Community post

Ever Lose A Bunch Of Work On A Project?

Seriously, asking:

Anyone else out there working on something in software and lost a huge chunk of work without even noticing until long afterwards?

You could be raking leaves, and a gust scatters them all about.
Or maybe pouring concrete and leveling it off, and something falls into it.
You could lose progress & work on anything, but with digital work it happens instantly and you might not even recognize it until later...

I've been editing a video in Kdenlive for the past couple of weeks, and I'll often do it in sections on the timeline.
I often take edited pieces that I re-record or re-do differently and out of fear of needing something out of it later; I'll group those all together at the end of the project like 'scraps heap' of sorts.

Kdenlive have has three "modes" for editing: Normal, Overwrite, and Insert.
Overwrite makes it so when you move a clip/block it can displace & replace another one.
In normal mode you couldn't place it there because the range is occupied by another piece of footage/image etc.
Insert mode does the same thing, but shifts whatever you're displacing to the right.
It also has a feature where you mark a range of the timelime for any number of reasons. You could render just that little piece to a video file, or apply effects to everything in that range.

But There Are Four Buttons There That Have Ruined My Life On Several Occasions

The two blue ones on the left are for INSERTING clips from your project bin into that range on the timeline, and the two red ones are for EXTRACTING/LIFTING from the timeline(and I think into the project bin).

Unfortunately, I will sometimes mark a section that's complete and render it to a video file so that I can watch it, and hear the audio.
Doesn't necessarily mean it's done, but I can review it for things that I'll miss in the editor because my playback is not always 1:1 and smooth.

In this case I marked an entire 5 minute section of work, and I overwrote it so that only audio remained...
Luckily I have the rendered video file, but I've made changes since then that aren't in the rendered video clip.
And i don't have any backups of the project from earlier times.

This doesn't happen often, but it's happened a few times. And it's infuriating because you're just editing and not realizing you've destroyed that block of work.

I rarely use those buttons, and Kdenlive is fully customize-able so I could remove them/replace them with other buttons/tools.
But it's also possible that I trigger this with keyboard shortcuts somehow so removing them might not even prevent this from happening.

I also spent hours last night trying to fix my graphics-driver issue, and I'm at the point where I think I need to upgrade my OS or install a brand new distro.
Or possibly swap out this Nvidia Quadro GPU for the newer GeForce I have. This workstation is maybe 15 years old, and so I'm not even sure if the new GPU will work with this motherboard.
I could pull one of two older AMD cards out of one of the other computers, but my OBS and Kdenlive are both setup to use NVENC to capture/render.
Plus both of those computers have Windows 7 & 8 installs in them, and changing GPU's with Windows is also a nightmare.

There's so many configurations for doing music, video, and VM's
on this machine that I'm worried about breaking/losing.
Literally most of the work for DS-Tech Media has been done on this machine.

Oh and I'm already going to miss my one month deadline. I try to publish a new video every month to Youtube because consistency helps keep the channel growing.

I'm just venting my frustration.
Anyways, end rant.