I've got a custom OpenGL based rendering engine and I'd like to add support for cinema-type scene animation. The artist that is helping me uses primarily 3DSMax. I'd like a file format for exporting and importing this data. I'm also in need of a file format for skeletal animation data, which may have an impact here.

I've been looking at MAXScript to manually export this stuff, which would buy me the most flexibility, but I have virtually no experience with 3DSMax itself, so I get a little lost when it comes to terminology.

So I'd like to know what file formats exist for animated scene data, and whether they are appropriate for my use (my fear is that they will be way too broad for my fairly simple needs.)

The way I view animated scene data is basically a bunch of references to [animated] models with keyframe-based matrices describing their orientation over time. And probably some special camera stuff to handle perspective. I might also want some event type stuff for adding/removing objects. Is this a sane concept?