Render Manager/Finder discrepancy

[David Eaks]

In Finder, are all the 115GB of render files in the same folder in the same location?

[David Butterfield]

Yes, I think they are. Except for some audio and constant frames in different folders.

[David Johnson]

I don’t blame you if you’re only comfortable doing what the manual advises, but I’ve always used only the Finder to delete my render files and have never had any sort of issues as a result … just make sure you know what you’re deleting … for example, I tend to leave to the “constant frames” alone in most cases and you certainly don’t want to delete the entire folder since it has your auto-save backups too.

[David Butterfield]

Thanks for your help, friends. Still not sure what to try here. Does the “Compress” action get rid of redundant files? The magic bullet here would be to get rid of everything not pertinent to my current saved project…they go back for months…very much appreciate the suggestions.

[Dave Johnson]

No, “Compress” just adds the files to a ZIP file. I haven’t tried this so I’m not promising that the renders will still work properly when you take render files back out of a ZIP, but that may be one option … compress the render files into a ZIP (in case you later realize you need them), delete them and extract them if you do need them again.

Personally, I would just delete them since doing so doesn’t harm projects … if you need to go back to projects for which render files have been discarded, you just have to re-render. Even though I use a fairly large RAID array and am not pressed for drive space, I delete my render files after mastering every project anyway since I don’t trust old render files. When I have to go back to a completed project to make changes, I actually prefer to re-render the whole thing since I’ve occasionally seen old render files seem to cause unintended results (flash frames, etc. where the software seemed to be confused about which of duplicate render files to reference).

[David Butterfield]

Thanks Dave, a path is becoming clear. I still wonder why the manual warns against using Finder to delete render files, but clearly this is the only way around the mis-reporting in Render Manager of the number/size of files.

[David Johnson]

Glad to help, David. I don’t know why the manual warns against using Finder to delete render files … honestly, I didn’t even know that it did … just that I’ve been doing it that way for years and have never had a problem as a result so the reason why doesn’t matter to me.

Perhaps it’s just Apple’s way of trying to protect users from themselves … render files are sort of like system files in that they’re not files that the user directly generates or uses. In other words, I can see how deleting the entire root folder would cause issues even though selectively deleting known files within it is fine.