So I am on a pretty fun project right now which relies heavily on Motion Vectors. When I say heavily, its not even that many shots. I have 7 shots that are using them right now and they are eating up my framestore.
I am on a Mac Studio M@ Ultra with 8TB SSD storage which is more than enough for dozens of projects. I have MV in action and each time I am tweaking it’s inputs to get what I want I first “Clear” which removes the last cached MV render and then I “Cache” to regenerate the MVs to be usable in my batch pipeline.
My issue is that “Clear” seems to clear no space and “Cache” continues to eat my framestore. I am down to 15% left on my system storage and feel liek I must be missing something. The project isn’t that heavy but I have my SYSTEM HD INFO window open and am watchin the storage loose roughly 100GBs every time I hit “Cache”.
Any ideas to help me avoid a catastrophic crash in a few hours?
Keep in mind MV caches EXR Uncompressed, and if this is 4.6k or higher which is the standard these days, it’ll eat all your storage in the blink of an eye.
Do you know how to clear these cached renders then? Right now I am archiving the project to remove it and unarchive it again in the hope that this clears my framestore properly.
Thanks - this is exactly what I am doing - “CLEAR” does nothing for me at all - it releases no storage space for me. “CACHE” simply adds to the cached storage. I have even tried manually deleting the cache clips from my Liraries.
Preferences>System>Storage>Clear Temporary Libraries should remove previous caches. If I’m not mistaken, however, you can also just delete them from the media panel. There is also a Flush Batch Cache Library button under Preferences>User>Batch&BFX. You may need to do a combination of these.
Exactly, you’ll need to check every batch iteration and clear cache on each, like render. Same applies if you want your archive not to size tons…
Also, you may have to close flame after you hit clear cache, give it a couple of minutes and run again. I found the cleaning happens when I close flame after I hit the clear button. I think this is using backburner in the bg. Not sure.
The caches get held onto for ‘Undo’ purposes. However if you’re on 2026 you can go into Prefs and under the System category on the Storage tab use the Flush Purgeable Media button which will force cleanup anything lying around in limbo like this.
Otherwise I think just quitting Flame should generally get it to clean up these ‘orphaned’ caches its self as well.
I would also suggest getting a frame store larger than 8tb , in this day and age that will fill up quick smart, some jobs can be that on their own given the right circumstances
I envy you commercial guys. Here I am with a single project that is over 100TB, and it is a forever ongoing branding project, that gets updated several times a year.
After investigating the issue, we have found the root cause of the issue and there is a simple workaround until we can provide a fix:
The issue is related to the Player referencing content that has been deleted from the project. So, to be able to get back room on your Media Cache, just follow these steps:
-Create a Colour Source clip on the desktop
-Go to Preferences / User / General / Clear Undo Buffer
-Go to Preferences / System / Storage / Flush Purgeable Media
-If you press on the Media Cache Space Estimation then you should be able to see the expected value and more room on your non infinite Media Cache!
This applies to all version and one reason it might have been overlook is because it only applies to the last deleted clip that you have viewed in the Player. Caches for any other deleted clips will get correctly removed when you will flush the Undo Buffer and Flush Purgeable Cache.
A quite subtle issue that can easily confuse users!
