For a plain video — no interactive timeline, no slide events, just a clean player — pick Video when creating a new Canvas.

The flow:

  1. Click upload, pick your MP4 file.
  2. Forge sends it through the encoding pipeline. You'll see a progress bar.
  3. When encoding finishes, the Canvas is ready to publish.

Specifics:

  • Files up to about 4GB upload without issue.
  • Encoding produces a 720p HLS stream. We don't currently encode higher than 720p — that ships when CDN economics allow it.
  • Encoding takes roughly the length of the video. A 30-minute video is ready in about 30 minutes.
  • You can publish other settings (title, description, explicit flag) while encoding is in progress, just not the Canvas itself until encoding is done.

Video Canvases support Echoes anchored to timestamps, the same as ZIP. The difference between Video and ZIP is interactivity — ZIP has the timeline editor and event lanes. Video is the clean version when you don't need any of that.

If you change your mind and want timeline events on an existing Video, convert it to ZIP from the Canvas edit page. The same encoded file is reused — nothing re-uploads.