[ This article was first published in the September, 2005, issue of
Larry’s Final Cut Pro Newsletter. Click here to subscribe. ]
In my classes, I’ve discovered that many of my students are not familiar with a very simple tool that can help you keep your render files under control – the Render Manager.
Unlike it’s big brother, the Media Manager, the Render Manager is both easy to use and works great… provided you set your computer up properly.
For anyone who has attended my seminars, read my books, or sat in one of my classes you have learned that I have very specific ideas on how to best set up your computer for Final Cut.
I’ve written an article about this and posted it to my website: Organizing and Archiving Your Projects.
In summary, the key is to set your scratch disks, then never change them. Final Cut does a great job of organizing your files, both capture and render, so that they are easy to find. The article explains this in more detail.
Assuming you follow this advice, using the Render Manager is straight-forward. (Your files will look different from mine because both of our projects are different.)
1. Select Tools > Render Manager.
2. The Render Manager window, generally, has two folders in it. One for the current project and one for all other projects.
3. Twirl down the arrow next to the currently open project. Notice that all sequences that have render files are listed. Twirl down the Sequence file and notice that render files are separated into audio render files and video render files.
4. Twirl down the Additional Projects arrow and see all the projects that have render files associated with them. Many of these project may no longer be active, but the render files still exist.
5. To delete a render file, click in the Remove column. Each line that has a check mark will have all its render files deleted.
6. You can delete files by type (audio or video), by sequence, or by project. In this example, I am deleting all the render files associated with the Chapter 2 Lesson. I simply clicked once, in the Remove column, and all subsidiary folder and files were checked.
7. Notice, when you select render files to delete, the total amount of recovered space is illustrated in the lower-left corner. In this example, I am deleting 10.6 MB of files.
Once you click the OK button, the render files are gone and can not be recovered by doing an Undo. The only alternative if you delete the wrong files is to re-render the sequence.
Also, you can not delete individual render files. And, in fact, what I’ve found best is to delete render files by project, once the project is complete.
Still, the first time I discovered the Render Manager, I must have recovered well over 20 GB of space taken up by render files I no longer needed.
And having more hard disk space to work with is always a good thing.
