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

1. 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
2. Expand Timing (Experts Only) option.
3. In the Then Hide it field, select Custom… from the dropdown list box
4. Enter the number of seconds (playing time of your movie) in the Hide After: field (see screenshot below)
5. 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

We’ve just finished adding additional formats to which you can now export flash movies created with Toufee. The top priority were the MOV and FLV formats as we got a number of requests for the same. Some users also did wish to export their flash videos to WMV. Without dissapointing any of them, we’ve added support to all these formats and in addition, we added MP4 support as well!

Very quickly, here is how to convert your flash movies to MOV, FLV, WMV etc

1. Submit your flash movie for YouTube conversion (Publish -> Export to YouTube option), yes, you heard us right, its YouTube conversion. As a first step, your flash movie needs to be converted to the AVI format. The AVI file is then converted to one of the target formats (MOV, FLV, WMV) which you’ll see in the steps that follow
2. You’ll receive an email that your flash movie is ready to download. The email will look similar to this.  Watch the last few lines closely though as you will now see a link that allows you to download the movie in MOV format.

   

3. When you click on the MOV link in the email, a new page will open with the message that your request for MOV conversion has been acccepted.  You will receive an email with the link to download your MOV file when it is ready. If MOV conversion is all that you need, then that is it. However, there is one more step you need to do if you are converting to FLV, MOV or MP4 formats

   
   
   

4. To convert to FLV, WMV and MP4 formats, you simply take the MOV link (shown in previous step) from the email and append the following parameter to the MOV link
   “&filetype=flv” (without quotes)
   So for example, if your MOV link is
   http://toufee.com/commoncgi/addmovrequest.pl?userID=56&proj=promobanner&domain=toufee.com
   then your FLV movie link would be just that with the “&filetype=flv” appended at the end of the URL.
   http://toufee.com/commoncgi/addmovrequest.pl?userID=56&proj=promobanner&domain=toufee.com&filetype=flv
   Once you paste the above URL in a browser window, you’ll get a similar confirmation page (as in step 3), this time however your movie will be queued for FLV conversion. The same applies to WMV and MP4, i.e. you simply need to change the value in the filetype parameter to wmv or mp4.

Hope this helps. Should you have any questions, please leave a Support Ticket by going to http://www.toufee.com/support/ and click on Submit a Support Ticket hyperlink.

See you all. Till next time.
Ganesh

Toufee, the popular online flash movie maker, now, more than ever, might be your best strategy for effective internet marketing. According to a recent report from ComScore 25% of all Google search queries  in the U.S. are for “YouTube”. In simple terms, every 1 out of 4 users using Google in the U.S. happen to search for YouTube and many eventually end up viewing a YouTube video. So how does this benefit Toufee users and internet marketers who use Toufee flash movies? For an internet marketer, this is great news, since YouTube presents a high-quality, targeted marketing platform that comes for free and has virtually no hassles setting up. All one needs is a good flash movie or a video presentation to deliver their marketing message and post this on YouTube. With Toufee flash movie maker, creating flash movies and flash videos is just a walk in the park. Toufee flash movie maker brings the power of Internet to your desktop as there are no software to install nor do you have to spend on costly hardware. All that you need is online connectivity and you can jumpstart in making your flash movies right from the word go.

YouTube publishing – the new marketing mantra

As you read earlier, going by the statistics, YouTube is sure an excellent marketing vehicle and publishing flash movies to YouTube is all the more easy with Toufee. In YouTube you have a wealth of traffic ready at your hands, all you need is a good flash video or a flash presentation to complete your marketing message – Toufee is your best bet for making flash movies.

One of the most sought after feature of Toufee is its support for YouTube publishing, something that many flash movie maker applications miss out on. Toufee makes publishing flash videos to YouTube as simple as it could get – all you need to do is select Publish to YouTube option in Toufee and in a matter of minutes Toufee emails you the link to download the AVI version of your flash movie which you then upload to YouTube to kickstart your marketing. We have many users who already use Toufee for creating marketing campaigns and promos and publish them  on YouTube channels.

Publishing Toufee flash movies to YouTube not only generates a lot of good traffic from YouTube, but also gets you a equally good traffic from Google as well! Since YouTube videos are always indexed by Google and returned on the first few search results, if you have a marketing video that is popular in YouTube, chances are that the same YouTube flash video might be indexed and returned when users search for related keywords in Google. This is the double-effect that you get when you combine the power of Toufee flash movies with a website like YouTube, that is the second-home to Internet users after Google.

Work anywhere, anytime, hassle-free

Toufee being an online flash application not only reduces the initial hassles of setting up a flash moviemaker application but provides all the tools that you need to create a professionally-looking flash movies. Toufee offers one-stop solution for all your requirements – you don’t have to waste your time scouting the Internet for images, audio or video; Toufee has an ever-growing database of images, audio and video that are constantly updated and tagged. That is not all, since Toufee supports direct import of media files from Flickr, Stock Photos for images and popular video engines like YouTube, Google Videos, Yahoo Videos and Metacafe for videos – all this from within the Toufee flash moviemaker application. With Toufee, there is a never a lost moment.

Publish at a single click!

As easy as it is to create flash movies with Toufee, so it is to publish flash movies. Toufee offers one-click publishing to popular social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut and to blogs like Blogger, TypePad etc. Here is a complete article that discusses more on Toufee’s one-click publishing feature. If you are planning to host the flash videos in your own websites, then you can easily export your flash movies to SWF or simply copy the HTML code from Toufee and add this to your website. With Toufee, making flash videos is just as easy.

With Toufee and YouTube, your internet marketing is as simple as uploading the AVI version of your Toufee flash movie to YouTube. And as you read earlier, if your flash video or your marketing presentation is good enough, YouTube will take care of the rest.

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

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.

Toufee has transformed flash movie making by taking the concept “online” and in the process becoming a great success story. Users of Toufee have found the online flash movie maker more convenient, feature-rich, and the easiest flash movie making application to get started with creating flash movies.  Not to forget the attractive subscription model which many users feel more suited for their needs than an outright purchase of a “boxed” flash software program.

Toufee Affiliate Program

Right from the day we started our trial run, we keep hearing from customers how much they like the program and we had many new users who were referred by our existing Toufee customers. This lead us to consider an affiliate system, something that we felt could benefit both our customers and us. We created a separate affiliate program for experienced affiliates and for existing customers who want to promote Toufee. If you had ever been an affiliate, you are certain to find that Toufee’s Affiliate program is the most attractive in terms of earning potential and of affiliate commissions. To give you a quick headstart, please go through the following link to know about the Toufee Affiliate program

http://www.toufee.com/affiliate-center.html

Affiliate Back Office:

Being the most popular online flash movie maker, Toufee literally sells itself with very little effort and that is something any affiliate would love to promote. As the Toufee movie maker did go through many major and minor updates, so did the Affiliate program. A marked feature of the new Affiliate program is the fully revamped Affiliate Back Office, a full-fledged affliate tool for tracking everything related to your affliate programs, right from signups, commissions, payments – all this coupled with a powerful statistics and reporting tool.

Some of the new features of the Affiliate Back Office are

1. No membership requirement and it’s free.
2. A full-fledged affiliate center with over 20+ affiliate tools.
3. Detailed tracking and logging. With Toufee’s back office, you get amazingly detailed stats for every hit you send to Toufee (not available in 99% affiliate tracking scripts).
4. Separate screen for earnings, signup and history where you can zoom into each and every record for each and every detail.
5. Fast and easy payment via Paypal on the first of every month.
6. And lots more, as explained in the affiliate center

Becoming a Toufee Afffiliate

Its pretty easy, simply complete the signup at the following page

http://www.toufee.com/affiliate/Profile.pl

Logging onto the new Affiliate Back Office

If you are an existing affiliate or if you have newly signed up, your new Toufee Affiliate Back Office can be accessed from the following link

http://www.toufee.com/affiliate-login.html

If you are existing Toufee customer, and would like to update your Affiliate information or would like to newly signup for the Affiliate program, simply click on the Affiliates link on the Members Home page (the firsty page you see after you login to Toufee) to create and/or upate your Affiliate information

Affiliate Questions?

If you have any questions related to the Toufee Affiliate program, make sure to check the following link

http://www.toufee.com/affiliate-faq.html

If you do not find an answer there, you can raise a Support Ticket by going to http://www.toufee.com/support or by fillin up the Contact Form found at http://www.toufee.com/contact.html

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

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

The word flash has always been synonymous with lightning and thundering and the advent of flash movies has brought a similar revolution in the cyber world. Flash movies have gained an immense popularity among web designers and the public equally. Why? Flash software enables you to create animations alongside interactive content and this feature creates a movie like feeling for the viewers.

Flash is an application that works on a multilevel platform. It is consistent across all platforms and browsers and any movie created in Flash will appear the same on all browsers and platforms – all that is required is the correct plug-in, which is really not a Herculean task. If the plug-in is not in built with the browser, it can be downloaded for free.

There are many advantages in using Flash. Flash is a wonderful tool to add games, animations and video to your website. Flash movies are relatively smaller files when compared to GiF formats and other video versions. It also offers a plethora of colors, blending options, and opacity levels with smooth animations and accurate typography.

Now let’s say you want to create a website and you need a demo or a tutorial to be placed in it. You have three options….. the first is to give it only in text, the second is through visual only I.e. only visuals and videos and the third …is a tactful handling of visual and text and that is where Flash helps. Flash movies help you to create a site where you can explore options for effectively combining text and videos. This helps to give various options not only to you but also to your viewers. If used judiciously, Flash you would give the viewers a platform to read, view, observe, hear and understand and that’s what we want, right?

A web designer always wants his website to be interactive and unique to gain an edge over competitors. Flash movies enables them to do this through features that allow them to add attractive text, draw graphics, and create special effects and much more. In short, using a Flash maker you as a site owner can speak to your audience and make that best impression on them. They help to catch audience attention in a quick way that cannot be seen in other kinds of media communications. In order to gain the full benefits of using Flash software all that is needed is harnessing its rich graphics and powerful programming features.

However as with everything  ”Excess of anything is harmful.” So avoid getting tempted to use too much of Flash or use Flash where it’s not needed. Why?

Flash takes a lot of space, hence it takes time to load a website with lot of Flash elements. So when using Flash movies, use it appropriately and meaningfully. Think of using it, like using images in a book – there has to be a balance between the text element and visual elements. They should compliment each other.

At the end the choice is at your discretion. However, it is advisable to use Flash as a part of your website rather than cluttering it up with it. So all the web designers out there- Do flash, but Flash in style!!!

So while flash movies can be great for your website, to create flash movies you need to learn actionscripting and programming. Fortunately, now there is a way by which flash has been made be easy… so average people like you and me can also make flash movies for our websites – and without spending a fortune on expensive flash makers Or months in learning all this technical Flash mumbo-jumbo first…

So while all the “Industry Experts” said it “could never” be done…

We Out of Pure Frustration, researched and reached out to the Greatest Programmers to Build “The Ultimate Flash Maker.” A flash maker that can create flash movies without any programming! And we did it!

Proudly presenting to you:

http://www.toufee.com/

The Easiest and Fastest Flash Movie Maker Online!

If you know how to use a mouse… you can create flash movies with Toufee’s Flash Maker.

P.S. We are currently having a 14 day free trial going on Toufee.com, so you can check out our flash maker without actually buying anything!