Rendering keeps failing after filling up C drive

[Colonel Damneders]

So I have a set of 4 videos I'm trying to render with media encoder but whenever I try to do it, the render fails near the end after my C drive fills up. My issue with this is that I don't have anything set to go into my C drive. All my media cache files are on another drive that is more than big enough to fit everything but for some reason, it goes straight to C drive and since my C drive has about 20 GB left, it fills up super quick.

Worth noting that I've tried this both in premiere and media encoder and all the cache & scratch disks in both are not on C drive and have plenty of room

While writing this I've thought about rerouting my temp directory through windows away from my C drive and onto my other drives. Will update this post once I get home and can test this.

My spec is:

8700K

32 GB DDR4 3200MhZ

RTX 2070 Super

My render settings are:

2560x1440 60FPS

Progressive Field Order

Render at max depth

High Profile

5.1 Level

VBR 2 Pass

24MBPS Bitrate Max & Target

Use Max render quality

[Peru Bob]

How large is your C drive?

Is it filling up with temporary system files?

[Colonel Damneders]

110GB with around 20GB free

I believe so but I've moved my temp files in the windows directory so I don't know why. All my scratch disks and cache files are also routed away from C drive. The error logged is "unable to render frame" which I heard could be fixed by going to software only render. Tried that and woke up to see it had failed again with a whole new error code. Unfortunately, I'm away from my home PC for the next 9 hours so I cant see the code as I print screened it and saved it there

[Peru Bob]

20 GB is not enough for the system files necessary to perform the operations.  You need a larger system drive.

[Colonel Damneders]

so my only option is to reinstall to another drive?

is there no other way to fix the issue?

also I've rerouted my system temp files away from C drive 

[Peru Bob]

Yes, you need a larger C drive.

[Jeff Bugbee]

Open this directory: C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common\Media Cache Files

Do a render and watch this folder and see if it grows/gets populated. I've heard of a bug where files still get written to this directory and if this fills up your C drive, you're going to get that error.

[Colonel Damneders · Accepted solution]

I figured it out! After contacting support and seeing that they were just going to try to avoid the issue rather than solving it I did some sleuthing on my drive as it got filled up using windirstat and noticed there was a file called 'pagefile.sys' that was massive and growing. Naturally I googled to see if I could delete it and found out its basically a file windows creates when it runs out of RAM and rendering a large video consumes a lot of RAM so it makes sense why it was so huge.

So rather than deleting it I needed to change where it is created. I of course did some googling and got my answer. Go to control panel > System & Security > System and click on advanced system settings on the left. From there click settings under the 'Performance' heading and go to the advanced tab. Click 'Change' under 'Virtual memory'. From there I set my C drive to have no paging file and one of my other drives to have one managed by the system. Saved all my settings and restarted my PC and left the render going and prayed and lo and behold it worked!

Hope this can help someone else 🙂

[Stellar_motivation5CBF]

Wow, thank you so much, watching this almost two years later and its saving lives, i was stuck but able to find a perfect solution, so thank you so much and be blessed

[avndrm]

Wow- I've been dealing with this issue for years and finally got fed up once again and looked again instead of constantly trying to uninstall and delete temp files. So happy I stumbled  upon this. This is a life saver. Thank you so much!!