Yeah, see, that's the thing. i did all those things (finally), and it's better (now there is  lip synching and head and eye movements, and the santa morph came thru) but far from perfect: no blinks, no eyebrow motion,  and can't make meaningful keyframe changes when back in Poser with the pose/animation applied. Meaning, I can't for example apply some smile or lip pucker in a layer on top.

In Mimic, the keyframes for the blinks, etc are present, but they have no effect.
Weird. An obvious case of shit not working like it's supposed to... either my brain or their crap.   

Okay, I found the problem. I had to go in to Poser's general preferences and unselect "use external binary morph targets", and "use file compression" while I was at it.

Kudos to Vicki Tolonen author of this tutorial,  for tipping me off:

http://www.daz3d.com/i/tutorial/tutorial?id=1886&_m=d

Now santa looks like santa, and there is actual lip synching going on, and head and eye movement, but still no eyebrows or blinks. Curious.

Okay, I did all the steps correctly,

• Saved the morph-injected character in the poser Library as D3 Santa
• Complete the Session manager with appropriate .wav, .txt, cr2, dmc (David) files
• ticked on head, eyes, eyebrows, blink

-Everything is correct, yes sir, correct I heartily say again-

but, hit play,  the character in Mimic has only one movement, the head movement. No blinks, no eyebrows, no eyes, not even a lip tremor, let alone synch.

That dmc file (David) that's in the default menu...that's the one to use, right?

What kinda dark xmass voodoo is in this DAZ Santa for David that makes all lipsynching schemes go to sh*t?

or is it just my weary brain cells, my frazzled limbic system, and that I' m not seeing something obvious?

Thanks, Koroyume, that's exactly what I needed to know. I need a decently lip-synched D3 Santa, fast. Cool part is, just a short sentence will be enough, but hand tweaking even a short sentence in Poser's god-awful animation utilities are enough to trap me in the NIghtmare Before Christmas.
Jeez, what don't I hate about (the actual) animating in Poser?:  let's see: keyframing, animation layers, splines, selecting... yep,  hate all of those. I guess there isn't anything i don't hate about (the actual) animating in Poser. Still, I maintain, at this point it's merits outweigh it's infuriations. It's a must-have for me...all those cheap assets,!

Speaking of love, I forgot to spread some to The Owl, the Originator of TheTip, in the first place. Thanks! I now have Mimic, we'll see how it collides with my finicky brain pan today.

Wow, Kuroyume's opinion came in in right "underneath" my post as I was typing, so now I know I must do this acquisition. Kuroyume has helped me in the past with good advice...don't remember what, exactly, but...yeah, it's on. I hope MImic is easy to learn and works well, because It's on now.

I may have to, yeah? How wonderful is it, really? 

Another point: I could use Lightwave (a fairly serious 3D app that I know fairly well) but I use Poser because of the vast range of cheap stuff : fully rigged characters, clothes, props, scenery, etc.
For the level of stuff I'm doing (animated ecards), that outweighs the fact that it's a buggy, cobbled together idiosyncratic pile of crap that's extremely irritating to learn to use compared to the more "elegant" and powerful serious 3Dapps.  In spite of it's infuriating shortcomings, Poser still actually saves time because of it's merits.

Thanks so much, that's what I thought probably should exist, but didn't know if it did...heh heh, if you know what I mean.  Gotta love these Poseresque prices, too!  

re: Now you know what to use: openEXR.

Actually, I do not own Poser Pro, so... my "workaround" is to either:

a) do the entire animation in Lightwave and/or Motionbuilder, with UV pass mapped onto 3D geometry and rendered separately from the "main" animation.

b) Use Poser 7 to do the character animations that I'd rather do there (than in Lightwave), and then do the UV pass in Fusion 5 (a compositing package) where I am basically hand-teasing the UV pass to visually integrate with the rendered animation. 

Option B is what I used for the "contemplate this" title, which is quite crude, and I know I can do better. It's 6 of 1, half a dozen of the other, in terms of which method to use.

The deep bit depth is needed only for the UV pass, and I'm sure it has to do with the sensitivity needed to replace one map with another, which is essentially what's going on with the PhotoInside process. The final output is a flash .flv file with visible compression. The whole issue is simply satisfying the requirement of their proprietary fly-render, map-tracking and replacing software. See? The UV pass bitmap that you map into your animation is a color/saturation gradient. The saftware needs to "see" this in very fine detail, in order to "know" how/where to map the user photo. The "how and where" can include not just movement but distortions, warping, exploding, reconstituting, etc etc that the animator has occuring to the UV map. 
Final formats acceptable to them are PNG and TIF. Again, only the UV pass needs to be 64 bit.
Only PhotoInside animations have these requirements. If you want to submit something not PhotoInside enabled, almost any old thing is god enuf, as long as it is video :)

Kuroyume, thank you for your enthusiasm, but please re-read my initial post.
I stated from the outset, 64 bit (16 X 4 channels).  16 bits per channel, not 64.
16 X 4 = 64.
AKA 64 bit RGB file.
If you go to any high-end 3D package, you will see the option to output various 64 bit RBG formats.

I suppose you would have to investigate the Lightfactory PhotoInside process to totally understand why this is needed, but it has to do with their render-on-the-fly UV mapping process. They give you a 64 bit map (a RGB color gradiant they use to "track" the UV pass), you integrate that into your animation, render as a seperate pass, and hand the various passes of your animation (BG, UV, FG) back to them. A user can then upload a photo, and it will be mapped, on-the-fly, into the animation, thus personalizing it. I hope this clears that up for you :) 

Thanks all,  for the feedback. Boy, I can see the curiosity humming. Yes, this is a real requirement

for a render-on-the-fly application (user-personalized animated ecards). I'm one of the artists on that site that has a Photo-Inside animation...needless to say, I didn't get the UV pass out of Poser
on that one :)   
-BTW, that's in the ZEN category, titled "Contemplate This"

...but I was sort of hoping, as I'm laying out my next animation, and it would be really convenient, in this case...oh, well, the workaround isn't so bad I guess.

...Yes! Something like multiple waving tentacles or branches  would  be much easier to animate with realism, with such a script...

Yeah, totally makes sense,   I do  think that would cover it.
Just some "random" thoughts: the first two are comparable to a "humanize" function in music, commonly applied to a machine drum beat to make it a bit less perfect  The last one is what I was keying in on. Of course, in using the first 2  but not the 3rd it could be just pure noise (no carrier wave).