Ever wondered how you can show your own custom image, maybe your company logo or your brand identity when your Toufee flash movie is loading in the background? This feature is now available but only for Business Account users.

It is very simple to add your own logo to your Toufee flash movie. Follow the steps below

1.  Login to Toufee

2.  On the Members Home page (the first page you see after login), click on the Settings tab

3. Click on the Logo option

4. Click the Browse button to browse the image file and click on Update >> to add the logo

5. Your new logo will now be available for use with all of your Toufee flash movies in your Business Account. Anytime you want to have the logo show on your movies, simply select Use my custom logo in preloader option in the Publish Movie dialog box (Publish -> Publish Online).

Please note that the custom logo is not enabled by default for the simple reason that not all of your flash movies will take long time to load. Hence you have to select the Use my custom logo in preloader option when you are publishing your Toufee flash movie.

Showing a custom logo as a preloader not only keeps the customer interested when your Toufee flash movie is loading in the background, but helps customers retain brand identity improving your product or service recall value.

Ever since the release of Toufee Pro, the online flash movie maker pplication has gone through a number of major and minor changes. One such major change was the migration to online video conversion , i.e. where you simply submit your flash movies to be converted to AVI format (via Publish -> Export to YouTube option), a process which replaced the old Toufee Desktop Convertor program. There are a lot of improvements on the “backend” as well; we’ve extended video codecs support so you will no longer have any issues with your video files uploaded to Toufee and also the Text effect engine has undergone a major overhaul. On the SWF front, there were a number of improvements to the core SWF builder engine. So all in all, the Toufee Pro moviemaker is now much more improved in architecture and scalability.

That’s just a glimpse of what we’ve done to improving Toufee flash movie maker application in the past few months, but are a lots of other updates which I’ll cover in my future posts. All right, I can sense what you are wondering. What about the post? How do we create flash movies with a manual replay option? Well, for those of you who do not know about the auto-loop that Toufee supports, here is how you enable it for your Toufee flash movie. Select Movie -> Movie Play Settings -> Movie Stops Playing -> Never (Rewind and Restart Play)

This is a nice feature to have, but something better would be the option like Click to replay option, the users viewing the flash movie could use to replay the flash movie if you want. Though this option is not built-in (for the right reasons, since its easy to create this manually),  here is how you can add manually this option to the flash movies that you create with Toufee.

1.  Open your flash movie in Toufee, and select the last frame to display it in the moviemaker stage

2. Switch to the last frame of your flash movie and add a text object with the text “Click to replay”

3. With the “Click to replay” text selected, selected the Advanced tab from the Left Panel, expand Link To - Website / Email option as shown below

4. In the Link To dropdown list select Frame as the option and for the Frame # dropdown list, select Frame1 (or the first frame in your movie).

5. Click Save button to save the changes and replay the movie.

That its, you now have a custom replay text (or a button) to replay your Toufee flash movies. You no longer have to worry about creating flash movies but not having a manual replay option, for now you know how.

Till next post,

Ganesh

If you were left wondering how to add animated GIFs (GIF89a format) to your flash movies, then you need to surely read this post! I am sure many of you would have tried uploading animated GIFs by using the Add Image button but couldn’t get the option to work. Worry not, for you can upload animated GIFs using the Add Video button. Add Video option not only allows you to add videos but animated GIFs as well.  Why use animated GIFs? Well, if used wisely, then can be very effective in a flash movie presentation. Animated GIFs provide you the much needed option of adding basic picture animations to your flash movies. Animated GIFs are not too big either and they usually are just a few KBs in size.

You can do a quick Google search for “royalty free animated GIFs” and you will end up with scores of sites providing you free GIFs. Based on the theme of your movie, you can select your aGIFs and see for yourself what a marked change it brings to your flash movie. Go on, add some spice to your flash movies.

I love the animation movie Cars - the movie has some of the best animation, stunning visual effects and superb attention to detail. My love for the movie doubled when I watched the video of how the movie was made, from conception to the final movie as we see it today. Now if you watch the making of Cars you would know why - these guys are simply amazing, right from the character modeling, storyboarding to visual effects, every bit of the “behind the scenes” stuff was exactly translated into the movie without the least change - perfect as per the plan, not to forget the painstaking detail that would have gone into all the work behind Cars. One moment…why the heck am I writing all this here? Am I not supposed to write something about how to make flash movies? I am, and I will talk about that in just a moment. Talking about the movie Cars, what made it a big success? One can attribute the success to a number of factors - technical brilliance, detail, but if you ask me I would say two things - planning (being clear of what is expected) and personification - I saw each and every toy in the movie as just another person, a character so easily you can identify and associate with. That’s what made the movie special. The makers of Cars gave life to the toys by making it goddamn real and personal!

Ok, so whats my point? The point is a) plan your flash movies b) make it personal…infuse life into your flash videos. Give it that personal touch - sometimes making a flash movie presentation is less of skill and more of an art. Think as if you are creating an art, a masterpiece - you expect nothing but the best. There is a big difference in making a flash movie and making a flash movie that stand out and speaks for itself. Having flashy effects in your movie is cool, but not worth if it doesnt deliver. Even the effects that you use in your flash video decides how well your movie can make that impact. Carefully chosen flash effects coupled with the sound and images can infuse that personal connection between the flash movie and the audience. This is what I mean when I say making a lasting flash presentation.

Never let someone see your movie as just another flash presentation. Your flash movie should make an impact, should drive home your message loud and clear and in a manner unique that will make your movie stand out from the rest.

The normal flash movies that you see on websites, use a small software component called the Flash plugin. This Flash plugin comes along with your browsers (IE, Firefox, Netscape etc) but you can also manually install it by downloading it from Adobe site. This Flash plugin is responsible for playing the flash movies and flash videos that you see on all flash-enabled websites. In a normal website with Flash content, though its not directly possible to save those Flash videos, there are lots of workaround you can do to save a Flash movie that you see on a website (In Firefox, saving Flash content is relatively easier than IE. In Firefox, open a webpage with Flash animations, right-click anywhere on the page and select “View Page Info” from the popup menu. This opens the “Page Info” Dialog box. Select “Media” tab. Firefox lists all the media files (images, sounds, videos) that’s prsent on the webpage. The flash movies will be listed under Embed type with .SWF extension. Click on “Save As…” button to save the flash movie. Isn’t that cool???) . You can do the same stuff in IE using IE plugins like “Flash Saving Plugin 1.2″, Aevita Save Flash, etc.

This option to save Flash content from websites is great, but assume that you’re developing a paid courseware service in Flash and hosting it on your site. Imagine if users save your Flash content? Imagine they distribute it illegally over the internet? You lose your customers as well as your revenues. Keeping this in mind, we developed Toufee Movie Maker flashbox technology, which is a small layer of software that automatically loads when a webpage with Toufee movie is loaded. Instead of the Flash plugin, Toufee Movie Maker flashbox takes control of the Toufee movie (remember Toufee movies are also Flash movies but are optimized for enhanced security and faster downloads). Toufee’s flashbox still uses the same Adobe Flash plugin to play the Toufee movies, but conceals the flash movie content such that Firefox and IE plugins cannot recognize it. Toufee’s flashbox adds the important security feature to your Flash movies such that it cannot be saved. We are also developing additional features into this flashbox to support what we call “permission-based playing” that allows you to control what your target audience can/cannot view. Toufee’s flashbox is a great tool if you are developing commercial content delivery using Flash technology. Toufee Movie Maker’s flashbox technology provides you enhanced security as well as the flexibility to control content delivery. You can verify if it works by opening your Toufee movie in Firefox and check the “Media” section to see if it displays any flash (.SWF) files - it won’t - your Flash movies are secured by Toufee.

Ganesh
Toufee Support

Flash can be effectively used in business websites if it can be applied to the right content and in the right way. So whats the best thing Flash can add to a business site? Flash can deliver amazing results when its used to drive home a message, something no other form of internet media delivery mechanism can match it in terms of versatility, features and power. Business managers have realised this and are increasingly finding creative applications of Flash not only to add glamor to their site, but most importantly, deliver that most important marketing message in a compelling way that users will never cease to forget.

A few years back, however, Flash movies were kept to the bare minimum in most business sites. Only after the number of Internet users grew exponentially over the last few years did business took notice of this wonderful technology. This, coupled with the ever-increasing average internet bandwidth saw businesses realign their internet strategy to account for more flash content in their sites. Key products had flash presentations that interactively put across the product features. Product advertisements became dynamic - ads were completely made as flash movies that allowed for lots of interaction. Businesses started to realize that Flash-based movies or videos reached target audiences quickly and cost-effectively than traditional media advertisements. The ROI was so impressive that many businesses started lowering their marketing budgetary exposure to traditional media and instead focused more on flash animations and flash movies as an advertisement tool on the Internet.

Effective use of Flash movies in business websites can pay rich dividend if applied properly. Flash videos can add versatility to a site, its simply that extra bit of Flash content on your business website that can make a world of difference if dealt with appropriately.

Flash is so powerful that people sometimes go overboard - an overdose of Flash can do more harm than good. Yet, some get bit by the Flash bug and couldn’t resist to build their site entirely in Flash, forgetting the golden rule - “Never break the browser’s back button!”

All internet browsers have a Back button, a basic navigation control that lets you navigate to the previous page. It might sound simple but at times can turn extremely handy. Assume that you’re filling a lengthly form only to find that you get a “Page cannot be displayed” message on clicking the Submit button. What do you do? Refill in the entire form? Nope, there’s your BACK button - click on it and the entire data that you filled in the form reloads from the browser’s cache. The Back button can be often overlooked for its limited use but at times might turn out to be your biggest savior. However, since the advent of Flash and the increasing number of Flash-based sites, website owners are tempted to redo their entire site in Flash robbing users of their site the freedom to use the Back button. It’s fine to have sites based on Flash if the purpose is simply to present information but if there are forms on the site and if it accepts loads of data then its time to have a rethink.

You might wonder why we have taken this article at Toufee? Well, its always a good thing to know what extremes can mean - overdoing anything pays off negatively. Create flash movies with care and try not to overdo. Thats why we developed Toufee, its gives you the power to create stunning flash presentations but still makes sure your flash videos does what it was meant for!