Troubleshooting faceless renders

Most renders complete on the first try. When something goes wrong, here's how to recover.

A stage failed

Faceless renders run in four stages: TTS → backgrounds → images → render. If any stage fails, Schedulin marks it red in the progress panel and stops the pipeline.

Click Retry on the failed stage. Most failures are transient — an upstream provider hiccup or a timeout — and succeed on the second attempt.

If it fails twice, scroll down to the specific failure types below.

TTS failed

Usually one of:

• Script too long. The hard limit is 1,200 characters. Trim and re-render.
• Unsupported characters. Emoji, raw markdown, or non-Latin scripts in a Latin voice can break the TTS step. Strip them and retry.
• ElevenLabs rate limit. Wait 60 seconds and retry. If it persists, your ElevenLabs key may have hit a tier limit — contact support.

Backgrounds (stock) failed

The keyword extractor occasionally produces queries Pexels has zero matches for. Edit the script to include more concrete nouns (e.g., "city at night" instead of "the urban experience") and retry.

If you're getting irrelevant b-roll repeatedly, switch to AI stills for that script — Pexels just doesn't have coverage for the topic.

Images (AI stills) failed

The Flux Schnell image generator can occasionally fail content-policy checks for benign prompts. Edit your script to remove ambiguous phrasing (e.g., "hunting", "gun", "blade" without context) and retry.

Render failed

A render-stage failure usually means the audio and visuals couldn't be combined. Click Retry — this is almost always transient. If it fails twice, contact support and share the video ID from the URL.

The audio is out of sync with captions

This is rare but can happen if you edit the script after the TTS stage completes. The captions are timestamped against the original audio.

Fix: clone the video, paste the corrected script into a fresh render, and the captions will re-time correctly.

I want to cap how much I spend on renders

Schedulin's billing dashboard has a per-month render budget cap. Set it to your comfort level (e.g., $50/month) and renders will pause when you hit the cap.

Still stuck

Contact support from your dashboard or email support@schedulin.app. Include the video ID (from the URL) — that lets us pull logs immediately.