[SOLVED] Problem rendering

I am having issues with rendering a short clip I've made. I spent two days on it, it's only 2 minutes long, but it's the first video editing I've ever done and I'm pretty happy with it.

The clip uses a lot of different effects and I have overdubbed a studio recording of a track that is playing throughout the movie.

While making it I experienced a lot of crashes, but I did have some successful renderings of some of the first versions of the clip. Now whenever I try to render the clip it doesn't work. I have experienced only being able to see the effects (no video) or that the video displays in black and white. And I have tried virtually all of the possible rendering profiles (all defaults under Web Sites and File Rendering) but also downloaded a couple from the website.

If anyone have any ideas on how to solve it, or a method for me to take the work that I've done and in some way make it distributable I would be much obliged.

Is it true that basically all the work that I have done manually is described in the XML-file that is my save-file?

Additionally I should maybe say that I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I have downloaded the ubuntu-restricted-extras, I have ffmpeg version 0.8.5 and melt v. 0.7.7 if that is of any use.

Some of the older versions of my project still render, though the music skips a lot. I'm suspecting it might be a problem with one of the effects. I use: Mute, Rotate and Shear, Vignette Effect, Chroma Hold, Saturation, Fade to/from Black, Contrast, Birghtness.