About this Tutorial
This tutorial introduces you to one of the advanced features of Toufee Pro and the most important feature of frames – controlling the frame timing. Frames form the building block of a Toufee movie and knowing how to set custom timings will help you master the nuances of professional flash movie making.

Before you begin
Make sure you have Left Panel visible. This is turned on by default, however, if for some reason you do not see this, click on the Star icon on the top left of the Movie Maker to show the Left Panel.

The Left Panel is a floating panel, which means it automatically goes out of view back and forth. If you wish to have the Left Panel to be visible always you might want to click on Pin This option. The Left Panel will then be attached to the Movie Maker stage unless you manually put it out of view by clicking on the Star icon (The Star icon works like a toggle button, notice the bevel on the Star icon – this indicates that the Left Panel is visible)

Viewing and Changing Frame Timing
Step 1: Make sure the Left Panel is visible
Step 2: Select a frame by clicking the frame on the filmstrip
Step 3: On the Left Panel, switch to the Advanced tab, and click on Timing (Expert Only)
Step 4: The Frame Length field displays the current timing (in seconds) that the frame is displayed on the screen. By default, a blank frame will have a default length of 1 second. To change the timing, simply enter the value directly into the Frame Length field or click on the up/down arrows to increase/decrease the timing.

Tip: The On Frame End Pause Movie is a useful option that can prove very handy when testing your Toufee movie, i.e. testing upto a particular point or a frame in the movie and not the entire length. When this option is turned on, the movie pauses after the frame, and will need to be manually resumed by clicking the Play button. This is particularly useful in long flash movies which involve lots of text-based data and/or important slides that should not be skipped.

Frame Timing Behavior
As you might have seen the default length of a blank frame is 1 second. However, this rule applies slightly differently for the first frame in a blank or a new movie which by default is set to 5 seconds.

The length of the frame automatically increases as movie objects (such as text, images, audios, videos etc) are added onto it. The Frame Timing or the Frame Length is the total of the timing of all movie objects on that frame. However, you can always reduce or increase the timing from the Timing (Expert Only) option on the Advanced tab.

More on Timing Control
Timing control is an important feature that is made available with Toufee Pro and offers better control over the timing of the movie objects. This tutorial is only an introduction to Frame Timing. In the further tutorials, we will be looking more on controlling timing of movie objects and how this works in co-ordination with frame timings.

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.