deleting render files

[Jeff Carpenter]

Just go into the Render folder for each project and erase the QT files within it. (Be sure to leave the folder itself, though.)

The next time you open that project Final Cut will tell you that it can’t find the render files. It will ask if you want to search for them. Just tell it “ok” or “skip” (something like that) and the project will open just fine. Nothing will be rendered, so you’ll have to re-render, but that’s the only drawback.

(Even if you re-render everything you’ll probably still save space since it saves every render you do. So if you’ve rendered-changed-rendered something a few times you have multiple copies of that same event in the render folder. By erasing and re-rendering you only have one copy of that event in the render folder whereas before you probably had more than one.)

[Coach]

Thanks for the info. If I keep the last sequence file will it all stayed rendered?

Coach

[Jeff Carpenter]

No, the project file is one file, the render files are dozens of files kept in their own folder.

It is impossible for you to tell which render files are which since Final Cut gives them long, number names that make sense to it, but not to humans.

The only way to do it is to simply pick all of them at once. So yes, you’ll have to re-render. That’s the price for freeing up the drive space. You have to decide if it’s worth it or not. Remember, the more changing and RE-rendering you’ve done to a project, the more space you’ll save. So maybe think about which projects you should do this to and which ones won’t save you much space.

[Coach]

Jeff,

Thanks again for the info. Is it common to toss and rerender the project to free space?

Coach

[Jeff Carpenter]

Most people try to have enough drive space available that this isn’t really that common, but yes, I’ve done it several times in the past without any problems.

Sometimes I’ve had something like a 3 hour ballet that I’ve rendered. (So now I have 6 hours of video on my drive.) I’ll then decide to change something…maybe I decide to brighten the midtones some…if I render it all again I’d have 9 hours of video on my drive.

So in a case like that, before the second render I’ll erase the original render files since I’ll be saving nearly 40 GBs by doing so! But normally, no, this is not something I do with every project.

[Alexander Kallas]

[Jeff Carpenter] “Just go into the Render folder for each project and erase the QT files within it”

Hi Jeff,
I’m not on my Mac now, but I can’t recall render files being QT files, just strangely numbered FCP files. I use FCP version 4.5
Cheers
Alexander