I have a long, raw video from which I needed to extract about five minutes. The audio also needed a lot of help. So I:

- Extracted audio and cleaned it up into a WAV.

- Imported the video into kdenlive (muted audio). Added audio on a separate track.

- Split both clips at the same point. Deleted the earlier portions and moved the rest to start at 0:00.

- Found the right place to end, split, and deleted the later parts.

- Added audio and video fades, and a title.

Everything looked great in the preview window. So I rendered.

I got a 4:15 video from a 5:05 project. Cut off well before the end.

Also, the video rendered from the beginning of the original file, not from my carefully edited starting point. And then, when I went back to the project to try again, I found that the project had been corrupted and the video and audio alignment (both!) were wrong on the timeline. I can deal with the rendering problem... but when a rendering problem breaks the project... that really doesn't play well with users.

So, at this point, it looks like I need to delete everything I did over the last three hours (!), cut the video first using avconv, and then hope that the new project will render properly.

Questions.

1. Is this a known issue?

2. How should new users anticipate this sort of problem and avoid large amounts of wasted time? (Actually, I've used kdenlive before, but only occasionally -- I don't need to edit video very often. Kdenlive worked beautifully for me in the past -- I had no idea going into this small project that it would be such a nightmare.)

Thanks.
hjh

what version of kdenlive are you using?

I *was* using the version that ships with Ubuntu Studio 16.04 -- kdenlive 15.something.

I've since upgraded to the latest stable version using the kdenlive PPA, but I haven't tried the same steps in that version (because I just wanted to get the video done, and after finding a couple of forum posts here about "seek errors" causing similar symptoms, I didn't have any confidence in it, so I used avconv to skip ahead to the point that I wanted in the video, and guarantee that both the video and audio file begin at exactly the point I want).

So I don't know if the problem will replicate in the newer version. I *might* try it again, just to see, but to be honest, video editing is not something I have to do very often so this is not an extremely high priority, and it already took something like 4 - 4.5 hours yesterday just to extract five minutes out of a 20 minute video file. I've spent enough time on this project already.

hjh