Stuff I missed...

• I heard about an interaction trick by Hal Bertram shown at the RenderMan users' group meeting, sending RenderMan into a loop, running constantly, so the scene can be modified during rendering.
• I did not get a chance to check out PFTrack and PFMatch by The Pixel Farm. They looks great, feature-wise, esp. PFTrack's integrated pixel flow, plus it runs on Linux.
  Update: Looking at literature from the show, there's a new PFMatch plugin for Shake 4 for $800 which pretty much does everything PFTrack (standalone) does-- very interesting, esp. since compositors would not need to learn a new program (read: SynthEyes).