Hi, everyone.

I am brand new to kdenlive and just edited my first video with the software. I thought it went quite smoothly even as I was getting used to the software. I am not an experienced video editor and just do it casually, out of necessity for posting my YouTube videos about board and card games.

I heard about the proxy option in kdenlive to make the editing process smoother, and it worked really well (after a long wait for the proxy conversions). However, when I rendered my video, one of the camera sources rendered all black. The other two rendered perfectly.

For reference, I had a Samsung Galaxy recording my face, a Huawei Mate 9 recording closeups of cards, and my new Pixel 6 Pro recording a full table view. The table view is the clip that failed, turning black. Previously, I had edited the same setup for a different video using Premiere Rush. It was successful, but I've just gotten so sick of that software.

I tried turning off proxy settings to do the rendering, but the clips were still showing up solid black (or white?). So I tried closing kdenlive and reopening to try again, but when I opened it, I got an error for every clip based on my Pixel recordings: "Invalid clip found and removed." All the clips are removed from the timeline.

That was just under two hours of footage that I'd edited down to 32 minutes, perfectly in sync with the other two cameras, and now it's all gone. Even reimporting the Pixel clips, kdenlive won't add it back in to the timeline.

Is there a way to get these clips to work again, and then render properly? Can I restore all my edited clips?

Thank you.

So what happened is kdenlive didn't have access to the clips anymore (did your rename them? move them?). You should have a backup file saved somewhere (i'm not sure where the default path is, sorry, but you can looks for it, it should be projectname_backup)

Thanks, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case. I haven't moved or renamed the files.

I've tried reloading the clips, but kdenlive "reloads" them into purely audio clips. Also, it's worth noting that even while the clips are errored out, the audio for those clips continues to work normally.

I've also tried "replacing" the clips with themselves, but I can't tell if it's having any effect. It certainly isn't restoring my clip edits.

I thought it might have something to do with the clips in question being H.265. I tried converting one of the clips with handbrake, but again, I can't tell if anything is helped when I replace the clip, because it still doesn't restore my edited clips on the timeline.

I have tried in a new project to open and work with (just briefly) both my original H.265 recording and my handbraked converted version, and both seem to work fine (haven't tried rendering). But again, during my entire editing process, all of the video clips seemed just fine—until I rendered and then tried turning off proxy settings.

I wonder if somehow my project file is corrupted, or if some setting is breaking the clips.

I've tried reloading previous versions of the file from the backups (thanks for that tip!), but to no avail.

The saves all have proxy settings on, and the video looks fine with proxy on. I'm also able to load the recordings into fresh files. But when I load these recordings (converted to H264, or the original H265, doesn't matter), they come in fine to the bucket, but then refuse to be added to the timeline. Simply nothing happens.

If I turn off proxy settings from a previous save, they turn either solid black or white.

If I load a previous save and try replacing the recordings (again, even replacing them with the converted files), they do not function.

Is there some feature of a video that would cause it to interact negatively with other videos? Resolution? Frame rate?

WELP it happened again with another video. I guess I have to start from scratch again on another project.

Hoping someone else knows what the problem could be in case it's fixable when it happens in the future.