What do amateur animators do with their EXR output files?

I’ve just rendered an animation that is roughly 15 minutes long - 25000 frames with each frame being a 32-bit EXR image at 1920 x 1080 resolution. I’m just an amateur running Blender on my old desktop computer, and it took about a week to render those frames. After converting the frames to a perceptually lossless MP4 video in the VSE, I’m left with over 500 GiB of EXR files. I’ve seen posts where Blender animators talk about making much longer videos, so presumably the rendering process for those could produce terabytes of output files.

While I have several old hard drives I can use as backup, their reliability may be questionable, so I’m planning to simply delete the EXR files.

I’m curious about what other people do. Do you find some way to store the render output frames, or delete them?

Find an inexpensive unlimited back up service.

I use Open Drive. And it has an app that you can Dl to your computer to simply copy files to.

When you consider the cost of drive space, a monthly service pays for itself when you go through a lot of data.

You may consider to save your EXRs with DWAA compression: it’s unbelievably light, more than the lossless mp4, which also loses 32bit information. Zip everything and forget it somewhere

as for online backup solutions, there’s also Mega which offers 50GB and an app to manage them

Weren’t the 50Gig only for a limited time and you had to perform some PR stunt to get them? Wasn’t there in quite some time. I believe really free you only get 15.

Regardless of the place where to store the data, I use to keep my .EXR only once I’m not 100% finished on Compositing, Postprod, or any action which “needs” the raw data. Once my final animation is done and already used by client or even by me, I use to delete .EXR and save only 8 bits .png of the final exported and postproduced result.


Indeed, I think that when you don’t need compositing anymore, 8 bit .png is the best way to store the full animation, with lossless compression. (I know that there is a loss from 32 bits to 8 bits, but whatever, 8 bits is the final format you would have on any output device (screen) so whatever … )


See you :slight_smile: ++
Tricotou

Compress your files, buy a new spinny metal drive with the lowest cost per gigabyte (don’t use old drives), copy your files over, put the drive on a shelf with a nice label. Keep your actual project files elsewhere, and keep the blender build you used for the render. Do not buy expensive backup hardware, or pay monthly for an online backup solution.

Remember that should the files be lost, all you’re losing is at worst a week’s worth of compute time, which is not that expensive to just reproduce, and gets cheaper as time passes because computers get faster.

Now your project files are another story. I’d take more care to keep those safe, preferably by having two backups, one of which is offsite.

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Agree here about the project files. Way more important to keep safe.

When working on a project, all of the work files (in this case it would be the EXR’s) are deleted only after it has been screened. Then I know the client is really done with it. Then I just make sure to back up all of the project files (on two separate hard drives), label them, and then put them away to gather dust.

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OP – can we see your animation? :slightly_smiling_face:

Also, what kind of computer are you using?

I ask because I’m a noob interested in making animation and I currently use an old Windows 7 computer.

Thanks for the responses.

I already create duplicate backups of my project files - I learned that lesson the hard way when I wanted to modify a previous project and discovered that the original files has been accidentally deleted. Ouch.

I’m not keen on subscriptions to storage services, mainly because I’m not wealthy and I try to avoid ongoing expenses. If I had plenty of income it might be a useful solution, although I’ve always had a nagging concern about putting my data in someone else’s care. What if the storage company goes bust and shuts down their servers overnight? That’s probably an unlikely scenario, but the possibility still makes me wary.

@ Jim_Reading
The animation isn’t anything special, certainly not the kind of thing that most people here are interested in. I mainly do looping abstract animations for my own interest, and play them at home as moving art. The current video is an extended version (about 750 MiB, so a bit too large to upload) of one I posted in the Animations section of this forum at https://blenderartists.org/t/abstract-eevee-volumetric-shader/1182603. Eevee has been great for this purpose due to its speed, so if I can push my ideas past Eevee’s limitations I can get an animation rendered in a fraction of the time it takes Cycles. My computer is quite a few years old, running Linux Mint 19 on an Intel i7-4790K cpu with a Nvidia GTX 970 gpu. It’s slow compared to new systems, but I’m relatively poor so I do what I can with what I’ve got. :slightly_smiling_face: I gave up on Windows years ago.

Yes! This is quite important.

Give dwaa a try, you get way smaller files

In that case, the other thing I also do is what has been suggested which is buy inexpensive external drives. I keep a lot of data forever this way as well.

But for rendering Exr this is not really practical if you do a lot of animating/rendering. You will spend more in HD space than you do for the service.

The subscription thing for me was I just did the math. But for me this is for all of my data. Not just render files. And I run a small studio. So the cost of building and maintaining a server with unlimited storage is also very high over the long term - for exr storage

Our storage at the studio is:

External or internal local drives at each workstation.
An on site studio server set up as backup that data locally.
Inexpensive unlimited ($10 per month) online back up.

If you are always using a log of data, 120 per year works out to be a great deal for unlimited storage as render files on top of everything else can be quite a lot.

No matter what you do, have more than one back up of everything.

Its just that for render frames this gets real expensive to maintain. they fill up a lot of room fast. And when you are done, it is mainly for archival purposes.

So I will delete those locally and only keep them as an online backup. For me it is the most inexpensive solution.

Just checked… you are right!

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“External hard drives are a wonderful thing …” Today, you can get multiple terabytes at an office supply store for less than $100. (And, if you don’t yet own a computer that can take advantage of them, “junk it.”)

The OpenEXR file formats are “unabashedly wasteful of space” precisely because space-conservation no longer matters in pratice. The only thing that matters, now, is the ability to have access to the originally-saved data, exactly as it was originally saved.

Go tell it to Greta :wink:

Go tell it to our IT department also. Constantly nagging about my huge files (includes packed images). Doesn’t help that I usually press the + key each time I save as well :smiley: but I do clean up every now and then. On a business end you want reliability, security, simultaneous access from lots or users all aroudn the globe, and multiple layers of redundancy and backups.

Now go look up the price and tell me it doesn’t matter.

I’ll share what I am doing.

I’ve organized how to create a feature-length move & video game into 5 steps:

(1) MODEL --> (2) MATERIALS --> (3) ANIM-PHYS --> (4) RENDER --> (5) GAME

Here is my “secret”. I am using my game & using screen capture, to render straight into video @ 30 fps. In other words, of taking 3 minutes to render 1 frame ------------------- I am rendering 30 frames per second. That is 30 x 60 x 3 = 5400 times faster. :slight_smile:

Thus, I don’t bother saving or using EXR files.