Okay so I am doing some renders in deep and file sizes are huge. Being new to deep I'm trusting my compositor on file format of 32 bit exrs. But he is new to deep too. So my question, does this absolutely have to be 32 bit? Any other tricks on optimization? Thanks for your help. At this point hundreds of gigs for a single shot is a bit much.

Okay, so looks like things have to be 32 bit. I'm surprised houdini can't optimize even a bit?

There are plenty of options to optimize the deep files

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.0/props/mantra [sidefx.com]

Rob