Sharing same project between Windows and Linux

I’ve got a project that I’d like to be able to work on at my day job (Windows 10) and home (Xubuntu 16.04). The files all reside in one folder that is synchronized on both desktops through ownCloud. What I discovered is that the .mlt file points to the resources using absolute paths. Is there any kind of workaround that would allow working on a project on different platforms? I tried doing a search and replace on the paths in the .mlt file. That seems like it might work but I don’t know if it breaks anything else. For one thing, I seem to lose the thumbnails in the playlist after doing that, but I haven’t experimented enough to know if that’s the only problem.

Some project related information is stored outside of the .mlt file like video thumbnails and audio waveforms. Those would have to be regenerated if moved to any other computer (Windows or Linux).

I’m not sure if there is a way to specify paths that is portable between operating systems. Maybe try some experiments with simple projects.

You might consider using vmware or virtualbox to virtualize a Linux environment on your Windows machine and then the project file would be more portable. Shotcut runs in Ubuntu within virtualbox for me. There is some performance degradation, but it is workable for me.

If all of the assets are saved in the same folder as the .mlt or a sub-folder of the .mlt, then it will save the XML using relative paths, and that should be portable across OSes. However, that will not work for clips that have altered speed, those are not yet able to save with relative path.

Hmmm, I guess I was still in the process of moving files around before I settled on my workflow. I just created a new project from scratch working from the folder where all the files resided and, you are of course correct, the path is now relative. I’ll go back and start my real project again - it’s small enough.

Thanks for setting me straight.