On Friday, I had the occasion (read emergency as a result of miscommunication) to make two 5 minute machinema demos of existing content. The good news is that the build was done, the avatar(s) outfitted, and a rough script was already in place. Oh, and they didn’t need audio.
End-to-end took about 2.5 hours. The absolutely critical non-standard bits were Camtasia (for capture, edit, and production) and a 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator to run the flycam. I needed a bit more free space on disk, too, so I copied raw footage off disk when I wasn’t working on it.
Lessons: you can’t have too detailed a script! rendering takes more time and you’ll need more disk space than you might think.