Hi Gang...I'll try to be brief. A couple of years ago I built a dedicated computer system just for 3D animation and video work. I installed a 500gb SSD drive for my system drive, but during production of my last movie, I had storage issues I hadn't anticipated. After setting up each scene in iClone, I would render it as an animated MP4 file, and upon completion of the render, I would save the scene and move on to the next one. If I had to go back and make a change, all I had to do was load the relevant scene file, make my changes, and rerender. But halfway through production, my system drive was full and I was at a standstill. After poking around, I discovered how large these files were, and moved a bunch to a dedicated storage drive and was able to finish the movie. Here's my question. I'm going to do a referb on my system, mostly to add a better graphics card. While I'm in there, I wonder if there's a way to store these scene files to another drive by default, or should I just go ahead and replace the present system drive with a larger drive. (hopefully migration from one system drive to another wouldn't be rocket science) thanks in advance for any tips anyone could shoot my way. Regards.....Bruce

Bruce,

Most serious animators render to frames rather than a compressed codec (which will suffer if you bring them into an editor to string them together and then re-render out again).  Also in that manner you can only render the *part* of the scene you want (you may not need to re-render the whole thing).  So there's that.

With iClone 7 you can use the Python script already provided by RL to do batch rendering, so it's even easier to set up a whole series of scenes you need to do (and then do them overnight or whatever).  So there's that as well.

Storage space is cheap and you don't need (or particularly want) to render to SSD, as the render time is much longer than any mitigating speed of the drive would be.  I have many TBs of NAS space I render to and it renders just as fast there as my two SSDs (both 2TB of space).  So my advice would be to get some external storage (cheap and easy to increase) and if you don't need NAS you can get by even cheaper (one of the many choices are the WD Desktop drives -- for less than a few hundred you can get as many TBs as you need).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Thanks for the reply! I do have other large HD options, both internal and external. About halfway through the production of my second movie, (the first one was done in iClone 5) I realized the situation. Once I realized that my system drive was filling up fast, I moved previously completed scenes to a external storage drive. I do have external large drives that I archive all of my iClone files. I really hadn't taken the time to consider how this method might quickly clog up a system drive. Now I simply wonder if I should migrate to a larger system drive, or continue moving completed files to offline storage. Whatever changes I make to my system, I want to do all of it at one time. 
   You also brought up rendering single frames as opposed to rendering to a compressed file. I'm going to have to examine this method to determine if it fits my needs. I've been satisfied to this point with the quality of my compressed files, and find myself wondering if the single file method would only serve to increase my initial storage woes. Something to investigate before I start the actual rendering process on my current project. (Still in the dialog writing/scene creating mode.) Thanks for the thoughts! Very much appreciated...Bruce