I'm going to field this first as I'm the CG guy who did the animating and rendering. I appreciate your feedback!
You have good points of course; I'll just point out a few things that will probably just sound like excuses in the end, but it's what it is. 1) This shot is not only my first effects animation, but is basically the first effects shot I have ever done, still or otherwise (the DS graphics are more just "graphics" than effects in my mind). After I did the graphics we testingly slid into feeling out accomplishing this shot. I was giving it my best go doing what the said he wanted, feeding him little tests, seeing what he thought...leading to what you see in this edit (a remotely final composite of which I still have not even seen myself yet!
).2) The camera motion looking "CG": Again, this is my first effects animation, and I am not a student of anyone who does this, have not read up on the art of carrying this out. I felt I was already juggling so much just to get what you see completed. Had I the experience to show/offer Ady such an improvement, he probably would have liked it, but... To my slight credit, for the pan I did avoid just perfectly tracking the center TIE (the kind of thing I actually see movies a lot and it bugs me); the camera turning is done independently, you see the TIEs fall out of frame for a little bit... I'm kinda proud of that, even if it isn't much.
3) I had no composite materials of the shot on my end beyond my renders, did not have his edit of the battle into which I could see what was coming before and after this shot, that was all on Ady's side -- and Ady didn't have a finished, fully blurred render until about five days ago, when he wanted the project released. While I could have requested he send me the layers and such, he was undstandably *busy*, and I didn't want to come across as trying to overstep my bounds. He knew what he wanted, and truth be told it all was fine to me for the most part from what I was seeing, what he was explaining. The guy is good!
Had I had the composite layers and more of the edit in my hands, maybe my "CG animator" eyes would have noticed these things you mentioned, like a better/more accurate blur length and the camera being too rock-solid -- or maybe my inexperience would have failed me, which I will honestly say is a possibilty. In fact, I picked the final mo-blur setting here, not Ady -- but it was a virtual shot in the dark for me as I was only going by playbacks in VirtualDub of the raw, uncomposited renders alone. Again, we were kind of hands-tied in a lot of ways putting this together. He's in the UK, I'm in California, I only have dial-up for e-communicating/sending... although I honestly think even just the CG side of this shot looks a bit better than a reasonable expectation for the how the end result could look given the resources and experience of the people who put it together for the kind of shot it is (or maybe not...?)4) Deadline -- Rendering this was going to take a long time on my computer as it was a 1.3 millions poly scene (<-plus motion blurring that!); With how much Ady was juggling we simply didn't have the time to do many tests -- and besides, our tests we did complete all looked pretty good to us
-- and we reached a point where it seemed like a good "go" and we went for the final render to have a hope of getting this thing done. (There's more to the story, but this is already long.)5) As far as the DS surface looking like mush, we did try to get the jedilaw's "DS surface greeble pack" working for us, but we just didn't have the resources in the end for that to happen (converting the meshes to LW, lighting them, animating, then rendering those MANY polygons!).
Anyway, I hope that sheds some light on this, hope I didn't come off as too defensive. Honestly, it's cool to hear (for me anyway) feedback. Lastly, obviously it's not really up to me if upgrades to effects are done for this edit.