Question of the day take two

Wired asks: How strong are Hobbits?

ah, but the point of hobbits was to show that the weak/meek inherit the earth.

they also estimate the wingspan of Smaug.

Medically, Hobbits are based on African Pygmies, or pituitary midgets, who are "normal' in shape but smaller.

Dwaves are usually bulky, which is why the term is used for the fairly common problem of Dwarfism, a genetic problem.
Wikipedia article on Nordic Dwarves.

So what is the association of short, bulky people and mining?
Children were often used in mines because they were smaller...
Miners traditionally are poor, so smaller, and some may have ricketts from not getting sunlight working as child miners, but would be muscular too.

In the original film, they used forced perspective to show the differences in height. So how do you do that in 3 D?

Joe: There’s one case where it did matter, though. Back with the “Lord of the Rings,” we could do force-perspective tricks – bring Gandalf closer to the camera and put Frodo farther away, and one could look bigger and one could look smaller. When you put the glasses on you realize how far apart they are, that trick no longer works.
So we came up with this idea – especially because we wanted to keep the cameras moving – to actually synchronize two cameras together on two separate stages. So Gandalf was on one stage, the dwarves on another stage and Peter can see them both in his monitor together and direct both of them. But they both had to keep in their heads where the other virtual person was going to be that was wandering through Bag End.