Subtitles of the Movie

Let's go ahead and take a look at something you won't get into very often but it is very important to having a good experience with Carrara, and that is working with the Preferences. You'll find the Preferences under the File Menu. You go down to the pull-down level and there are two options here that you've got. One is Preferences and one is Reset Preferences. You'll want to use Reset Preferences sometimes if strange things start happening to Carrara. This can happen for any number of reasons where things just don't show up in the rooms the way you expect them, or suddenly fonts can't be found. It means that there are corrupted Preferences in your system and simply resetting them, or reset them all back to factory defaults and create a new Preferences file which makes life good. Let's go ahead and open Preferences here and we'll take a look. The first one that opens up is Application. This is where you can check these little items here that are important. I always have mine checked for Updates. I happen to like leaving Tooltips on, and those types of things, but we'll see where those are. I skip the tips to front. If you've got that window that keeps popping up and telling you things about Carrara and you are familiar with that then you can make it go away there. Additionally, this is where you set the Maximum Undo Levels; very important if you find yourself needing to make trips back in time to repair something you've worked on. I'm not going to go through all of these, but I am going to point out a couple important ones. The rest of them are fairly self-explanatory, but I want to go over why you would want to possibly adjust some of these to yourself. Under the General tab here, if you happen to have multiple monitors like I do this is where you can go ahead and determine whether you want to split the screen across two monitors and stretch that out. Additionally, if you want to change your language at another time you can do it here, and this is where the Tooltips themselves are showing. I always like to leave mine on. Something important here, I work with a Graphics tablet and there are times I like to work with that. This is where you turn that feature on. If you want to go to Full Screen Mode this is where you turn that on as well. Another thing to take a look at is Imaging and Scratch Disks. New with Carrara 6 and into Carrara 7 is a feature called Texture Spooling. This is a way that if you're working with a very rich scene with many, many photo textures it allows Carrara to utilize the hard disk on your system rather than trying to put all that stuff into RAM and make your system drag down to its knees. If you are having some issues with programs, or I shouldn't say programs, but renders later on taking a long time to complete or getting out of memory errors which occur sometimes with very rich textures, you may want to adjust the Spool Textures to Disk here and how much memory you want to reserve to do that. You're normally OK using the defaults that come in. It actually does a little analysis real quick on your system and comes up with a default. Something else here is Temporary Documents. Periodically you will find, or I should say that Carrara doesn't always clear temporary documents when it's done. You can come here and go to that redirective, but look at the file path here, and every once in a while pop into that and see if you've got left over temporary files there. I've heard some users, and myself actually, recovered over a gigabyte of data on my drive just from temporary files that have been stored. Another one to take a look at: OpenGL format. This is where you'll want to go ahead, if you're finding things being kind of clunky in your interface when we move around that, come in here and turn on Use display lists. This will make it faster for some cards but as a little prompt says here: slower on others, it really depends on the hardware that you've got installed. Let's go down to Render Room. This is where you find the specific IP addresses if you're working with Carrara Pro to go ahead and set up the Render Nodes so you can utilize other computers on your network to assist Carrara in its rendering, this is where all these are set and we'll go over that real briefly at the end of this series, in the special Rendering section. So, that's the Preferences file. Go ahead and explore some of those, set them up, change the colors if you want, but the ones I pointed out are some important ones that actually affect the functionality of your experience with Carrara.