launches the particular video in an external player (if the video file hasn't already been converted to Flash Video, which it can be in Acrobat 9 Pro Extended).

Multimedia tools

Acrobat 9 provides deep support for Adobe Flash technology, enabling users to include Adobe Flash Player-compatible video and application files in PDF documents. Acrobat 9 (including the Acrobat 9 Reader) has built-in support for the Adobe Flash Player runtime, meaning they can playback SWF files directly for optimal viewing.

Acrobat 9 Extended also converts video content into Flash Video, from AVI, QuickTime, MPEG, WindowsMedia, ASF, and 3GPP. If a file is in FLV (VP6) or H.264 formatting, it appears to work fine without conversion. RealMedia can be placed in a Portfolio as part of what Adobe calls "legacy placement" for older versions of Acrobat Reader. (See here for more details.)

One point that some may be wondering about, given the fact that Portfolio documents can also be emailed, is how to handle large video files. Acrobat 9 Pro and Extended have a solution that works well if you are online: Either embed the video or provide a URL to the video files, the latter using a Rich Media Video Annotation (a way of embedding video content that's slightly different from Portfolio). When you're offline, as Joel Geraci, Acrobat's technical evangelist pointed out in a recent blog post, the URL option doesn't work so well, and Portfolio doesn't have a way to allow a URL rather than a direct embedding of the video file, so he created a way to get the benefits of a Rich Media Video Annotation in Portfolio while still creating an embedded low-resolution version of the video file into a Portfolio document that's small enough to email.

"So this provides full HD streaming video when you're online," wrote Geraci. "If you're not online, an embedded low resolution version plays instead. The secret is in building your own video player in Flex or adding a little ActionScript around the FLVPlayback component in Flash. Then, rather than adding the video directly, you add your customized SWF player as a Rich Media Flash Annotation."

To show off this integration, he's even created a version that leverages an ActionScript called FlashVars. Check it out here. Hopefully this will be added as a feature in a dot release of Acrobat 9.

With the deep Flash integration, the previous ability to convert web pages is enhanced. Up until now, it was impossible to capture complete web pages and place them in a PDF document, due to the inclusion of rich and interactive media in most websites. Now the entire page can be captured, which is beneficial in website review as PDF versions of web pages can be printed, archived, marked up, and shared.

Acrobat.com
Speaking of sharing, Acrobat 9 now includes integration with Acrobat Connect. This previously standalone service allows live collaboration within a PDF document, much the same way that a WebEx allows the conference chair to drive a group’s navigation through a PowerPoint document. This similar feature now lets a group look at the same PDF document in real time, quickly providing feedback and markup. Like Word, too, there's now the ability to compare documents, automatically highlighting the differences between two versions of a PDF document, including text and images, although not videos.

Annotation of Flash (SWF) files.
Given Flash integration, Flash SWF files can now be directly played on the page, allowing the use of Acrobat's built-in commenting features to review and markup the interactive content. The default mode, once a Comment has been placed, is to allow a reviewer to see a bitmap "state" or still image of the SFW content at the moment the comment was placed. This is helpful but may cause issues with fast-moving content and comments that are then placed out of sequence/at a later time in the SWF as the content moves along. Several workarounds are available, including one from Geraci that also restores all the variables—important for finding the exact "state" of the SWF file at the time of commenting, including radio button states, etc.

OCR / Scanning
OK, it's not the coolest feature, but as a lifelong proponent of trying to find my desktop (the real one, not the cluttered virtual desktop that I have on my computer) I have tried various tools that let me do quality scanning and optical character recognition (OCR). The best one I'd found until Acrobat 9 was a Mac-based tool called DevonThink Pro Office, which worked hand-in-hand with the Fujitsu ScanSnap to produce a PDF that retains the scanned image, but also creates a searchable OCR of the text which is placed on a second layer in the PDF (the Image-Text setup, versus the Text-Image setup that puts the actual OCRed text on top, for all you scanning geeks out there).

That particular ScanSnap scanner has a piece of software that allows a set of macros to be launched that scan, open in the OCR program (DevonThink), perform the OCR, and then prompt for a name/location to save. With that tool, I was able to significantly reduce the amount of paper on my desk. But the downside was large file sizes, sometimes almost twice the size of the original PDF.