Today's What's Up

Bleh. I actually named my old company after Braidwood. Although it was the nuclear power plant, not the town. The town? They throw people in jail for no reason there. Meh.
OK, so in Blender the vector blur should be set to ".5" to replicate a 180-degree shutter. And now you know.
I think I've finally hit the end of my computer's ability to work for us. It may just be the graphics card. It may be that I don't have 12GB of RAM and a 6-core processor. I don't know. I'm thinking I should get a used HP or something with an i7-970. Videoguys has system recommendations. The thing is, about half the price of the computer is just in the dang video card. You can easily spend a thousand dollars for one.

We, like everyone else, are thinking about jumping ship as far as Apple's Final Cut Pro is concerned. I want to be conservative about the jump though. We'll likely stay on FCP 7 for another year or so.

Yep, we're using this laser sword plugin.
+++++
Do you like notes about how to use Blender? Sure you do. Here are some notes about finding the rigging of a special version of the Sintel dragon that Nathan Vegdahl hit me up with:

In the dragon.blend file, the armature for the dragon should be on the
scene layer just to the right of the bottom left layer.  If it's not
there, hit alt-h to unhide.  If that doesn't work, then perhaps the
armature layers are all turned off (I'm pretty sure I didn't leave it
that way, but it's possible).  In that case go to the outliner, which
should be at the upper-right of the blender window, and find the "rig"
object and click there to select it.

Select the armature, and go into pose mode (ctrl-tab, or use the mode
menu in the header at the bottom of the 3d view).  In the n-panel
(toggled on and off by hitting "n" while the mouse cursor is in the 3d
view) there should be a tab labeled something like "rig layers".  You
should be able to toggle control visibility with that.  If that
doesn't work, then the rig controls may be hidden for some reason.
Toggle on all of the layers, and press alt-h to unhide the bones.

If that still doesn't work, then the rig armature may have been
accidentally switched to solid display instead of wire display.  Make
sure the armature is selected, and go to the object properties (the
solid cube icon in the properties window on the right).  Find the
"display" tab.  There should be a drop-down menu in there labeled
"type".  Select "wire" from the drop-down.

Unless something is really, really weird, you should at least see the
rig controls by now.  You should be able to select them and pose them,
now (g for grab, r for rotate, s for scale--or turn on the transform
widgets in the 3d view header, whichever you are more comfortable
with).