[playbass06]

Well, what renderer are you using? I'd assume mentalray?

If you can, switch over to Arch&Design shaders, and try to use "Glossy Reflections" on as many areas as you can for reflective surfaces. They save time. Depth of Field and motion blur effects are also things to be avoided, they'll easily make render times 10x what they were (depending on the # of samples).

I've spent a good amount of time optimizing our scenes with these materials, and it's usually around 2:45 (min:sec) per frame at 720p (but our setup is a 3.2 GHz i7 and 8GB DDR3 RAM). But if you're spending half an hour on one frame... you've got a lot of stuff in there. How many faces are in your scene? Ours is just over 250,000. If yours is significantly above that (>1mil) you may want to do some serious poly reduction. Do you have any other machines/licenses of 3ds Max? Use Backburner to do some network rendering.

And, just out of curiosity, why are you doing over 1000 frames? The video is limited to 30 seconds, which at 24 frames/second, would amount to 720 frames maximum.

Good luck, hope you get the render times down.