Video not rendeirng properly

I am trying to make a simple slide show video set to music for my son’s wedding this weekend. When I play the timeline in the preview window, or whatever it is called, everything looks fine. But when I export the video file, portions of the previous slide sometimes persist when the next slide starts or parts of the image are pixelated when it first switches to the next image.

I used the default setting (H.264/ACC MP4 file and checked “Use hardware encoder.” There is one video track and one audio track. Except for one short MP4 clip, all images are jpgs. I want to eventually add a title but have not used any filters yet. I installed the latest version of Shotcut and that didn’t fix the problem.

I have a 1 year old Dell desktop with an i7-13700 2.10 GHz processor with 64 Mb RAM running Win 11 Pro and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB GDDR6. I tried running the video on both the Windows Media Player and the Movies & TV player and got the same result.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I’ve been waiting for pictures and only have two days left to work on this before we leave.

First and foremost, disable the hardware decoder and try again. There is a high probability that will correct all your issues.

If that doesn’t work:
Are your video files variable bitrate? Try converting to edit friendly and see what the output looks like?

Can you please:

  1. Show a screenshot of your timeline from within Shotcut.
  2. Attach a copy of the project file (.mlt)
  3. Either link to YT or upload a part of the video output that is misbehaving.

Thanks for your quick reply. Unfortunately, disabling the hardware decoder didn’t work. I had taken a screenshot of a sample of the defect but forgot to attach it. Here is the timeline and mlt file and a portion of the video. It is not all like that. some sections are fine. It started on the 6th jpg. I also noticed that when I put the rendered video into ShotCut again to make a clip, the video looks normal in the preview window, even though the source video is messed up???


S&B slide show.mlt (68.0 KB)

There is only one 4 sec video clip in the middle and that rendered properly. The file properties says it has a “total” bitrate of 3198bps so does that mean it’s variable? Here’s a screenshot of the file properties.

All the rest are jpgs of various resolution and size. I used “automatic” video mode when I started the project and I just noticed that it should be 1920x1080 25 fps since I added a jpg first. The video clip was 1280x720 29.97 fps.

I hope there’s something there that helps.

Ooops. I must have deleted the sample of the defect video when I was editing. It started on the 6th picture and is intermittent throughout the video.Here it is.

Ugh. I just noticed that it replays differently every time.

I do not notice a problem in your video, and it plays the same for me every time.

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Well…I see it on my computer. I saw it earlier on the clip I uploaded to the forum but it’s playing normally now. Could it be unique to my computer playback? I don’t have problems viewing YouTube videos on this computer. Here’s some screen grabs showing the problem. The second one has 3 different images superimposed.


This project is jinxed. I installed my old Vegas Movie Studio 14 on my new computer and redid the slideshow there but none of the video is displaying in the preview or in rendering.

It could be a problem with the hardware-based decode/playback on your computer, at least through apps using the Windows media subsystem. We definitely do not see the problem you showed in those illustrative frame grabs. Try playing the video Shotcut generated in Shotcut. Shotcut does not use hardware or the Windows media subsystem. To do that, simply open the file within Shotcut; do not add it to the timeline.

Thanks. It certainly seems to be something about my Windows video players. That makes sense because the defects vary. It plays OK within Shotcut and the timeline plays normally too… I copied it to my husband’s computer and it plays normally there. I uploaded it to my Google Drive and it plays fine from there (on this computer) too.

Hopefully it will play on whatever they are using at the wedding. Do you happen to know of a video player that is independent from Windows?

For the wedding, most TVs and projectors can play MP4 good from a USB thumb drive plugged in. You should try that but only if you already have that device in order to test it. Otherwise, if you are looking for a different media player for Windows there are many, but popular ones are VLC and your web browser (except perhaps not Edge given your problem). You said it played fine from Google Drive. Use that web browser, open a new tab, and drag the Shotcut-made video to there to see how it plays back.

Well, it didn’t work on Chrome or Firefox. Thanks for your help. I’m just going to finish up the titles and audio and hope for the best.

I see 4 images with regular cut transitions that plays the same every time, and none of what you describe above.

Did you try my suggestion of exporting again without hardware encoding enabled?