CompuServe Messages

I'm doing an animation for a client who wants quite a lot of devices he manufactures to be flying by in different (depth)layers. I approached this problem by scanning in photos of these devices, applying a single colour to the background of the photos with PhotoStyler, creating from this picture a b/w mask and combining the two resulting pictures in a material as decal texture map and opacity map. This material is then assigned in the 3D Editor to 2d quads of the correct aspect ratio. So far, so good, the result is looking as expected… The problem I've encountered now is that this methods costs a considerable amount of RAM. As I have to render to 1280*960 stills, I scanned the photos at an average size of 1000*500. The use of 8 different maps leads to a memory usage of 96 megabytes which is tolerable for the moment (Yes, I was able to rig my computer up to 96 megs, fortunately…), but what if my client wants to see 16 devices hovering around in one scene? Is there a way to reduce the amount of memory used for rendering this scene? Am I right to understand that 3DS uses a 64 bit colorspace – meaning that every single pixel of my maps eats 8 bytes? If that's true, is there a way to switch to 24 bit colorspace? Or do you know another method of doing this animation? Scaling down the maps won't work as the edges get too jaggy. In order to calculate the amount of memory used for maps, is there a formula which can be used not only by the savantry but also by plain people? <g> Any help appreciated, Volker