Low Memory Alert Has Wiped My Project's Timeline

[Danja]

What is your operating system?
Windows 7

What is your Shotcut version (see Help > About Shotcut)? Is it 32-bit?
21.03.21

Can you repeat the problem? If so, what are the steps?
Not really applicable.

I was editing in Shotcut earlier this afternoon. I briefly had a web browser open while doing so. Shotcut threw up an alert about running out of memory, which isn’t entirely unusual if I happen to have a web browser open while using it. I went to save and close Shotcut, as I knew I needed to use the browser for a bit, but Shotcut kept throwing up multiple instances of the alert, slowing my machine down entirely so that I couldn’t respond to it before it threw up another. I eventually managed to get through them, after a short period of Shotcut being flagged “not responding” by Windows, saved my project and closed Shotcut. Or it crashed as I tried to close it, I’m not sure. Either way, it relaunched itself a minute or so later without me telling it to. I closed Shotcut again, got on with what I needed to do in Firefox.

Went back to Shotcut a bit later, reopened my project and the entire timeline is now empty. The playlist is still full of all the clips that have been added the project, but all the actual editing work is completely gone, even the tracks, just a total void. It will let me create new tracks and add material in, so it’s not that it’s unable to load the timeline element of the program or anything, it’s just decided to wipe my work. There’s no evidence that this is a recovery file (there’s also no file in the autosave folder) or that it’s had to deal with any corruption, it’s seemingly an entirely valid save file, just bereft of what was saved in it.

[brian]

What are your computer specifications for CPU and RAM?

Does it meet the minimum system requirements?

Shotcut - Frequently Asked Questions

Maybe these instructions would be helpful for you:

How to manually recover an auto-saved project after a crash

Note: I know you can find most of the information from this tutorial scattered in a few discussions on the Forum, but I don’t think there is a post dedicated only to this. So, for anyone with the same problem, I thought it would be easier to find the solution if the information was condensed in one place in the Tutorial category. Please feel free to let me know if there is anything to add or to change in this tutorial. Even typos or bad English syntax (my native language is french). For me, S…

[Danja]

Yes, my system meets the minimum requirements.

@brian

Maybe these instructions would be helpful for you:

As I said, there was no file in the autosave folder (apart one from about three weeks ago) because Shotcut saved over the project file with its blank version, so any autosaves it might have made were discarded (and I had saved my work not long before it started throwing up memory claims anyway). Which is not a particularly helpful system.

[brian]

@Danja

As I said, there was no file in the autosave folder (apart one from about three weeks ago) because Shotcut saved over the project file with its blank version, so any autosaves it might have made were discarded

Unfortunately, your project is gone. I do not know why this happened.

In the future, I recommend keeping a backup of your project file as you work.