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Archive for the ‘Toufee 2.0’ Category
Monday, February 16th, 2009
Today, we will look at a handy tip that might probably be useful when creating presentation-type flash movies, i.e. for flash videos primarly used for business presentations. We will look at how to show a flash movie object, for example, a text or an image (your company logo perhaps) throughout the entire playing time of the flash movie. Why would you want it that way? Assume you create a flash video about your product and you want your “product logo” or a product tagline to show through the movie. This is also useful when doing a business presentation where you want to have the topic or the “title” to show across all the slides.
While there is no direct way to place a flash movie object on all frames (yes, you can place the same object on all the frames but this increases the movie size), but there is a workaround. For example, if your movie plays for 220 seconds, then set the timing of the text object to 220 seconds and voila, your text will show the entire 220 seconds and that way, we create the effect as though the object was present in all the frames.
Enough said, let’s look at an example. Assuming we have a text object in our movie which we want to show for 220 seconds (i.e. the movie playing time is also assumed to be 220 seconds), then here is what to do
- Select the text, and from the Left Panel (click on the Star icon on the left of your screen if you do not see the Left Panel), select Advanced tab
- Expand Timing (Experts Only) option.
- In the Then Hide it field, select Custom… from the dropdown list box
- Enter the number of seconds (playing time of your movie) in the Hide After: field (see screenshot below)
- Click Save button on the top right to save the changes
That’s it. Your text should now show throughout your flash movie play. It’s just a matter of extending the timing of the object.
Hope this was useful. As always, please forward all your queries, suggestions and concerns to help@toufee.com.
Till next time, God bless!
Ganesh
Tags: Add new tag, create-flash-video, fre moviemaker, make flash movies, Online-Flash-movie-maker
Posted in Flash Tips, Toufee 2.0, Toufee Tips | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
When publishing Toufee flash movies to their webpages, particularly flash banners, some users have noticed that there is an inconsistency between the actual movie size (Movie -> Movie Size -> Set Custom Size option) and the Movie Size parameter value in the HTML code generated by Toufee. To better illustrate this, consider the following flash movie. This is a sample 200×250 flash banner (width = 200 pixels, height = 250 pixels). What you are looking at is the preview of the flash movie movie in Toufee MovieMaker application.
In the below screenshot, you would notice the Width and Height parameters set to 200 and 250 respectively via the Set Custom Size option (Movie -> Movie Size -> Set Custom Size)
However, when you publish your flash movie, notice that the Height attribute in the HTML code has the value 280 pixels instead of the original value of 250 pixels.
The reason that Toufee adds this additional 30 pixels to your Toufee flash movie is because your Toufee flash movie needs to accomdate the Player Controls (Play, Pause and the Volume controls) at the bottom. This applies to all Toufee flash movies since the default setting is Web Like Player. However, if you are creating flash banners, then you would generally need no Player controls to be shown at the bottom of your flash movie. You can turn of this Player Controls by selecting Movie -> Player Skin Controls -> Hide Player / No Controls as shown in the below screenshot
Now, publish your movie again, but this time you will notice that the HTML code in the Publish Movie window will have the Height parameter set to 250 pixels which is the current setting.
This is actually not a bug but this is the built-in design of Toufee. If Toufee does not add the additional pixels to the Height parameter, you would not have the Player Controls when you use the published HTML code in your webpages for those movies that need the controls. However, for flash banners, following the above steps would remove the problem of the Height parameter inconsistency.
Hope this is useful. Meet you then in my next post!
Ganesh
Tags: create flash banner, create-flash-video, flash banner, flash movie, flash video, publish movie, Toufee
Posted in Flash Tips, Toufee 2.0, Toufee Tips | No Comments »
Monday, December 15th, 2008
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
Tags: create-flash-movies, create-flash-video, flash moviemaker, replay flash movies, replay flash video
Posted in Flash Tips, Toufee 2.0, Toufee Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, December 11th, 2008
The Problem
Quite a few Toufee customers have reported that they did not see any of the changes that they saved in the previous session. Customers have experienced this issue even though they have saved their Toufee flash movies properly using File -> Save or the Save option (on the top-right of the MovieMaker window). After a few tests, we traced down this problem to an issue with browser caching, a technique which Toufee MovieMaker extensively uses to improve application performance. Though all of the changes made by customers to their flash movies are actually being saved, the reason they did not see the changes the next time they logged on was because they were looking at the “cached” version of their movies which lead to thinking that they actually lost their work. The actual fact is that none of the work was lost but because of this caching technology, they were looking at the “older” version of their flash movies.
The Solution
The simple solution to the problem is to clear the browser cache and relaunch Toufee. Customers should then be able to see all the changes that they saved in their last session. For detailed instructions on clearing your browser cache, please refer the following page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_your_cache
Posted in Bug News, Toufee 2.0, Toufee Tips | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
If you are an old member of Toufee and have used Toufee Classic (i.e. Toufee 1.0 version) to create your movies, then you might wonder where all those movies have gone since the introduction of Toufee Pro version. Worry not, for all your old “Toufee Classic” movies are very much intact if you have upgraded your membership to a paid subscription. As a special bonus, all paid members will have access to both the current Toufee Pro version plus the Toufee Classic version at no extra charge (you actually get two softwares for the cost of one and what’s more, Toufee Classic is fully-functional as ever).
As mentioned earlier, paid members can access all old Toufee Classic movies by clicking on the Toufee Classic link in the “HomePage” after you login to Toufee Pro as shown in the attached screenshot below
Clicking on the Toufee Classic link opens the much familiar Toufee Classic version where you can access all your old flash movies.
 
You can actually still do a whole lot of things with the old Toufee Classic version. Toufee Classic is fully-functional which means you can edit all your old Toufee Classic movies, and republish them to your blog or to popular sites like MySpace, Hi5, Blogger etc.
You might wonder why are we still keeping Toufee Classic in production? The reason being that we wanted to give all our old members the time to be able to smoothly transition over to the new Toufee Pro version. Also, we are porting few of the old effects from Toufee Classic version over to the new Toufee Pro and we would like to keep Toufee Classic running till such time we fully migrate to Toufee Pro. Besides, some old members are still getting used to the plethora of features packed in Toufee Pro, so we thought we would give them a breather to switch over 
Ganesh
Toufee Support
Posted in Toufee 2.0, Toufee Classic | No Comments »
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
If you had read my previous article on downloading Toufee flash movies as SWF, I would have mentioned that it was one of the top requested features of Toufee Pro (i.e Toufee 2.0 version). So, what was the most requested feature (and it still is)? You guessed it right, its uploading Toufee flash movies to YouTube
Download Toufee Pro (Convertor)
Before you can upload your Toufee flash movies to YouTube, you have to convert them to “compatible” video formats (AVI, MOV, MPG) that YouTube supports. We’ll this takes a lot of time and a lot of steps and patience to get this done all yourself. So we developed a standalone tool called Toufee Pro (Convertor) that fetches the movies from your Toufee Pro account, converts it into a video file that you can then upload to YouTube.
How to get the Toufee Pro (Convertor)?
 Its just a click away – simply select the Export to YouTube option from the Publish menu and you are ready to go. Once you select the option, you’ll be presented a dialog window (shown below) from where you can directly download the Toufee Pro Convertor. The installation package is around 3.5mb and should download in no time. Installation is a pretty simple process and should you be up and running in no time.
Converting movies using Toufee Pro (Convertor)
Once downloaded and installed, you have to login to Toufee Pro Convertor using your Toufee account login ID and password. On successful login, all your movies created using Toufee Pro will be listed. Select a movie and the conversion process will immediately begin (as show in the screenshot below).
You might also see the Downloading Media Files message (as in the below screenshot) showing up after the conversion process is complete.
Once the conversion process if fully complete (i.e. including the Downloading Media Files process), yo’ll be prompted to save your Toufee flash movie file. The flash movie now gets saved as a .AVI file on your PC, but that is not all, there are still a few steps left to upload your movie to YouTube. Once your movie is saved to your hard drive, you’ll now be presented the YouTube upload screen
Here is where you enter a suitable description for your flash movie. You also enter Tags or keywords that allow your movie to be searched by other YouTube users. Make sure your description is comprehensive enough and your keywords closely relate to the content of your flash movie. You also select the Category of your movie in the above section. After completing all the details, click on Upload to YouTube button and you’ll immediately notice a popup message. Click OK.
A browser window then opens bringing up the following YouTube page
Click Allow Access button. In the following screen, you’ll be asked to login to your YouTube account. Enter your login details and once you login to your YouTube account, Toufee Pro convertor starts uploading the converted movie to your account. You’ll be able to view the progress as shown below.
That’s it. Once the upload is complete, you’ll find the new flash movie in your YouTube account. Please note that this involves quite a few steps and you’ll notice that it will take a while to convert depending on the size of your flash movies. The speed also depends on your internet bandwidth as Toufee Pro Convertor downloads your movie, converts it into a video file, uploads the file back to YouTube, all of these involve lot of data to be transfered to and fro Toufee and YouTube servers. So its imperative that you are on a good internet connection to avoid delay or timeout issues.
I know it was a long wait for thousands of users who wanted to upload their Toufee flash movies to YouTube, but not any more now!
Ganesh
Posted in Toufee 2.0, Toufee Pro | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
One of the top features of Toufee Pro is the ability to download the flash movies as SWF file to the PC so that users can keep a copy of their work offline. This was a feature request that we regularly happened to get ever since we started work on Toufee Pro. We’ve finally got this incorporated into Toufee Pro and it just takes a couple of clicks to get your flash movie downloaded to your PC as SWF file.
 Where is this option?
You’ll find the option under the Publish menu – select Export to Flash (Standalone SWF) and you are ready to go!
A few pointers though…
There are a few things that I would like you to look into to finish it up nicely. Firstly, open the Toufee movie by selecting File -> Open Existing. Let’s quickly look at some options.
Set Movie Size
Make sure have set the Movie Size to the ideal dimension. You can set this option from the Movie menu (Movie -> Movie Size). If you are making a presentation, you would ideally want to have a bigger in which case you chose HiDef (640×480). If you are simply publishing it to the web, or hosting it on your website you have two choices – you can either go for the Set Custom Size (ideal for creating banner flash movie for your website) or choose the Video (320×240). There is also the Web Page (800×600) option but let me keep it on hold for a while as I will be covering that in my future post.
Set Movie to AutoStart
All Toufee flash movies are set to autostart by default, however, if you had selected the Paused at Start option, you might want to change it back to autostart since when you are saving your flash movie as SWF you’d ideally want them to start playing automatically. You can set your movie to Autostart by selecting the Automatically after load of the Movie Starts Playing option under Movie menu (Movie -> Movie Starts Playing -> Automatically after load).
Configure Player Skin/Controls
Again, since you are saving your flash movie to an SWF file, you’d rather prefer not to have player controls (Pause/Stop buttons, timing bar, volume control), which is fitting if you are publishing the SWF file to your website or would just like to keep it stored on your PC.
Select Hide Players / No Controls of the Player Skin / Controls option under the movie menu (Movie -> Player Skin/Controls -> Hide Players/No Controls).
I can guess that most of you are raring to go and download your flash movies as SWF. Hope you enjoy making flash movies with Toufee. Have fun!
Ganesh
Posted in Toufee 2.0, Toufee Pro | 3 Comments »
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
Hi
To all those Mac users, I assume you probably had problems uploading files (i.e. images/audio/video) to Toufee from your Mac.
Worry not, as we’ve now come up with a new way to upload particularly for Mac users. First of all, clear your browser cache to load the latest version of Toufee (clearing cache loads Toufee afresh from our servers). Open the Toufee Movie Maker (opens in a popup window). Now when you click on the Upload button on the right panel, you’ll find a new button called Trouble Uploading? button (please refer to screenshot below). This is an HTML uploader that we created for users who weren’t able to upload previously in Mac.
Hope this helps. If the problem still persits, please raise a support ticket via the Support Desk.
Ganesh
Posted in Toufee 2.0, Toufee Pro | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
Imagine a product that takes evolves with ideas from thousands of minds – the result is a near perfect product that works flawlessly. Asking users what they want is far more effective than brainstroming sessions in swanky conference halls with little end-user participation. At Toufee, we believe in keeping things simple and what better way to give users what features they want than to directly ask them? So if you think there’s something you wish to see in Toufee you can directly post your suggestions at www.toufee.com/wiki
Posting suggestions at Toufee Wiki requires that you create a user account and creating an account takes less than a minute. Also, its better this way because each one of us can know who posted what.
I’ve already created a base list of sugggestions or features requests to start with and you can easily and quickly work on those to add your own suggestions. If for any reason you find trouble adding your ideas to Toufee Wiki, you can email them to me at ganesh@toufee.com and I would post onto the Wiki on your behalf.
Thanks
Ganesh
Posted in Movie Maker, Toufee 2.0 | 3 Comments »
Monday, October 15th, 2007
Its difficult to comprehend the features of Toufee 2.0 in one post. This is my third post and still I have a huge list of new features that Toufee 2.0 brings to simply flash movie making. Toufee 2.0 boasts of 75 new features that instantly turn you into a pro at creating flash movies. Why Toufee 2.0? If you had a look around whats happening around the technology side of Flash, you would be amazed at the pace at which new technologies overshadow their old counterparts. Toufee 2.0 brings the best of these latest developments in Flash technology to your desktop. With Toufee 2.0, we take you to experience flash movie making one step further – from simple effects to advanced flash movie creation, timing control, templates and a whole lot of exciting features that will allow you to create flash movies, the professional way – and hey not to forget – Toufee 2.0 is just as simple as Toufee 1.0, maybe even better!
Here is another quicklist of new features that you can expect to see in the new Toufee 2.0 (this is not the entire list, read my last few blogposts on Toufee 2.0 so that you can get an idea of all the features)
- New wizards that quickly allows you to create flash movies, flash websites and flash catalogues
- Masking and Shape Tweening
- Enhanced and easier time control and navigationÂ
- Animated buttons (e.g. rollover effects), improved Frame control and support for music notes
- New graphic and gradient elements on all objects
- Bitmap effects
- Option to create Inline Slideshows easily within your flash movie
Posted in Toufee 2.0 | 2 Comments »
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