Can't create proxies - KDenLive stops responding, ffmpeg still running, Win11

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1

I’m hoping this is something that can be fixed with a setting or easy tweak. My computer is fairly low powered as it’s an i5 laptop, but I’m not asking a lot of it by way of editing.

When I riht-click and create a proxy video, sometimes it will work ok, but most often KDenLive will stop responding. It doesn’t matter how long it is left for, it has locked up and has to be forcefully quit. When this happens, however, ffmpeg is still running and, even if KDenLive is shut down, ffmpeg will finish creating the proxy. I then have to re-open KDenLive and tell it to create the proxy - it then realises one already exists and marks it as such in the list of clips with the “P”.

Obviously this is not a good way to create proxies. 100 clips means probabably 80 crashes. I’ve tried setting the proxy type from automatic to various options (most of which don’t work as I don’t have a seperate GPU, just the laptop i5 integrated one), but that makes no difference.

To my semi-educated eye, I think KDenLive is losing communication with ffmpeg - something timing out maybe? Sometimes the progress bar will glitch a few times during proxy creation, but that seems unrelated to whether or not it will lock up.

Source video is a GoPro video, however it will crash whether it’s 1080p, 2.7k or 4k, it is just more likely to on the 4k I guess because the files are much larger.

KDenLive 24.08.1 Installed version
Windows 11 Pro 22H2 22621.4169
Intel(R) Core™ i5-7300U CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.71 GHz
RAM - 8.00 GB (7.84 GB usable)
Samsung SSD 980 Pro 2Tb (1.4Tb free)

2

I have exactly the same problem (Win10). Has anybody solved the issue?

3

If ffmpeg is still running, then kdenlive might not have actually crashed, it may just be unresponsive while your system is hammering against its limits. And it’s likely to be more about running out of RAM than your processor being “underpowered”.

What version is your camera? Most of them for the last few years now actually create low-res preview files (because they aren’t powerful enough to play back the videos they create either), and kdenlive supports using those as proxies.

Last ditch, you could create your own low-res copies outside kdenlive and then use them the same was as “external proxies” - but really, if you’re at that point - editing video on that machine isn’t going to be a whole lot of fun anyway, so it might be time to look at scaling up.