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When things go wrong

Sometimes things go wrong and there are some ways to continue your work without much trouble. Below is a list of items to try before abandoning your session.

1. If your computer or the program crashed, you can use the File pulldown choice of Load backup to get back to the last automatically saved session. It will most likely not include the last few operations that were done though. But if you forgot to Load backup when you restarted ,CINELERRA-GG you have a second chance to use File → Load and select $HOME/.bcast5/backup .prev as long as you only loaded a different file and have performed no editing operations.
2. If you accidentally destroyed your current project by a Load with Replace current project when you should have changed the Insertion strategy, and you had not saved a recent backup, this is another time when it is useful to use File → Load and select $HOME/.bcast5/backup.prev as long as you only loaded a different file and had performed no editing operations.
3. If you suddenly get errors or hangs on media or strange looking tracks, you might want to rebuild indexes. You can do this in the Resources window with a right mouse click on the media to get a pulldown with the Rebuild index option. For an easy way to rebuild for all of your media use Settings → Preferences, Interface tab, Index Files section, Delete existing indexes. Over time, as you load media, the indexes will automatically be recreated so each load takes a little longer, but this quite often is all that is needed to repair a media problem.
4. On an older computer, if you are playing media and it can not keep up, you can turn off Play every frame in the Video Out tab of Settings → Preferences, Playback tab. You will then see the video jump as it skips frames in order to stay caught up.
5. The Cache size can be lowered to 1048 if playback seems choppy or if you have problems with lv2 plugins, or you can increase the Cache size for better flow. This can be changed in Settings → Preferences, Performance tab.
6. After saving your session and settings and exiting CINELERRA-GG, you might want to rename your current $HOME/.bcast5 directory and start with the default setup. This will eliminate your settings as the potential cause of a problem; however, all of your preferences will be lost until you go back to your original .bcast5.
7. You can also temporarily rename just Cinelerra_rc in your $HOME/.bcast5 directory, so that a new file with the original name will be created with original defaults. You will lose your preferences, but it is just for testing and you can move back the renamed CINELERRA-GG_rc over the new one if that is not the cause of the problem. Be sure to stop and restart CINELERRA-GG whenever you rename this file.
8. Some media has only a single keyframe at the beginning of the file so that moving anywhere on the timeline results in just a black image in the compositor. CINELERRA-GG needs more keyframes to determine position. You can temporarily use Settings → Proxy to size to put in keyframes. How to use Proxy is explained in 19.3 Proxy Settings and Transcode.
9. If you have enabled an Automation Curve such as Fade or Speed on your track but it does not show, it could simply be because the range minimum and maximum are incorrectly set in the zoom bar. Set them to more reasonable values until you see the lines appear. Just as a reminder, the zoom bar is on the bottom of the main window (figure 8.1).
10. If the rate at which frames are captured during Recording is much lower than the framerate of the source, the video will accumulate in the recording buffers over time and the audio and video will become out of sync. Decrease the number of frames to buffer in the device in Settings → Preferences, Recording tab so that the excess frames are dropped instead of buffered.
11. If loading files locks up, this might be because CINELERRA-GG is building picons/vicons for the Resources window. If you load a large number of images it needs to decompress every single image to build a picon/vicon. Go into Settings → Preferences, Appearance tab and disable Use thumbnails in resource window to skip this process. Keep in mind though, that it only has to create these thumbnails the first time a new piece of media is loaded or the values are changed.
12. After a crash, look on the window where you started running CINELERRA-GG to see if there is a line towards the end of the output that reads something like a bunch of numbers followed by the word "AssetVIconThread". Frequently this indicates that some system resouce has been exhaused in creating/running the Vicon images in the Resources window. You can disable Use thumbnails in resource window in Settings/Preferences, Appearace tab to see if this resolves the crashing. In most cases when this is the cause, it will be the second to last line shown in the window. In addition, you might want to Delete clip thumbnails in the Interface tab section of Settings/Preferences.
13. For an older computer with less CPU power, in Settings → Preferences, Appearance tab, be sure that Autocolor assets is disabled; set View thumbnail size & Vicon quality& Vicon color mode to lower values or switch to No Play instead of Full Play in the Resources window (this is to the right of the word Visibility in the left hand side of that window). You will then have more CPU and more memory available to do actual editing.
14. When using AppImage to run with the OpenGL video driver, you must have the OpenGL drivers for your Operating System graphics board installed as it is not included in the AppImage library set. The error message you might see if this is not installed is: error while loading shared libraries: libGLU.so.1: cannot open shared object: No such file or directory.
15. If you have updated your Operating System or newly installed some applications, it is possible that your LV2 plugin path may have been modified and be in disagreement with what you have set for CINELERRA-GG. This could result in a crash upon startup. Look at the messages in the window from where you started CINELERRA-GG to see if they look similiar to the following:

        LOAD: http://eq10q.sourceforge.net/matrix\_lr2ms
        LOAD: http://eq10q.sourceforge.net/matrix\_ms2lr
        LOAD: https://community.ardour.org/node/7596
        LOAD: urna-comp
        ** segv at 0x7f2cd80813c4 in pid 4540, tid 4540

    The last line before the segv indicates the name of the LV2 plugin that is causing problems. Please refer to the section on LV2 plugins 10.9 to resolve the issue.
16. Check your Overlays window if you do not see your Assets, Titles, Transitions, Plugin Keyframes, or other lines such as Fade, Cameras, etc. on your timeline. These items will still be functional, but you may be confused when you do not actually see their physical presence if you inadvertently unchecked them in the Overlays window. Use the Window pulldown to enable/disable the Show Overlays window.
17. BugTracker - sometimes there is a problem creating a new report issue in the website's Mantis Bugtracker using the Chrome web browser and you lose what you just typed in. Generally when logging into the bugtracker, the option "only allow with this IP address" needs to be disabled, then the bug tracker will work fine.
18. Forum -

    1. If you can not register your username in the website's Forum, it could be because the protection measures against spammers also is in effect with real users, so sometimes the website blocks the registration for the forum. This often affects email addresses of well-known email providers. Send email to the mailing list which requires you to subscribe ((`https://lists.cinelerra-gg.org/mailman/listinfo/cin`) so that you can be added to the forum manually as long as you confirm that you agree with the terms of use of this website and the forum.
    2. In the website's Forum, use of unacceptable characters or strings can result in the error message "A potentially unsafe operation has been detected in your request to this site". You lose what you had typed in and you will have to check what you remember typing in for a non-converational set of characters. This can be as simple as ../../ (dot dot slash dot dot slash) or some types of C++ code.

    3. Entries not showing up for several hours could be due to taking a long time to propagate around the world on some time basis.
    4. Not seeing a comment or reply section could be because you are not logged in or recognized as logged in. If you seem to be logged in, logout and then login again to see if that resolves the problem. Another potential solution is the switch the language being used to English, even if you think it is already English. Sometimes it is left in a different language and needs to be reset.
    5. Until you have made a few entries in the Forum, you will have to wait a few hours for your entry to be approved. This is because there are people who spam the forum so attempts to alleviate this by requiring moderation for new users until validated.

Some Helpful User Readable Text Dumps

On the File pulldown, there is a Dumps option with a submenu of dump EDL, Plugins, Assets, and Undo. In all cases, you will have to have started CINELERRA-GG from a window instead of from an application icon and the text results will be shown in that window.

- Dump EDL will display your current EDL state on the screen in the window from where you started .CINELERRA-GG This can be useful to see information concerning a specific edit or a file path.
- Dump Plugins will show the names of the currently loaded plugins.
- Dump Assets displays the media assets that you have loaded and various pertinent details on each, such as samplerate, width, and height.
- Dump Undo will dump the last 32 edits on the undo stack exactly as kept, which can be useful if you are looking to see how far back in the undo to go to get to a specific spot.

Common Problems

Some messages you may see in the startup window may or may not be errors. Some examples are:

FFMPEG::open_decoder: some stream times estimated: /your directory/filename

This is not a problem. Basically, when you open a file if a stream has a known duration, there is no message. If the duration is unknown, it is estimated by using the File Size and Bitrate to estimate the duration. This may just indicate that the stream number CINELERRA-GG uses versus ffmpeg may be counted differently.

FFMPEG::scan: codec open failed followed by
FFMPEG::scan:file= your directory/filename

This is not a problem. CINELERRA-GG is building an index for your file in order to better seek. In that process, different methods are tried until a successful scan is complete.

int FFMPEG::init_encoder(const char*); followed by
bad file format: your directory/filename

This error occurs when you are rendering, or possibly capturing media via recording, when the file format/type are set to an incompatible option. To fix this in the Render window, check the Video and Audio wrenches configure compression settings and choose a compatible Compression as shown when clicking on the down arrow in the Preset window.

AudioALSA::write_buffer err -32(Broken pipe) at sample #

This indicates that there is something wrong with the audio. Some reasons for this are:

- You simply stopped playing in CINELERRA-GG while the audio is in progress.
- Running on a computer where there is no sound card.
- Incorrect setup of the audio parameters in the Settings → Preferences, Playback tab.
- Your sound system is already in use by another program, like when playing tunes outside CINELERRA-GG.

void AssetPicon::create_objects():

While rendering, you may see this in the Message log window as well as in your terminal startup window. Your render will be incomplete. This indicates that CINELERRA-GG is unable to update the image of the asset picon either on the Timeline or in the Compositor. Usually not a problem unless rendering large media such as 4K. Because this is just for displaying approximately where you are in the render process, turn off "Draw media" in the patchbay for the video tracks (3rd icon from the left). You can still see how far along the render is by checking the progress bar which shows the percent complete in the bottom right corner of the main program window.

Playback does not keep up so you hear the audio ahead of the video.

When this occurs, it most likely means that there is not enough CPU power to keep up. You can go into Settings → Preferences, Playback tab and uncheck Play every frame. Not playing every frame means that as it plays, if it can not keep up with doing all it has to do to change the frame into a vframe and then draw it, the program just notes that it is falling behind so skips frames to catch back up. This does not affect rendering. A different solution is to use Background Rendering as described in section 7.6.

CINELERRA-GG will not start and produces error message on the startup window.

There can be various reasons that CINELERRA-GG does not come up. Some of the recent reasons are listed here. Please notify the www.cinelerra-gg.org website when you have any unknown startup issues.

- CINELERRA-GG doesn't come up in Debian with compiz window manager running. Workaround is to use a different window manager or bring up cin first and then compiz. There is also a report that Compiz leads to single frame problems after a certain amount of time in the case where you switch to fullscreen mode and than back to normal node – cin stops working and so you will have to restart cin.
- When a library goes from one version to a later version, sometimes a pre-built CINELERRA-GG binary will fail because it was created at a different version than the one the user has on their computer. This seems to happen more frequently on Arch distros because Arch has continuous releases and is usually kept up to date. An example of the error message you might see in your startup window would be:
  cin: error while loading shared libraries: libvpx.so.5:
  cannot open shared object file: No such file

You can usually install the required library to fix the problem. A temporary fix may be to create a symlink but this must be done with extreme caution as it may create an unstable condition. A better workaround is to use a tarball to install the software instead of the package build until the libraries are in sync between the build and your Operating System install.

Loading a very large number of media files, for example 500 clips, crashes CINELERRA-GG with messages similar to the following that are displayed in the window from where you started CINELERRA-GG:

       BC_DisplayInfo::init_window: cannot open display "".
       BC_DisplayInfo::init_window: cannot connect to X server.
       unjoined tids / owner 42
         00007feb27fff700 / 00007feb8f496700 9MainError
         00007feb267fc700 / 00007feb7affd700 18FFMPEGScanProgress
         ...

This usually indicates that you are out of Operating System file descriptors. You can increase the amount easily with the following command line: ulimit -n 4096 where 4096 is a size suggestion but can be increased. You can include this command line in your .bashrc or .profile file for the user login which gets run every time you login, or modify the Operating System limit for everyone in the system file, which for Fedora is /etc/security/limits.conf. Alternatively, you can reduce the number of file descriptors needed by going into Settings → Preferences, Appearance tab and unchecking the flag use thumbnails in resource window.

Using a non-supported locale could cause a failure in starting CINELERRA-GG with the following error:

       BC_WindowBase::init_im: Could not open input method.
       unjoined tids / owner 1
         00007f543dffb700 / 00007f54989d5840 12BC_Clipboard

This is caused by LC_CTYPE setting you are using, and maybe other Locale settings too. For example, using the following will cause the unjoined tids error.

       LC_CTYPE="en_IL" /mnt0/build5/cinelerra-5.1/bin/cin # set LC_CTYPE and start cin

This is an operating system error which is resolved by using the following startup instead:

       LC_CTYPE="en_GB.utf8" /mnt0/build5/cinelerra-5.1/bin/cin # set LC_CTYPE and start cin

You can either export the LC_CTYPE variable before starting CINELERRA-GG or add this in your bash startup file or simply run from the command line as shown above.

Masking Feather is not working and produces error messages on the startup window similar to:

    0:1(10): error: GLSL 4.30 is not supported. Supported versions are: 1.10, 1.20, 1.30, 1.40, 1.00 ES, and 3.00 ES
    Playback3D::print_error:
    #version 430 // vertex shader
    in vec3 in_pos;
    void main000() \{
    gl_Position = vec4(in_pos-vec3(0.5,0.5,0.), .5);
    }
    void main() \{
    main000();
    }

In the mask window, check the box Disable OpenGL masking to use software instead of OpenGL.

Stack smashing detected error message.

In at least one scenario, the fix for this is to go to Settings -> Performance and set "Use HW Device" to "none".