Comment 17 for bug 1198555

This solved my problem. I had the very same problem per described by previous posters. For a rather easy workaround, I received the following answer from Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) source: https://answers.launchpad.net/openshot/+question/273161

The following should work as a manual workaround:

Issue the command
gksudo gedit /usr/share/pyshared/openshot/windows/ClipProperties.py

(if the command gksudo is not installed, try
sudo gedit /usr/share/pyshared/openshot/windows/ClipProperties.py
instead; if gedit is not available on your system, then use any other text editor.)

This should ask for your password as confirmation for an administrative action and then open the editor with one of the Openshot Python programs loaded.

Scroll down near line 91 and change the sequence of two lines
from
 self.txtIn.set_value(round(self.current_clip.start_time, 2))
 self.txtOut.set_value(round(self.current_clip.end_time, 2))
into
 self.txtOut.set_value(round(self.current_clip.end_time, 2))
 self.txtIn.set_value(round(self.current_clip.start_time, 2))
Keep the indentations exactly as they are in the file!

Search for the occurrence of 0.01
After the second occurrence (probably line 663) delete the block of the three lines

if local_out > local_max_length:
 local_out = local_max_length
 self.txtOut.set_text(str(local_out))

Attention, you have to make sure that you do not touch the indentation of other lines.
Save the file, close the editor, and try using OpenShot again.

In case that OpenShot does no more work after these modifications, just reinstall the openshot package and you should be at the same status as before.