The shaders in Poser 5 permit you to load existing animations for use as materials. This is done with the Movie node, found among the 2D Texture nodes.

I've successfully loaded .avi videos and animated .gifs with the Movie node; it doesn't accept MPEG videos or QuickTime .mov files. Perhaps we can badger CL into adding additional file support.

The Movie node can be plugged into various channels, so you can create animated textures, displacement maps, transparency maps, etc. The effects possible with this shader are limited only by your imagination.

Animated Transmap (MPEG video, 762 KB)

In the example, I'm using a video clip as a transmap. I've placed several square props in front of and behind Sabrina, and applied a short, homemade video clip of falling snow as a transmap to each prop. This technique could also be used to simulate rain.

The shader tree for one of the square props is illustrated above. It doesn't get much simpler than this. All I had to do was plug the Movie node into the transparency channel, with the value set to 1. As your animation moves forward, the Movie node automatically frame-advances your video material.