It seems to me that Carrara renders to my computers RAM. I say this because everytime i render an animation that is over a certain duration, the application crashes. Then if I restart the computer and check the Trash ( I'm on a Mac), I find my movie in the trash in a folder called "rescued items..." and it is fully playable. I take this to mean that Carrara renders the animation to RAM or the invisible "Temporary Items Folder" at the root of my Hard Drive (Hence the reason for having to save the animation to disk after it is already rendered). If this is the case then the system requirements stated in the manual are incorrect since the RAM requirements would be directly relative to the length or size of the file you're rendering. Am I just rambling, or does this make any sense??? C9

Pretty much all of the activities you do in programs of all sorts are held in ram until you save to disk. When the Mac crashes or is shut down, it attempts to rescue the contents of ram which would be whatever you were doing before said crash or shut down. Sometimes the rescued files are usable, sometimes not. The minimum memory amount set in the memory control panel is close to the stated system requirements which is what the program needs to have all of its functions available. And you are right, ram requirements will be directly relative to the size of the file you are working with. As will the number of undos you can expect to obtain. Some programs will open with a fairly small amount of ram, yet do not run optimally without much more, such as Photoshop - it'll open with 24mb ram but it doesn't begin to hum without at least three times that much. Now I'm rambling but yes, you make perfect sense.

Hi C9, If you render directly from the file you're working on it goes directly into RAM. For larger images and movies, use the Batch Render as it renders to disk and purges RAM. In the preferences, there is an option to, "Save batch renders every XX minutes" or something like that. Mine is set to every 15 minutes to make sure that I don't fill up RAM on the big files. Mark

Hi all, I thought it made sense but I wanted to make sure. Thanks. But, then how come applications like Adobe After Effects and Infini-D don't require you to manually save renders to disk??? Maybe this is why Carrara renders faster??? I'm just trying to figure out the reason for the extra step of saving and why I get that "file not found" error. I will of course try that "batch render" thing. Thanks for pointing that out. Incidentally, I think that Carrara is a fine application. Some things just need to be worked out. I was also wondering about the QTVR assistant in Infini-D. Is there any way to do this in Carrara??? Maybe with the advent of MetaStream QTVR was done away with. But that, I guess, is another post. Thanks Again, C9

Actually After Effects 4.0 did require you to manually save to disk. 4.1 fixed this (and later a patch to 4.0)but if you watch your ram as it renders it fills up every single spec of ram you allocated before it starts writting to your file. I am totally excited that we are switching to NT this summer as most graphics programs just dont deal with ram the way I want them to on a mac.