I am new here and was just getting started learning kdenlive this weekend before it stopped working (it cant open my project file anymore - just crashes when importing video) so I decided to ditch kdenlive for Shotcut. I noticed I could open my kdenlive project file in Shotcut just fine, and it kept all my edits etc, but it doesnt appear to give me any kind of timeline view where I can start editing again. So my question is: can I import/open the kdenlive project properly in Shotcut to the point where I can get back to a proper timeline view and start making edits again, or is it best to just scrap the project and start again with Shotcut?
Two weeks ago my wife started a government course that included various resources for creating content for schools.
One of those resources was Kdenlive.
I helped my wife with this based on my previous experience at Shotcut.
It is true that Kdenlive was very unstable and blocked many times, but it is true that the autosave feature allowed the project to be retrieved.
I suppose you’ve already tried this, but if the project is important, have you asked the Kdenlive community about your problem?
Without underestimating the work of communities of developers who give us hours of hard work to provide us with free and great software tools, each user has different needs and uses different equipment. The times I tried Kdenlive on various teams it was always unstable for me and it’s a problem that doesn’t seem to be totally solved. It happened in 2017 and it still happens in 2020.
So, I’ve long since left Kdenlive, but I’ve never really gone into it. I chose the software that was most stable for my setup, and that’s Shotcut.
In the case of my wife (who never did video editing before), the default interface on Kdenlive was overwhelming and she finally found Shotcut more comfortable for her.
I found problems with some audio filters that suddenly caused my eardrums to burst.
These are just small software problems that are in constant development.
Maybe you can get your project back on Kdenlive.
If it’s a project with a lot of transitions and effects, redoing everything is a hassle.
If you finally choose Shotcut you’ll have to make the project from scratch, so you have nothing to lose by asking for a solution on Kdenlive.
Anyway, welcome to this community.
Thanks! Yeah I have posted a thread over on their community as well, so we’ll see what they say. I had the autosave feature enabled but as far as I can tell it never actually created any autosaves because there is only one save file on my hdd and its the one I made and cant open. I did actually quite like kdenlives interface and was getting used to it after about 10 hours, and then this happened and now I am deeply distrustful of it. Its one thing for it to crash while you are working, forcing you to go back to your previous save and lose work, but its a totally different thing (and unacceptable in my book) for there to be no indication that something has gone wrong and to save with no errors, only to corrupt/break the file so when you come back the next day you cant even open it… thats just not on…
EDIT: Actually I was wrong, I did find some autosaves hiding in my app data folder, so I can recover some of my work, BUT… the latest autosave also just crashes when opening and the next newest is 2 hours before that, so thats not actually much help because that was when I did all the tricky transition stuff…
Yes, the autosave files can be hidden for better protection and to avoid accidental deletion.
When I was aware that Kdenlive was hanging and closing with actions that from my point of view were not complex or required exaggerated processing ( I stress point of view because this is very important since I am only a user and not an expert), I instructed my wife to do a manual save after adding some filter or transition. We also saved the same project under a different name so that we could retrieve it if necessary.
All these precautions were necessary because my wife had a deadline to submit her work for the course grade, and she had to use Kdenlive.
On my desktop screen, Kdenlive looked good. On my wife’s laptop screen, however, it was overwhelming.
I customized the interface for her so that some windows were only visible if needed. I resized and increased the size of the icons on the top bar. I also customized the top toolbar and timeline to add icons of the most used actions.
With this customization, the workflow on the laptop (at a visual level) was clearer for my wife’s project.
About what you say, it seems that something you did after the last autosave messed up the project.
Some time ago I found a comparison where different behaviors were visualized in different video editors: the still incipient video editor project Olive and Kdenlive.
There were a few Kdenlive shutdowns.
Have a good day and you can solve your problem.
Greetings.
