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Your Clip Stopped When You Closed the Tab
A clip left rendering when you closed the tab was already paid for — when the row picks itself back up, and what to do with one that never will.
Why a clip stops when the tab does
Rendering happens at the video service. The waiting happens in your browser.
The tab you pressed Generate in asks the service how your clip is doing every 5 seconds, and it is that tab which moves the row from Queued to Processing to Ready, and files the finished clip in your Gallery.
Close the tab, reload the page or let the laptop sleep, and the asking stops. The clip is not cancelled — the service carries on rendering it — but nothing on your side is left listening for the answer. That is why a row can look busy long after anything is really happening.
The clip was paid for when you pressed Generate
Credits for a clip are taken at the start, not on delivery. A clip abandoned halfway is a clip you have already bought.
They come back when a status check hears the video service itself report a clip it will not deliver — failed, cancelled, aborted or errored. The charge is reversed and the credits are paid back. That check has to be made by an open Video Studio.
So open the Video Studio and let the row finish before you delete it. Delete it while it is unresolved and nothing is left to ask about: no clip, and no ruling to refund against.
Most rows pick themselves back up
Open the Video Studio again and go to Gallery, where the queue sits above the finished clips. A row still sitting at Queued or Processing that carries the video service's own job reference is picked up the moment the list loads. One status check goes out immediately rather than waiting for the next five-second turn, because the usual case is a clip that finished long ago and only needs collecting.
From there it ends properly:
- Finished — it leaves the queue and joins the clips below it, with its thumbnail, its length and a Download button.
- Failed at the service — the row says why, and the credits are refunded.
- Still rendering — it carries on from where you found it. The twenty-minute clock below starts again from the moment you opened the page, so a long wait in a queue does not fail it on arrival.
The two ways a watched clip gives up
A row being watched will not spin forever. Two limits end it:
- Twenty minutes unfinished. The row is marked failed and reads "This clip never finished — it was still unfinished after 20 minutes, so it is marked failed instead of loading forever. Try again, or use a shorter clip." A normal clip takes one to three minutes, so nothing still alive is failed by mistake.
- Three minutes of unanswered status checks. If the service cannot be reached for that long the row reads "We lost contact with the video service while this clip was rendering, so we cannot tell you how it ended. Nothing is still running — start it again if you still want the clip."
The rows that can never come back
A row that carries no job reference has nothing left to ask about, so roughly 25 minutes after it started it is closed off rather than left spinning:
"This clip was left unfinished when the page was closed, so it stopped being tracked and never completed. Start it again to get the clip."
That is the end of that one. Start it again to get the video.
What the row says about your credits
The line under a failed row tells you which of two things happened, and it no longer guesses.
- "Credits refunded." — the video service ruled on the clip and the charge was reversed.
- "We could not confirm a refund for this clip — tell us on the support page and we will sort it." — we gave up before the service ruled: the clip ran past its deadline, contact with the service was lost, or it was left unfinished when you closed the page. Nothing was reversed on its own. Take it to the contact form on /support and a person sorts it by hand.
A clip the service never started at all is not charged in the first place, and the message says so at the time — there is nothing to claim back.
If a row says the credits came back and your balance has not moved, that is worth reporting too.
None of this applies if you leave the studio open. Clips take one to three minutes, so a background tab is enough for the row to finish by itself and land in the Gallery.
Where to next
- Next in Video Studio: Shot List & Movies
- If a clip was refused: Your Clips & Refused Clips — What every other kind of failed or refused clip means.
- Before your next clip: Overview — What a clip costs before you press Generate.
- Charged for nothing: Refunds When Something Fails — When credits come back after something fails.
3 of 5 in Video Studio · Last checked 17 September 2026 · Previous: Your Clips & Refused Clips