Thanks for the reply. I think I'll stick with VUE for now ... I can do the wide landscape shots there, and the closer shots in Carrara ...

Here is where I found the San Francisco DEM's, I downloaded the "San Francisco North" file, including the Golden Gate, the Peninsula, and Alcatraz Island, all of which are part of my animation. It downloads as a text file, which you have to convert to a *.dem file by getting Windows to delete the *.txt extension. Windows Explorer can do this if you kick it hard enough ...

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/dem/dem.html