I am having issues with rendering a short clip I've made. I spent two days on it, it's only 2 minutes long, but it's the first video editing I've ever done and I'm pretty happy with it.

The clip uses a lot of different effects and I have overdubbed a studio recording of a track that is playing throughout the movie.

While making it I experienced a lot of crashes, but I did have some successful renderings of some of the first versions of the clip. Now whenever I try to render the clip it doesn't work. I have experienced only being able to see the effects (no video) or that the video displays in black and white. And I have tried virtually all of the possible rendering profiles (all defaults under Web Sites and File Rendering) but also downloaded a couple from the website.

If anyone have any ideas on how to solve it, or a method for me to take the work that I've done and in some way make it distributable I would be much obliged.

Is it true that basically all the work that I have done manually is described in the XML-file that is my save-file?

Additionally I should maybe say that I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I have downloaded the ubuntu-restricted-extras, I have ffmpeg version 0.8.5 and melt v. 0.7.7 if that is of any use.

Some of the older versions of my project still render, though the music skips a lot. I'm suspecting it might be a problem with one of the effects. I use: Mute, Rotate and Shear, Vignette Effect, Chroma Hold, Saturation, Fade to/from Black, Contrast, Birghtness.

I'd perhaps first try updating your kdenlive and MLT versions, make a copy of your project and import it into a more recent version and see how you go. MLT 0.7.7 is quite old and no doubt the kdenlive version is too.

You can use sunab's 'stable' PPA for Ubuntu here: https://launchpad.net/~sunab/+archive/kdenlive-release

or cutting edge here: https://launchpad.net/~sunab/+archive/kdenlive-svn

Using either of the above will replace your LTS distro kdenlive and MLT versions.

If you want to just try a recent build of kdenlive and MLT to test without removing your LTS distro versions then you can get a pre built binary here: http://builds.meltytech.com/kdenlive/latest.rss

Or use the build script here:

http://www.mltframework.org/bin/view/MLT/BuildScripts

It's probably more advantage to update the software than try to fathom out what effect, codec, etc etc may be causing problems with your current set up.

Open terminal, add repository. Update, upgrade.

Open kdenlive, yes, it does look like a newer version. The effect stack looks more intuitive. Nice.

Open project. Render, play after render, check!

Rendering... The excitement is unbearable. Is it gonna work...

VLC opens. And there it is! My project in full flaming colors. Awesome!

Thank you very much mr. Yellow. This is great.

If you're ever in Aarhus I will buy you a beer.

However the audio is still skipping something awful.