[Sunny Thaper]

Probably the best thing that helped me and my former team was during the offseason we concentrated on learning other things inside of 3D Max, such as After Effects and Premiere. You won't believe how useful those two tools can be, in fact I would say 5 sec out of our 30 sec was completely After Effects, which only took maybe an hour to accomplish, but if we had done it with Max I think I would have still been working on it to today

The second tip I can offer is if you are in a big group of animators, or even a not so big one, experiment with Xref, it can really save you some time and effort when it comes to bringing everything together in the end.