Failed To Open Issue (Shotcut Project Will Not Open)

Help/How To
1

So I’ve been making a short film over 30 minutes that took me days with no sleep. Just as I’m soon to start exporting, I try to open up my project in shotcut and it says it’s failed to open. “Failed to open C:/Users/personal/Desktop/titleofproject.mlt”. Shotcut has ran on my computer fine all the time, this is the first time this issue occurs. I recently updated shotcut to the newest version. I did the “remove the spaces” and it still didn’t work. Please help.

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2

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT’S HAPPENED TO ME I fixed it once now i can’t to it the only reason I joined the forums was to fix this issue PLEASE HELP US

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3

This also just happened to me after 2-hours of work. The file text looks normal and the file permissions are good. After reading some more forum posts I went back and tried using File Open icon and it still fails to open. V25.10.31 on Linux Mint 22. Thanks for any insight.

4

There is no simple solution except to try a previous version from backup. Shotcut includes that. Here are the docs again.

If you are technically savvy you can run a XML checker against the file to see if it finds a problem.

Also, after it fails to open in Shotcut you can go to menu View > Application Log and scroll to the end, and it might show something relevant somewhere in the last N lines.

5

I created a manual backup and saved it, thanks for that info. I know that everybody is always whining for an improvement, but how about a 10 minute backup option in a future release? We can lose a lot of work in one hour. It is easy to delete old backups when we think about it. It is difficult to remember manual backups every 10 minutes when you are engrossed in creation.

This fail to open happened after parallel system operations had used a lot of system memory. So maybe there’s a connection with memory availability. During this time all exports appeared normal. Just conveying what was going when the fail to open happened on my computer.

As for the application log I will be sure to check that if it happens again. Thanks

6

I now have a backup mlt file that loads properly and another created 2 days later that fails to load. Maybe someone with understanding can compare these two files and determine what is causing the fail to load.

This one loads

good keyframes simplified 2025-11-26T10-39-48.mlt (12.0 KB)

This one fails to load

failed keyframes simplified 2025-11-28T12-03-20.mlt (26.7 KB)