Rendering your animations

All right, you've made a scene, you've animated it, and done your fast test renders. You're ready for a final render.

Making your computer ready to render

The first thing to do when you are ready to render is open up your file manager, and make sure you have room on your computer to do it. I can't tell you how much room you'll need for a given project, and the rule of thumb is to clear off as much space as you possibly can. It's a good time to save copies of all those projects you are no longer working on and then delete them from your hard drive. Back them up to data sticks and flash drives or one of the following:

• An external hard drive
• A CD or DVD
• Your storage on the Web

You may also want to use a program like CCleaner, for Windows, to clean up your computer's file registry and remove temporary files from browsers. Go into your Internet browser as well and manually delete the history if you don't have a program which does that...