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Allocating More RAM to combustion

Your ability to play back clips in real time is controlled by the amount of memory on your system, the amount available to combustion, and the amount allocated for caching. The number of frames that you can render to RAM depends on the resolution, color depth, and size of the images.

You can increase the maximum amount of memory combustion can use for caching, and (for Macintosh OS 9) increase the application memory size. Macintosh OS X has dynamic memory allocation.

Note: Another preference related to RAM is the Render Cache Size for the Paint operator. For details, see Setting Paint Preferences.

To increase the cache usage:
  1. Choose File | Preferences, or press Ctrl+; (Windows) or Command+; (Macintosh).

    2. The Preferences dialog appears.

  2. In the Host category, select Caching.

    3. The Caching preferences appear.

  3. Enter a value in the Maximum Cache Usage field.

    4. The value initially appears in percentage of the total available memory. You can also select MBytes from the adjacent list to set the number of megabytes.

  4. Click OK.
To change the application memory size (Macintosh):
  1. Close combustion and all other applications.
  2. In the Finder, choose About This Computer from the Apple menu.

    3. The Largest Unused Block value shows how much memory is currently available on your system.

  3. Subtract 2 MB from this number (which the system requires) and take note of the new value.
  4. Close the About This Computer dialog.
  5. Select the combustion icon in its application folder.
  6. In the Finder, choose File | Get Info | Memory.
  7. In the Preferred Size field, enter a number that is larger than the default memory allocation, but smaller than the number that you noted in step 3.

    8. Note: The larger this number, the less memory will be available to run other applications simultaneously with combustion.

  8. Close the Info dialog.

For the Macintosh, the amount of memory that appears on the combustion status bar is approximately 70% of the value in the Maximum Cache Usage field (in the preferences). For example, if you set the Preferred Size to 400000 KB, and leave Maximum Cache Usage at 100%, the value on the status bar is 274 MB.

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