Where Does Manim Save Rendered Videos?
Manim renders into a media folder next to your scene file, sorted by quality, with partial files and Tex cache beside it.
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Run manim on a scene file and a media folder appears next to it. Finished videos land in media/videos under a folder per scene and quality, like 480p15 or 1080p60. That naming is why the same animation seems to exist in several places at once.
Everything else in media is scaffolding. Partial movie files, Tex output and logs speed up re-renders but can be regenerated, so they are safe to delete when disk space runs short.
Where Manim stores this, by platform
./media
Created beside the .py file you render. Override it per run with --media_dir PATH or permanently in manim.cfg. Videos sort into videos/<scene>/<quality>, images into images/.
./media
Same relative layout. The TeX cache inside media/Tex is what makes first renders slow and later ones fast, so keep it if you re-render often.
.\media
Same structure on Windows. Long scene names plus deep quality folders can push past path length limits, so a short --media_dir like C:\manim_out helps on big projects.
Frequently asked questions
how do i change where manim saves videos
Pass --media_dir PATH on the command line, or set media_dir in manim.cfg for every render. The videos, images and cache trees all move together under the new root.
can i delete manim partial movie files
Yes. The partial_movie_files folders are render cache. Deleting them only costs time on the next render, while the finished .mp4 files in the quality folders are the keepers.
where does manim store logs
Under the log directory, controllable with --log_dir, plus --log_to_file to capture terminal output. Check there first when a render dies with no obvious error.
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