If I want to make an actual animation, do I have to put it through 3d studio or can I export it out of Poser somehow?

You can export it out but it will be exporting a rastor format (animated gif or avi) and not vector images. Swift3d and Vecta3d deal in importing 3ds or dxf files, then making the animation there. So you couldn't do a walk animation unless you exported each frame as a seperate 3ds file.

I was very disappointed when I got my hands on both Swift and Vecta. I was hoping to export poser chacters out to Flash cartoons and found both products useless for this. The best way I found is to import the images from poser into flash a frame at a trace them into vectors. here is an animation made this way: http://www.vidivox.com/showpages/s18zorger.htm

Export your animation from Poser by selecting the whole animation and making each frame a different 3ds file. Once in vecta, open the first file : xxxx001.3ds and a window will pop up, asking you to import it at a sequence or a single file. Chosse sequence, pose your model ( only the first frame will be displayed ) in the 3d view. When you will export it to swf, vecta will render each frame after the other one and voila, you got your anim ( but huge size! ). You'll have to optimize it in flash...