How to create animated mask emitter

Hello all!

I was intrigued by the clip shown in the sneak peek video for pi 3.0 where you see the figure of a man rendered as fire, smoke, etc. I understand that this is created by using a masked emitter... I am unclear however, on what file format is the best to use for this... I have photoshop 7 (and I just downloaded the patch for pi 3.0 so I can use psd files), can I use this to create an animated image and import it into PI?

What I want to do is create a human figure mask to which I will attach an emitter (for example, create a demon with fire and smoke emitters which I will render in pI and overlay in vegas 4.0) Or is there some other software package that you would suggest would work better for this (to create the initial image...)

Thanks in advance for the help...

Bryan Steagall