I do have After Effect production bundle 6.0, which of course supports z-depth. I have yet to do any 3D work in AE, but I imagine it's pretty easy as I'm pretty comfortable in AE in general.

It just seems to me that keyframing the camera parameters would be easier. You know, set a keyframe on frame 1 with focal distance = 15, move to frame 50 and set a new keyframe of focal distance 25, etc. But apparently it doesn't work that way?

Someone on another forum mentioned to use a locater and tie the focal distance to the locater. Seems overkill to me, but I admit I'm just learning this, so I'll reserve analyzing it until I'm more familiar.

Thanks for the input, I'll try the post-production method. Presumably that's going to have a slightly different look, right? Not that it really matters for what I'm doing, but I could see where someone would prefer one render look over the other.