[jfelser]

My team had the same problem last year - we were getting render times around 20 minutes for both the safety animation and normal animation. We ended up just having to dial down the settings (mental ray samples per pixel etc...) in order to get decent times. This year, we built our animation with frame times in mind, and made pretty extensive use of wireframe in the finished anim. We used previews of everything first, too, so that we could tweak animations and edits without having to rerender anything. Minimizing the number of lights is always good, turning off shadows for any place where you do not explicitly need them is good, using as few foliage models (or anything super complex) is always good, using mental ray if you have reflections is good, the list goes on...

Anyways, this year the average frame time is less than 30 seconds for our animation, so I guess the work paid off. Especially with that early 2/13 deadline ready and waiting.