Question 1

What do I need before my first render?

Accepted Answer

A Windows 10 or 11 64-bit machine, one AI text provider key (Anthropic or OpenAI), one voice option — either an ElevenLabs key or a local model — and a Pexels key for stock footage. Publishing credentials are only needed when you're ready to upload.

Question 2

Where do I put my API keys?

Accepted Answer

Open Settings inside the app and paste each key into its field, or copy .env.template to .env and fill it in before launching. Keys are stored in your own configuration on your own disk.

Question 3

How long does one video take?

Accepted Answer

On recommended hardware, a 60-second vertical video typically finishes in five to twelve minutes end to end. Voice generation and rendering dominate that time; cache hits on repeated topics cut it substantially.

Question 4

Why do I need to create my own OAuth app?

Accepted Answer

Because your uploads should run under your own developer credentials and your own quota, not a shared pool. You create an app in the Google, TikTok and Meta developer consoles, paste the client ID and secret into Settings, and VidForge AI uses them to open that platform's official consent screen.

Question 5

Why does my TikTok video arrive as a draft instead of being posted?

Accepted Answer

VidForge AI requests only TikTok's video.upload scope, which is the Content Posting API's upload mode. Your video lands in your TikTok inbox for you to review and post. Direct posting requires TikTok's video.publish scope, which is only granted after a successful app audit.

Question 6

Connecting an account fails or the browser never returns. What now?

Accepted Answer

The OAuth callback uses a loopback server on port 8734 by default. If that port is busy, the app picks a free one and updates the redirect URI, but TikTok and Meta require the exact port to be registered in their developer dashboard — so register the port shown in Settings. The Diagnostics tab reports the precise failure reason for each attempt.

Question 7

How do I disconnect an account?

Accepted Answer

Remove it in the Publishing Center's Accounts tab, which deletes the encrypted token from your local database. You can additionally revoke access from the platform's own security settings, which invalidates the token immediately regardless of what's stored locally.

Question 8

An upload failed. Will it retry forever?

Accepted Answer

No. The queue retries transient failures a bounded number of times and then marks the item failed with the platform's own error message recorded in history. Uploads interrupted by a crash are reset to pending rather than retried automatically, so nothing is uploaded twice without your say.

Question 9

The log says CPU encoding is being used even though I have a GPU.

Accepted Answer

Open the startup diagnostics banner in the log. VidForge AI test-encodes one frame per candidate encoder and prints the exact reason each was rejected — usually an outdated driver, a GPU whose NVENC session limit is already saturated, or an FFmpeg build without the encoder compiled in. Updating the graphics driver resolves most cases.

Question 10

Voice quality degrades partway through a long script.

Accepted Answer

Leave smart chunking enabled. It splits long scripts at sentence boundaries, quality-checks each chunk and retries the weak ones before crossfade-merging. Turning it off is what reintroduces drift on scripts over a couple of minutes.

Question 11

A render stopped partway through. Do I start over?

Accepted Answer

No. Pipeline checkpointing records the last completed stage, so retrying the job resumes from there instead of regenerating the script and voice you already paid for.

Question 12

Scenes are showing generic motion backgrounds instead of footage.

Accepted Answer

That's the last step of the visual fallback chain, and it means both Pexels and Pixabay returned nothing usable for that scene's keywords. Check that both API keys are present and within quota; adding a Pixabay key alongside Pexels resolves most cases.

Question 13

Where are the logs and databases?

Accepted Answer

Under the data and logs directories beside the application, or wherever you pointed DATA_DIR and LOGS_DIR. The Publishing Center keeps its own separate database under data/publishing.

Question 14

Do you receive my scripts or videos?

Accepted Answer

No. There is no VidForge AI server for them to reach. Your prompts go directly from your machine to whichever AI provider you configured, and your videos go directly from your machine to the platform you're publishing to.

Question 15

How are my OAuth tokens protected?

Accepted Answer

They're encrypted at rest with Fernet — AES-128 in CBC mode with HMAC-SHA256 authentication — using a key generated on first run and stored only on your machine. Losing that key means reconnecting your accounts, which is deliberate: the tokens are not recoverable without it.

Question 16

How do I delete everything?

Accepted Answer

Uninstall the application and delete its data directory. That removes every script, render, token and history record, because that's the only place they exist. See the data deletion page for a step-by-step walkthrough including platform-side revocation.

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