I am still a beginner at using Kdenlive. I was using Kdenlive just fine a few minutes ago while making a project, where I had to reopen Kdenlive since it was taking up performance. Once I opened the file back, it went through the loading process, then it froze at the “Building Sequences” section, which then followed with an immediate crash.
The crash only happens on the project, even on all of its backup files except the one that was made nearly 5 days ago, with little progress. I’ve tried uninstalling and switching Kdenlive’s version from 23, 24, and the latest version, but it resulted in the same.
Weirdly enough, I tried opening the file on another laptop of my friend, where I had transferred all of the used media into a folder. When I tried opening the project on my friend’s laptop, it works perfectly fine with no crash.
Currently, I’m using the latest version of 25.08.3. Any idea on how to specifically fix this crash?
Hi @ElBrineZ, and welcome to the forum and community.
If you can open the project fine on your friend’s computer where all the (source) files are in one folder, it appears that the location of the files on your computer may be the problem.
If they are mapped drives under Windows (that your OS?), that may be the problem. So, I suggest to move all the source files to one folder, open the project, have Kdenlive find all the “missing” files, and then save it under a different name.
However, it still crashed when I moved all the used media into a single folder. Previously, on opening the file with my friend’s laptop (both mine and his are using Windows, thank you), there were still a few files missing, but it opened the project just fine.
I tried making sure that what would happen if I opened the project with no media file on my friend’s laptop, with it being replaced with the “Use Placeholders” feature. Surprisingly, the project opened with no problem whatsoever, excluding the fact that all of the clips are now placeholders on my friend’s laptop.
Any other idea that I could try to fix this problem?
UPDATE: 50% of my Kdenlive projects are now doing the same exact thing.
Almost all of my past Kdenlive projects are now inaccessible, with it crashing at the “Building Sequences“ process. The one backup of this current project is the only project that is still accessible, but not for the projects that were a year~ old.
I had my Kdenlive updated for the first time just 2 months ago, from an old version (I couldn’t remember which, it was near 2020-2021). Maybe this information could help?
It certainly is good additional info. If your projects were done with a Kdenlive version that is 4 to 5 years old, there could be a few kinks, although we go to great lengths to make project files 100% backwards compatible. But the devil is in the details.
I suggest you uninstall Kdenlive, delete everything that has kdenlive* in it, and then re-install Kdenlive, or try the standalone version. See this troubleshooting section for Windows in the official Kdenlive Manual.
BTW, you can have multiple standalone versions on your Windows computer and even open them in parallel. This might help in finding which version breaks with your project files
Really sorry about the late reply. When I try to follow this suggestion of yours, I found out another cause of the crash.
I specifically had 4 folders for media used, where 3 folders are inside a folder where the project itself is kept, and the other one is for songs I kept on my laptop. The 3 folders are basically medias of “voiceovers”, “background“, and “ambience”.
From the elimination process, I found out that including the media of “songs“, “voiceovers”, and “ambience” crashes Kdenlive during opening. But if only the “background” media was included, it opened up perfectly fine. “background” media has no audio, while the other 3 has audio.
I could easily conclude that the problem is with the media and audio itself, but I still have no idea about how to fix this. Any other method that I could try?
Unfortunately, yes. Both mine and their laptop are Windows 11.
For the difference of Windows settings, I couldn’t really inspect too deep onto that, because I can’t go snooping around other people’s devices.
For path names, we both have different paths, but I’ve redirected his into a newer file. Following my previous post, he only has 3 folders, where the “song” folder on my laptop are fused with the “ambience” folder on my friends laptop to avoid bigger media branches.
When creating a custom effect. DO NOT name it the same as another effect, because it’ll corrupt every single media that uses the named effect.
For the background of how it happened, I previously was messing around with the custom effect feature, so I won’t be setting each voicelines with 15 db gain value on the “Volume” effect. Stupidly enough, I named the custom effect as “volume”, which then broke the real Volume effect, leading me to restart the app. This is why I couldn’t open most of my pervious projects, because I used the “Volume” for those projects too, while for my freind’s laptop, they’ve never made the custom effect before, hence not crashing upon starting.
I managed to found this conclusion by deleting every single custom effects that I’ve made. Therefore, when I tried to open the unopened projects, it works perfectly fine with no crashing, but while only having a slight modification of a few lost custom effects due to all of it being deleted.
Thanks for your investigation. I have now pushed a fix in Kdenlive so that saving a custom effect with the name of an already existing effect is not allowed anymore.