Feedback on ClipFlair Social Network website Manuale d'Amore  Viewed 115675 time(s), 19 post(s), 8/31/2013 12:41:01 PM - by DavideMartini

sorry, just saw that, you press the wrench button at the titlebar of the Clip component to turn it over and paste your .mp4 to the Media URL field there

then press the wrench button again to turn over again the Clip component

then can save your activity to a .clipflair file from the save button at the activity toolbar (at the bottom of the screen)

Hi Davide,
If the video from Dropbox does not show well or is buffering you can try loading locally from your PC. Wrench icon > click on the folder icon "open local media file" next to the URL.
But if you do it this way the video is not saved in the .clipflair file.
To share it, the best way is to upload it in the Gallery (we do that for you after you post your activity in the forum "suggest activities").
Once in the Gallery it acquires a URL which you can share.
If not, you have to send them the clipflair file and they will load it from the ClipFlair Studio. 

the video console option is for low-level video stream diagnostics, shown at a translucent overlay over the video, you should have that turned off (as is the default) to not see the video fainted. Anyway when you save your activity to a .clipflair file and load again it won't remember that setting and will show the video without that overlay

Currently all components (shown as floating Windows) inside an Activity container window are linking (two-way binding) their Time and Captions PROPERTIES to their container so that they all sync their changes. They can keep/use separate instances though of such PROPERTIES and I'm working on a way to allow the activity author to easily unlink such PROPERTIES of components from their container.

What you could do currently is to either:

- make two versions of the same activity, one saved with male captions and the other with female captions to separate .clipflair files that you can load from disk as needed

- have one activity and export male, then female captions to .srt or .tts file (Captions component has buttons for importing/exporting captions to such popular subtitling file formats) and load to the Captions component as needed

- alternative to the previous option is to use the Load/Save state buttons of the Captions component (shown when you flip it over at the Top) that allow you to save a template of it with male captions and any other settings you wish to do (like which caption columns are shown etc.) and one with female captions in it (the templates are saved as .clipflair files) and then at runtime flip over the captions component and load the template you need (either the male or the female ones). Note that .clipflair files saved like that (which contain the state of a single component) can also be loaded as if they were activities (with the load button on the activity toolbar), in that case it makes a NEW activity and adds the respective component in there, loading its saved state from that template .clipflair file.

ALSO, you don't need to have a Connection to the network if you've kept the ClipFlair Studio webpage open (say if you had set your PC to standby [PC sleeps and keeps memory alive using some low power] or to hibernation mode [you can even set a laptop to hibernation for years, saves all memory to disk and doesn't use any power]).

However ClipFlair Studio (as most webapps build upon Microsoft Silverlight) also supports installing it for OOB (Out of browser) use. To do this, right click on an empty area of the activity container and select to Install ClipFlair Studio. At the dialog shown select to add a shortcut icon to your desktop (apart from the icon at Start menu / Programs) and when finished it will open up a separate window with ClipFlair Studio running as a standalone application outside of the browser. At that point you can close the browser page (save your activity First from there if you had done any work with it) and load the activity you want from that standalone window.

Then in the future you will be able then to launch ClipFlair Studio application from the desktop with the shortcut icon the installer places there. That version will behave as it was at the point you installed it (whereas the Webpage version always runs the latest code bits), however as it starts, if there is a network Connection available it will check for updates and download them in the background as you work in Studio app. Then it will tell you that it brought an update and INFORM you that next time you launch the out-of-browser (OOB) app it will use the updated version.

> When I turned to the "see" button, I got the clip... in a shadowy fainted way.

it seems there was an issue for some videos (depending on whether they have alpha channel information) with Clip component's white (-ish) default background color. Such videos appeared with a colour tint, depending on the background color setting of the Clip component (see http://social.clipflair.net/Blog/post/Hints-and-tips-for-creating-ClipFlair-activities/15/Changing-colours/ on how to change colours)

Now changed the default background for new Clip components to Black which should eliminate the issue

Also, note we've added drag-drop functionality recently (http://social.clipflair.net/Blog/post/Hints-and-tips-for-creating-ClipFlair-activities/16/Drag-and-drop-a-clip-in-the-activity/), Windows-only currently