How to troubleshoot errors with animated titles

NOTE: Blender 2.80 compatibility

The new Blender 2.80 release, which made major changes to the API, is not compatible with OpenShot 2.4.4 release.

This has been fixed in the development source, and the next release of OpenShot will support Blender 2.80.

Since August 23, the Daily Build packages downloadable from https://openshot.org/download/ are also compatible with Blender 2.80. Upgrading OpenShot to the latest Daily Build will allow Blender 2.80 to work with the Animated Titles editor. (Only Blender 2.80 is compatible with the latest Daily Build releases — earlier Blender versions will not work with any OpenShot version later than OpenShot 2.4.4 release.)

The only option for OpenShot 2.4.4 is to downgrade Blender to version 2.78 or 2.79. Nothing below this point will help you.

See issue #2901 for more details.

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There are a large number of issues logged about errors when trying to create animated titles with Blender. When trying to create an animated title OpenShot returns an error: No frame was found in the output from Blender.

First, set the path to Blender correctly

It's best to use the Browse button in the Preferences interface, rather than typing in these paths directly.

On Windows Blender is installed by default into:

• 64-bit - C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender.exe
• 32-bit - C:\Program Files (x86)\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender.exe

On Linux which blender will tell you the install path which is usually /usr/bin/blender on Debian\Ubuntu systems.

On Mac OS X blender.app can be installed in the Applications folder and used like any other app. Right click on the app and select Show Package Contents. Then navigate to the executable and drag and drop this to the terminal. This will give you the path to the executable - something like /Applications/blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/blender

Second, update the Blender scripts

The Blender scripts bundled with OpenShot need to be updated to take into account a change to the Blender Python API where the Python attribute in TextCurve has changed from text_object.align to text_object.align_x.

The following scripts need to be updated:

• blinds,
• blur,
• colours,
• defocus,
• dissolve,
• explode,
• fly_by_1,
• fly_by_two_titles,
• glare,
• glass_slider,
• halo_zoom_out,
• neon_curves,
• rotate_360,
• trees,
• wireframe_text,
• zoom_clapboard.

The text to change is in the Modify Text / Curve settings section (search for text_object.align or spacemode) and change the align to align_x.

Restart OpenShot (sometimes a complete reboot is needed) and try creating an animated title. Be patient. Blender can take a long time to render some of the image sequences or AVI clips.

On Windows you can check in C:\Users\username.openshot-qt\blender for output from the animation process.

Further debugging

Hopefully, OpenShot and Blender are now working well together and you have some animated titles in your project. If not enable debug mode and check the log file. To enable debug mode go to Edit > Preferences > Debug and tick the box. Logs are written to (on Windows) C:\Users\username.openshot-qt\openshot-qt.log

You can also run the Blender files and scripts outside of OpenShot to see if there are any errors reported. Open a command prompt or terminal and enter (adjusting paths as appropriate to your system):

/path/to/blender -b /path/to/blend/file.blend -P /path/to/python/script.py

This tells Blender to open the specified blend file and run the specified python script. Progress and errors will be output in the terminal. This together with the debug log will hopefully give you additional information to help you solve the problem.