Blender Performance Profiling 2.7... Good Assets? Big Buck Bunny.

Hello,

I am interested in performance profiling Blender source on multiple platforms. Can anyone recommend a suitable input data set for Blender 2.7?

Big Buck Bunny appears to be a long the lines of a good candidate. It has a significant memory footprint, significant render times, takes advantage of Blenders features, Creative Commons Attribution License. However, everything I’m reading and seeing indicates it’s not meant for Blender 2.7. For example, loading Big Buck Bunnys chinchilla in 2.73a on Windows, clicking Render Image, results in a flat black rendering of the model. I’m super noob with the GUI but it appears that the light sources are spotlights not oriented toward the model. If I add a light source, I can get a legit rendering, but there are fur artifacts. Fur appears in striped coherent volumes across the characters body.



BBB assets are linked from here:
peach.blender.org/download/ —> browse at graphicall.org

Questions:
Am I doing something egregiously wrong rendering the image?
Are these blend files a non starter with 2.7? Did blender updates yield incompatibilities with lights?
Can these blend files be converted?
Would you suggest something else? How about the Sintel project?

First post here, Thank you.

-Michael