I have encountered the dreaded 'Could not render animation: unknown error'!

[Sketchy]

"Could not render animation; unknown error"

Hi, so I recently tried animation for the first time (using Krita because its the software I use for other digital art). When I tried to render my very first and very short animation, it said “Could not render animation; unknown error” every time when I tried to render it as a video (even though I was following tutorials that seem to have worked for others). I know it’s possible to render it in other ways and formats too, but it’s really frustrating and I can’t figure it out. I downloaded and …

Sorry to post this question AGAIN. I’ve looked at lots of previous posts and I tried the solution from the latest one above, which was to get FFMPEG from a certain place. But it hasn’t worked.

I want to render a portion of my animation (to show as a WIP), but when I try to render it as video, it thinks about for a while, loading as usual, then it says ‘could not render animation. Unknown error’, and I’m left with only the frames and no video.

Krita version is 5.1.5
Windows 11
Graphics card driver up to date.
I redownloaded and installed latest FFMPEG essentials from Gyan.dev. I re-routed Krita to the folder. (Although my previous version of FFMPEG worked fine as I had exported a few timelapse videos from it the other week).
Checked that PC recognises new FFMPEG from CMD
I restarted Krita a few times.
I updated Windows and restarted PC.

And I still get the error message.

I tested the timelapse docker just now with the new FFMPEG and managed to export a timelapse video MP4 no problems.

Screenshot below shows my animation render box, plus the CMD response to FFMPEG.

Help please. Have I missed something?

Edit 2: I tried moving the ffmpeg folder out of C drive as advised in other posts and into my Documents folder. I rerouted the PC path and Krita path. And it still gives me the same error.

EDIT 3: I just tried a brand new little animation to see if that would render and it did. So the issue isn’t FFMPEG insofar that it IS rendering stuff OK. Is my other file just too big for Krita to render?? It’s 1499 frames long total with multiple layers, but the bit I tried to render was only 57 frames long.
Krita has spontaneously close itself a lot the past couple of days. Yesterday when I was in the middle of drawing a frame it just closed, no error message. But mostly it closes itself when I press play and it re-buffers the frames and just shuts down half way through. I don’t know know if they’re connected. Is my animation just too large?

[AhabGreybeard]

Hi @Sketchy, I think you are not alone with this one

Krita wont fully render the animation

Render

Animation export bug in latest release

If so, t’s a known bug and it’s been reported: 459993 – Frames being named incorrectly and program being unable to found specified frames to being encoded

Please check/confirm that your animation can Render from frame-0 to frame-something.
Read this reply for a crude workaround:
Krita wont fully render the animation - #6 by AhabGreybeard

[Sketchy]

Ahhhh, thank you! Yes, that would explain why it rendered the little test animation I did, because I started from frame 0.

OK, I shall use the workaround as it still exports all the frames I wanted. I’ll put those into a new file and render from frame 0.