Hi, Kevin -
Just an update so you don't feel as if you wasted your time. I've had other things occupying my time lately.
I took a quick look at Fusion, but I really can't/don't want to drop several hundred dollars on software I only have one specific use for.
Tangentially, the new version of HDRShop seems to be inaccessible. I've tried a couple of times to get a key from the group at USC running the gig. No response through the licensing web page, nor by emailing them directly.
The end objective is to get depth data loaded into an OpenGL texture. I just wanted to verify that the data was there, and see what format it was in. I guess I'll skip the intermediate steps and build a static lib from the latest version of tifflib, then see if I can load the image directly and check out the results.
I'll keep you posted. And I'll post a clip file of the render and render layer nodes along with screenshots of the image and depth data as I'm seeing it. I'm probably wrong, but I'm a-thinkin' it'll come down to data loss when going to an 8-bit/channel format with the z data.