I authored a pretty simple video editing project in Kdenlive 25.04, and closed it after a few hours. When I reopened the project, I got these errors about invalid clip chains:
The upshot of these errors is that on one video/audio pair of tracks, the audio is completely missing. The video is intact however, and the files haven’t moved.
As I said, I authored this in 25.04, but I have since tried to open the file in 25.04.1 and it has the same issue, so if it’s a reading issue, it hasn’t yet been fixed. If it’s an issue saving the file, it could’ve been 25.04 specific. I have 2 questions:
Is it possible for me to hand edit the kdenlive file to fix the invalid clip chain errors by hand? As I said, it’s not like the source file is gone or corrupted – it still load the video.
What further information should I gather to make a useful bug report?
It is possible to edit it manually because .kdenlive project files are XML files that can be edited in the text editor of your choice. But I strongly advise against it unless you fully understand what you are doing and how to recover from mistakes (as small as they may be).
Instead, I recommend you open a bug report. Provide the project file as an attachment besides the screenshots you posted here. Also state the OS you are on.
Before you do that, however, try to open a backup of your project (Menu > Project > Open Backup File) and check whether this has the same problem. You may need to go back a few backups to get a working version, though.
Hello! Thanks for the very helpful reply. I did indeed find a backup file a few versions back that didn’t have the issue. It’s a good amount of work lost, but it’s a starting point. I see that the backup timeline points to subfiles for each backup, so I’ll include those in the bug report as well.
Yeah, I saw that .kdenlive files were human readable, but I couldn’t see why that particular chain entry was broken, and the error message isn’t particularly informative. I’ll try to diff the first broken backup with its working predecessor and see if there’s anything obvious. And of course, I’ll also file a bug.
For a bug report, please do include the last-working and first-broken project files - but also, if you’re able to recall or reconstruct - a description of what you were likely doing to the project between those two points.
If the working state stayed ok to let you keep editing for quite a while after that save point, but the actually saved file was ‘corrupt’ or malformed - then my first guess would lean toward a bug in undoing and/or then redoing some operation which didn’t perfectly restore the expected state. And if that is correct, it may not be perfectly obvious where the real issue occurred from just the difference between those project files.
