UIImageView animation causing crash

I have a UIAnimation view that plays an array of PNG images as an animation. There are about 200 frames and total size is about 8 MB. The animation works just fine on simulator and iPhone 4, but when I test on iPhone 3GS, the app crashes due to the animation.

I've tried using UIImage imageNamed:, but I read that using imageWithData might 开发者_开发技巧be faster, so I have this:

            NSString *imageName=[NSString stringWithFormat:@"fishBg_%i.png", i];
            NSString *fileLocation = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:imageName ofType:nil];
            NSData *imageData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:fileLocation];
            [animationArray addObject:[UIImage imageWithData:imageData]];

What can my problem be? When I reduce the number of frames to about 100, then the animation plays and the app doesn't crash. But when I bring up the frame count to 200, then the app crashes. What's a better way to do this? The animation is a PNG sequence of transparent images, so I'm not sure if I'd be able to convert this to a video and keep its transparency and place other images under it.

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Since we need to conserve as much memory as possible here (assuming that’s why you’re crashing), try managing memory more explicitly:

NSString *imageName=[[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"fishBg_%i.png", i];
NSString *fileLocation = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:imageName ofType:nil];
[imageName release];
UIImage *theImage = [[UIImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:fileLocation];
[animationArray addObject:theImage];
[theImage release];