Yep, you read right.  I don’t have Sims 3 yet so please stop emailing me questions.  If you’re wondering why I didn’t buy it yet or plan to anytime soon it’s simple.  I really don’t play the game anymore and use it to make machinima.  Yes the new camera and lighting tools are kick-ass awesome in Sims 3 but without hacks and cc,  I don’t see the point.  It took me 2 days to make that silly 1 minute featured movie on the Sims 3 site and that’s because I had to sit around for hours waiting to capture a specific animation.  It’s not worth it to me, especially when we have animation customization ability in Sims 2 now.   If you ask many other seasoned machinima directors, they’ll tell you the same.  It looks as though the community is working hard and fast at cracking the game though so as soon as we get the ability to hack, I’ll be buying the game.  Anyway, I don’t know how much of this information is out there but we did get a handout on how to use the camera tool so here is the most relevant info (this guide is for the experienced Sims 2 camera user):

The keys to move the camera around such as W, S, D, A, E, Q are the same as Sims 2.  The new tool is the dutch camera which allows you to tilt from left to right, letting you create those funky Twilight Zone style angles:
SHIFT- D: tilts camera to the right
SHIFT- E: tilts camera to the left

There’s also the ability to zoom using the keys:
Z:  zooms in
X:  zooms out

You can also rotate the camera around a fixed point 360 degrees by using the left and right arrow keys- a cool feature we didn’t have in the Sims 2 (the keys I’m not absolutely sure on since I didn’t take notes).

The keys used to saving camera positions are almost the same as in Sims 2 except 4 isn’t included.  The save camera keys are from 5-9.

Now on to the good stuff that’s probably not in the booklet included with the game that you’re too lazy to read.  Find the camera file.  I don’t know where it is, they didn’t have it in the game when we were at the camp and we had to add and link to it later.  At that time it was called videocamera.ini but it might be called something else now.  If you know where it is in Sims 2, I have no doubt you’ll easily find it in Sims 3.  I messed with a lot of the numbers a bit when I was at camp but didn’t take thorough notes.  The descriptions are pretty self explanatory so don’t be afraid to play around with the numbers to test the camera (make sure you keep a backup copy!).

Controlling camera speed can be easily varied by changing the Move numbers.  You can adjust these numbers from and to an infinite range.  But just to give you some guidelines, you’ll want to use .1 or higher for very slow moving close-up shots and 50 to higher to faster moving wide-angle shots.

Move = # - changes the camera speed for horizontal movement
MoveVertical = # - changes the camera speed for vertical movement

The most important and coolest feature though is the LerpDuration.  What this number will do is control the amount of time you go from one saved camera position to another.  For example:

LerpDuration = 10 - this means that it will take 10 seconds from the camera to move from one saved position to another.  How cool is that?

Other things you’ll notice is the camera moves from one save position to another very smoothly without as much lag (which, if I remember correctly, you can actually edit in that file).  Same as Sims 2, you’ll be able to save the camera file while the game is open and have it take effect without restarting.

Lastly, for those of you who have the game, we machinima directors asked for certain features that were missing in the game.  I don’t remember the whole list (it was like 10 things) but please let me know if they included the following:
-some sort of set hour cheat
-fluidity of animations like if you string 2 animations together, they don’t go into default stand mode for a split second between animations. Same with when you make them change direction while walking.
-ability to grab Sims when you are in the neighborhood with the move objects cheat
-ability to get rid of sleeping zzz’s, musical notes/halo effects on instruments, progress bar
-some sort of way to extract and queue animations (yes, it was a stretch but I asked them for that but have little hope)