If you're going through the process of doing most of the work in another app, just to render it out in real-time in Blitz....the whole exercise becomes kind of pointless. If you create something like 3D Movie Maker, it will be fun for kids to play around with, but will generally be too limited. Most 3D apps have a hardware renderer, and if you use light game style geometry, you should be able to render it more or less in real time straight to an .avi. Some of them even supports advanced shaders, shadows, multi-pass (for anti-alias, motion blur and dof) and so on.
I think the Machinima folks are interested in making movies quickly and easily, e.g. tell the character to walk there, bend down and pick up that thing and hit that other character with it etc...without going in and adding lots and lots of keyframes, moving polys and so on. The tool I would use for creating Machinima movies would be Second Life ( www.secondlife.com ), it has everything you need...including people who would be willing to star in your movies. I've also heard some rumors that Sims 2 will contain good tools for creating movies with your sims, so that might be an option.
Ragnar
I think the Machinima folks are interested in making movies quickly and easily, e.g. tell the character to walk there, bend down and pick up that thing and hit that other character with it etc...without going in and adding lots and lots of keyframes, moving polys and so on. The tool I would use for creating Machinima movies would be Second Life ( www.secondlife.com ), it has everything you need...including people who would be willing to star in your movies. I've also heard some rumors that Sims 2 will contain good tools for creating movies with your sims, so that might be an option.
Ragnar