Frames are the building blocks of a Toufee Pro movie and knowing how to effectively work with frames helps in quickly creating movies and greatly reduce a lot of repetitive work. Toufee Pro Movie Maker has a number of improved features for handling frames that facilitate easy ordering, duplication and managing frame backgrounds/effects. This article will quickly introduce you to creating/duplicating frames and using the Frame Manager how to optimize frames management.

Creating Frames
All Toufee Pro movie have a standard blank frame (with transparent background) to start with. Adding a new frame is quite simple - Select Add New Frame from the Frames menu (Frames -> Add New Frame) or press the Insert key on the keyboard. New frames are always added as the last frame. You can also right-click any frame in the Toufee Movie Maker stage and select the Add New Frame from the popup menu.

One aspect that you might notice is that new frames are always added in the end. Let’s say you have 20 frames in your movie, and you want to quickly insert a frame after your 2nd frame - how do you do this? Frames Manager, which will be covered in a while, is the answer

Duplicating Frames
Creating copies or duplicates of a frame can be very handy in cases when you are doing a presentation-style flash movie where you would like to repeat the headers, footers and common items across all the frames. Click on a frame and select Duplicate This Frame from the Frames menu. You can also select the invoke the same by right-clicking on a frame and selecting the option from the popup menu.

Frames Manager: Integrated Frames Management
The Frames Manager is a new feature of Toufee Pro that simplifies the task of managing frames in your Toufee movie. You can invoke the Frames Manager from the Frames Menu (Frames -> Frames Manager)

As you can see in the above screenshot, you can do most of the frame-related operations from within the Frames Manager window - i.e. creating, reordering and removing frames.

For example, if you would like to add a new frame after Frame 2, simply Frame 2 and click on Add New button. This will create a new frame immediately after the 2nd frame. Selecting any frame and clicking on the Remove button deletes the selected frame.

But the most important function of the Frames Manager is ordering of the frames, a key aspect of frames management. By using the Move Up and Move Down buttons in the Frames Manager window, you can easily arrange the frames in the order that you want them to be. This allows you to quickly juggle frames - you now need have to have to worry about making your movies in the exact order, you can always change frame order if you feel the sequence need to be changed and concentrate on individual frames.

Publishing Toufee flash movies had always been easier and the same continues with our new improved Publish feature of Toufee Pro. The new Publish window of Toufee Pro offers much more support and functionality than its earlier version (Toufee Classic). Besides, we have direct publishing support to a number of new social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut etc., or to blogs like Blogger, WordPress so you never have to run around copying and pasting HTML code or having to login to multiple sites if you want to publish the same movie to many social networking sites.

Toufee Pro allows you to directly publish your flash movies to the following sites -MySpace, Comment, Friendster, Facebook, Orkut, Bebo, Tagged, Blogger, Hi5, Live Spaces, Piczo, Freewebs, LiveJournal, BlackPlanet, myYearbook, WordPress, Vox, TypePad, Xanga, Multiply, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, MiGente

Invoking the Publish window
You access the Publish window by selecting the Publish Online option from the Publish menu (Publish -> Publish online). You’ll find the new Publish window (shown below) has all the options at one-click making publishing flash movies easier.

You can simply publish your flash movies to your favorite site by clicking on the appropriate button. You’ll also notice the Copy button if all you want is to copy the HTML code so that you can paste it in your website (if you are running your own) or to a blog which is not listed in the Publish window.

Example: Posting to MySpace
As you have noticed, the new one-click publish has made it easier to publish and saves you a lot of time. Let’s say you want to publish your movie to MySpace. All you have to do is click on the MySpace button on the Publish window and you’ll see a MySpace login information.

Enter your MySpace login information and select the section under which you want the movie to be posted and Toufee posts the flash movie to your MySpace profile in no time. On successful completion, you’ll see a “Message Posted” dialog box as shown below.

Bookmarking Flash Movies
Besides publishing flash movies to sites, Toufee Pro also allows you to bookmark your flash movie to popular bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us etc. through which your flash movies get quickly shared to millions of people around the globe. Click on the Bookmark link on the Publish window to open the Add Bookmark

When you click on the appropriate button for the site, for example, Digg, your movie is automatically added to Digg and the confirmation window will popup as shown below.

Make the most of it now!
Toufee Pro’s powerful publishing features allows you to quickly and easily share your flash movie to billions of people around the globe. The one-click publishing feature removes the need to manually copy and paste HTML code and importantly saves a lot of your valuable time so you can give your creative abilities shape with Toufee Pro.

All flash movies created with Toufee Pro sports a movie-player look with all the playing controls enabled by default. The movie player skin allows easy functionality to quickly pause/stop movies or jump to specific timelines using the Timing bar. However, if you are developing a flash movie for your website or a flash banner, then you would ideally like to have just your flash movie without any sort of player or controls.  You can do so by selecting the Hide Player /No Controls option under the Player Skin / Controls submenu of the Movie menu (Movie -> Player Skin / Controls -> Hide Player / No Controls).

Settings this option removes the YouTube-like player skin from your current flash movie. If the flash movie is posted on your website, then please remember to Save and Publish your flash movie (copy the new HTML code from the publish window onto your website/blog where you’ve posted your flash movie) again for the changes to be reflected in your website.

The Hide Player /No Controls is not the default option, so you have to set it manually for those movies you do not wish to have the player skin.

Hope this helps, please leave your comments, if any.

Ganesh

Starting with Toufee Pro, we are building a completely self-referential and comprehensive reference guide for Toufee by way of the new Toufee KnowledgeBase. The KnowledgeBase can be accessed by going to http://www.toufee.com/support

Toufee’s KnowledgeBase will act as the first point of reference and support for common questions and how-to’s related to Toufee Pro. We’ve  justed started adding articles to Toufee’s KB (KnowledgeBase for short) and as we move along, you’ll find the KnowledgeBase grow in content and depth, covering a broad range of FAQs, How-To’s and also targeted tutorials covering major functionalities of Toufee Pro.

The homepage of the KnowledgeBase list all the popular FAQs that were searched for. If you wish to look at topics by category then click on the KnowledgeBase link to access the various FAQs and articles grouped by category as shown in the below page.

I am sure that users now know where to go to look for FAQs? Still can’t find what you’re looking for? No worries, you can quickly submit your query to support by clicking on the Submit a Support Ticket link found on the KnowledgeBase homepage. Hope this helps. Explore the Toufee’s KnowledgeBase and if you a common FAQ listed, you can always raise a support ticket and we’ll add that to the KnowledgeBase!

Ganesh