Poser is okay to use for animating (primarily using the Graph editor), and you can't beat having access to the gazillion figures, props and clothing that are available, just never try to render finished animation in Poser. I compose the animation in Poser, and render preview animations in it to see the movements, then bring the animated models over to C4D.  RorrKonn, if you're like me, your most precious commodity is time, so anything you can do to save time is a major plus, and that definitely includes buying/downloading as many characters and props I can rather than building them myself.  When it comes to animating, the thing that should take up most of your time is animating, since that's where the rubber hits the road. The rendering time, as long as you can get it to a reasonable amount of time, shouldn't be your biggest concern--what I do for longer renders is just let them run overnight, which makes the rendering time a small concern since I'm asleep anyway--most decent packages will allow you to gang up animations if you have more than one ready to roll, but realistically that rarely happens, for me at least. Animating one character for a scene is usually about as much as I can do in an evening, and often it takes a couple evenings to get one ready to run. I agree with earlier comments that you don't necessarily need After Effects, editing programs like Premiere or FinalCut are probably fine for what you probably need, since 99% of what you're going to do is probably going to be just cuts, dissolves and compositing.

Anyway, that's my 2¢.--Tim