Today I finally got my SpaceNavigator - a must for anyone wanting to do smooth camera movement (as well as lots of other cool things). There are in-world cameras that can help to create camera tracking and crane shots, but the SpaceNavigator is by far the easiest and most effective tool to use. It averages for about $100 in Australia (and about $60 in the US) Torley Linden has some great tutorials here.

When it comes to setting up a killa system, speed is the key. Get a powerful graphics card, fast hard drives and plenty of RAM.

In January '08 I put together a system I'm still really happy with. Intel Q6600 2.4Ghz quad-core processor, 4GB Ram, 2x750GB SataII HDs, NVidia 8800GT graphics card and 24" HDMI monitor. My system is able to capture high definition (ie1920x1080 resolution) if I need it. I will look at the pros and cons of High Def in another blog.

This is a dedicated machinima machine, as I will be doing my editing on a separate Avid Media Composer.

I will be using Camtasia to capture DVCPro (Standard Definition) in 16:9 (and I will show some tests in the next blog of the best compression options to use)

AWM Mars captures uncompressed High Definintion footage using HyperCam and has a very fast system.

"In order to do so, I have a powerful graphics card nVidia 7950GTX from XpertVision that allows me to overclock it, this is combined with 2GB of fast matched pair system ram and 4 SATA II HD's array, each having their own controller. The HD's are commercial quality and have over 100,000 MTBF rating, they also have 16mb cache each. I can theoretically suck down over 12GB per second of data. I keep both my OS and SL on 2 other fast SATA II HD's, both using separate HD caches."

If you have a Linux system Allen Kerensky has put together a nifty wiki with lots of useful tips.