Expert: Russell Calabrese - 11/29/2006

Question
Hello Sandeep.  I have a question about creating an animation and having enough memory.  Some while ago I created an ocean with Maya Fluids.  Then I created an oval, added some glow to it and had this oval fly over the ocean like an angel.  I did not have any shadows or anything.  I rendered at production quality for about 300 frames.  Then I went into Adobe After effects and added some opening credits.  After completing this 10 second animation, the final avi file ended up being 2 Gigs.  Obviously I want to create longer and better movies.  However if 10 seconds was 2 gigs, I realize that a 4 minute animation would be very large depending on what all i have in it.  My question is, would buying an "external" hard drive that can hold say 400 Gigs allow me to make longer animations without taking vast amounts of room on my computer.  Or does it have to be an internal hard drive?  I have a Dell PC Pentium 4, 2.66 GHZ, 128 MB of RAM if that helps any.

Answer
Hi Vincent,

Your computer might be a bit slow for this kind of animation. If possible, see if you can upgrade the processor to a Pentium 5 or get a fast video card that can run on your computer. You also can use a lot more RAM memory. 2 Gigs of RAM would be good. I use an external drive for my projects. I suggest a 1Terrabyte or a 500 Gig firewire disc.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

Russell