While there were hardly any “damages” to speak of, I still had a rather upsetting time. I was working on a project that was around two and a half hours long, I was leaning over to see the screen and I leant on my mouse - bear with me - and I accidentally clicked the right end of the zoom slider. this renders 1 second as over the full width of my monitor, ~35cm, my project running at 50 frames a second, 2.5 hours, or 9,000 seconds. 9000 seconds by 0.35 metres is 3150 metres. That’s rather long, not something my PC really wanted to think about. I joked about it trying to render the empire state building, but it’s nearer the length of manhattan. My computer was nuckling down like it was the final assignment at this point, it wasn’t even showing anything on my monitor. In the end, I decided to pull the plug, I wasn’t in the mood to sit it through at the time.
So, what do I need, now that I know this? Can there be a dialog option for things that may take a long time and possibly even freeze a PC.If I had been editing for ages, forgot to save, and that happened, that’s wasted time on a PC restart and decent edting.
I’m not sure if you’re looking for answers here, but three things came to mind after reading your text:
Does zooming on the timeline make a project harder to process for the computer ?
After all, magnifying an object doesn’t actually make it bigger or heavier. Looking at a grain of rice with a microscope doesn’t make it as big and heavy as a potato.
You are brave to work on a 2½ hour long video in a single Shotcut project
I usually divide my projects into many sub-projects, or chapters.
You don’t mention what version of Shotcut you are using. But in the latest version, Shotcut warns you when you’re running low on available memory. Maybe your PC froze because of an addition of many factors, not just because you suddenly zoomed on the timeline.
So yes, it is interesting. I’m curious to see what more competent people than me will think of this.
I just tried to do what you did on a Windows 10 system, but with a 17-minute video using the latest version of Shotcut.
I had the timeline at the minimum length, where the whole 17 minutes took up about 20% of the timeline. I then clicked on the right-hand edge of the slider to get the most magnification (1 second took up about 75% of the slider). My memory went up from about 300 MB to 3 GB and the PC locked up but only for a few seconds only. Then the memory went down to about 400 MB and all was OK.
I then did this several more times and eventually got the Shotcut warning message:
