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.

Many times, Toufee users are faced with the need to convert their video files from one format to another for easy upload to Toufee Pro. Sometimes users might have encoded the video in a less known codec. So if you ever have a problem uploading your video files to Toufee or problem with your video files not getting detected in Toufee Pro, simply convert the videos to MPEG format using Any Video Converter. This tutorial covers step by step the procedure of converting movies to MPEG.

Download and Install Any Video Converter
Download and install Any Video Converter from the following URL
http://www.any-video-converter.com/any-video-converter.exe

Step 1: Launching Any Video Converter
Click on the Any Video Converter Professional icon on the desktop or select it from the Program Files folder in the Start menu. The Getting Started page opens which quickly lists the steps involved in the conversion. You’ll find that converting with Any Video Converter is a breeze as its one of the most user friendly program that is available.

Step 2: Select the Video file

Click on the Add Video button to browse and select your video. Once you have selected your video, it will be listed in the grid as shown below.

Now select the MPEG II Movie profile from the Profile dropdown list box (see above screenshot). The Profile option is where you select the target format into which you are converting to. If you are converting to a different format, say, WMV, you can select the the same from the Profile dropdown list. Any Video Converter supports most of the formats so you can be rest assured you’ll never run out of options.

Step 3: Starting the conversion process

When you are ready to convert, click on the Encode button. You might get a warning (like the one below) since the evaluation version supports converting upto 3 minutes. Click on Continue to Evaluate button

The conversion process with start and you will see the progress as shown below

Step 4: Completing and verifying the conversion process

Once the conversion is complete, you will see the Completed message in the Status field. Click on the Output Folder button (on the bottom left of the screen) to open the output file and verify by playing it.

As you saw, converting with Any Video Converter is a breeze. You should not find any problems now with uploading or converting videos for use with Toufee. Should you have any further questions, please leave a support ticket as always!

You might have encoutered the “Add Frame Error” when trying to convert  your Toufee flash movies to AVI or MPG or when uploading them to YouTube using Toufee ProConvertor software. This usually indicates not having the latest Desktop Flash Player and the required Flash ActiveX for your browser. We will be soon porting the Toufee Pro Convertor software to a server-based program which means you do not require any software to convert your flash movies to AVI or MPG video, but for the meantime, please use the following updates.

Please install the latest Desktop Flash Player along with the Flash ActiveX plugin by downloading these from the following URLs

http://www.toufee.com/flash/plugin.exe
http://www.toufee.com/flash/activex.exe

Make sure you clear your browser cache before installing the above updates.

Also make sure you have the latest Toufee Pro Convertor which can be downloaded from http://pro.toufee.com/downloads/setup.exe

Toufee Pro flash movies can be used to make great Autorun CDs which can be used for a variety of applications like custom-made birthday CD specially for a friend, a corporate flash presentation, video tutorials, etc.

 Step 1: Export your flash movies to SWF
This is the most basic step, you have to get your Toufee Pro flash movies from Toufee’s server onto your PC. The step by step procedure of exporting flash movies to SWF has been covered in the following blog post.
http://www.toufee.com/moviemaker/download-toufee-flash-movies-as-swf-files/

Step 2:  Convert your SWF file into an EXE
Autorun files need to be EXE to work. Your SWF flash movie needs to be converted into a self-executable EXE file so that it runs automatically when the CD is loaded without having to launch another program to open it (which is generally the case with a SWF file).There are a number of free utilities that can convert your SWF file to an EXE. One such program called SWF to EXE 3.0 from Brothersoft can be downloaded from this UR
http://www.brothersoft.com/d.php?soft_id=58065&url=http%3A%2F%2Feurotest.chat.ru%2Ffi%2Fswftoexe.zip

Step 3: Create the AUTORUN.INF configuration file
An autorun CD contains the AUTORUN.INF configuration file that contains information on what program needs to be launched when the CD is inserted. The format of the autorun.inf file is as below

[autorun]
OPEN=FlashFile.exe
ICON=Icon.ico

Open a blank Notepad file, type the above lines (replace FlashFile.exe with the name of our flash movie exe file that you just created). The ICON.ico is for if you want the CD drive to display a specific icon file you’ve included, if not leave that line out. Save this file as “Autorun.inf”

Step 4: Burn the files to CD
Copy the flash movie .exe file and the autorun.inf (that you created in the last step) and burn them onto a blank CD. Please make sure that you put both the .exe and .inf files in the root of the CD. Once the data is tranfered, test the CD and your Toufee flash movie should now popup automatically - looks cool isn’t it?

Toufee Pro’s most popular feature, besides the hundreds of new preset effects, enhancements and new options is the ability to export flash movies to standalone SWF files which allows your flash movies to be played independently on any PC or Mac platform without the need to access Toufee Pro MovieMaker.

[If you are unsure how to export Toufee flash movies to SWF, please refer the following Toufee Blog article http://www.toufee.com/moviemaker/download-toufee-flash-movies-as-swf-files/]

Running SWF files on PC

1. SWF (Shockwave Flash) files can be opened by an standard browser like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera etc., Simply drag and drop the SWF file into a browser window and the SWF file will automatically play.

2. SWF can also be run standalone if you have converted the SWF files into EXE files, I’ll cover more on this in the next post.

3. Some SWF files (like Toufee Pro flash movies) require that you have the latest Adobe Flash 9 plugin to run properly. While most browsers do have the latest flash plugin installed automatically, it is always advisable to have this downloaded from the following URL
www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=shockwaveFlash

Problems running SWF files
The most common problem with running SWF file is directly related to not having the latest Adobe Flash plugin. Installing the latest flash plugin resolves this most of the time. In some cases, a corrupt SWF file may also not run properly, and this can be corrected by redownloading the file.

Ganesh

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

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