InDesign allows you to create basic animations for output to digital PDF or HTML formats without using separate software. Show This feature works similarly in InDesign CS5, CS6, and CC versions.
I would not recommend any animation or videos for the PDF format. There were workarounds previously, using Adobe flash to generate the animated content but now that's been discontinued and replaced in favor of HTML5. I would recommend an online portfolio. There are easy website templates out there so you don't need to know HTML or CSS, and they would probably have better implementation of interactive elements such as animations or videos. Furthermore it'll have a better chance of displaying properly on all types of devices, considering the content would be responsive to the device resolution. 320 Combining Animated GIFs with InDesign Animations“ - [Instructor] You know that InDesign can make interactive documents with buttons and animations, right? But a lot of the animations are very basic, just like fly in, or fly out. So a lot of people have been trying to figure out how to extend the animations to do more things, like have a bird flying with wings moving up and down, stuff like that. It was Mikaela de Stefano who first showed me how to pull off this trick. And it involves importing an animated gif. For example, I'll simply go to the File menu, choose Place, and then grab this gif. This is a gif file that I downloaded from the free giphy.com site. So, my apologies and much appreciation to whomever created it. I'll click Open, and now, I can simply click, and it places that graphic on my page. Now, you know that animated gifs can be used on the web, of course. But it turns out, that you can import them into InDesign, then when you export a fixed-layout EPUB file, or you use Publish Online, the animated gif works, because those are based on HTML web technologies. Now, this will not work in a PDF at this time, which is a real bummer. But, I hope that Adobe adds that capability in the future. Anyway, here's what you do. After you place the graphic, the animation will not play on the InDesign page, but it will play inside a panel. Here's what you do. You go to the Window menu, choose Interactive, and then choose EPUB Interactivity Preview. You're probably going to want to make this panel bigger, so it's easier to use, but right there, you can see that the animated gif is working inside the panel. Okay, I'll click the stop button to stop that for a moment, and now, I'm going to tell InDesign to animate that gif. I'll do that by going back to the Window menu, back to Interactive, and then choosing Animation. From the Preset popup menu, I'm going to choose Fly in from Left. And I'll say that this should take about six seconds. Now, I want him to walk right off the screen, so I'm going to position him where I want him to end off, over here on the paceboard, and then down here at the bottom of the animation panel, I want to make sure that the Animate popup menu is set to To Current Location. If you don't see these settings, you may have to open up your Properties section. Now, I don't want him to fade in or out, so I'm going to come down here to Opacity, and change this to None. And also, I don't want him to speed up or down, I just want him to walk at a constant rate, so up here in the Speed popup menu, I'm going to change this to None. Okay, but there is a problem here. You can see this light-green motion path here, and it's not long enough. I want him to start from off-screen on the left, so I'm going to click once on that motion path to select it, then I'll place my cursor over the left edge, and you see how the cursor changes? Now I can drag this all the way off to the paceboard on the left side. That indicates that he should walk from the left side to the right side of the page. I'll click off here to deselect, and now let's try it out, back inside the EPUB Interactivity Preview panel. I'll click the play button, and let's see if it works. There he goes! He's walking right across the page. So, that's awesome! Now, as I said, this will work when you export a fixed-layout EPUB file, or if you use Publish Online, or if you use some other HTML export tool. Here, let's try it. I'm going to go to the File menu, and I'm going to choose Publish Online. I'll give this a different title, cause Untitled 2 doesn't do it for me. I'll call it animation test, and now, I simply click Publish. InDesign takes my InDesign file, uploads it to the web, and converts it into HTML for me. When it's done, all I need to do is click View Document. InDesign launches my web browser, and shows me that file, which is currently on their server. And there you go. The guy walks right across the page. Perfect! Now, of course, there's a lot more that you can do with animations and interactive documents. My friend Diane Burns has a couple of great titles on these subjects here on the online training library. You should check them out. Can you insert GIFs into InDesign?Placing animated GIFs in InDesign
You can of course, place animated GIFs into your documents, but InDesign has (almost) no idea that the images are supposed to be animated. When you place the file, all you get is a static image of the first frame.
Can I create an animated GIF in InDesign?If you're looking to create an animated GIF for social media posts, the process should begin in Adobe InDesign and end using Photoshop. This power combo allows you to design the storyboard of the GIF using pages in InDesign, exporting them as PNG or JPGs and creating frame animations in Photoshop.
Can you imbed a GIF in a PDF?Once the document is open, click on the "Edit" button in the main menu and then click on the "Add Image" icon to select the GIF you would like to add to the document. In the popup window, click on the GIF to select it and then click on "Open" to insert the GIF into the document.
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