Decreasing render times

[Setsanto]

Hey,

This is the first year the team I'm in is entering an animation. The thing is, though we're doing an animation which I believe is quite good considering our skill level, we're looking at 4min 30s render times, which we're going to need to cut down. Any major suggestions? We are using mental ray with final gather (on what amounts to low default setting), and no funky stuff like Hair and Fur etc. I tried using scanline, but it came out very dark and awful. Any suggestions?

~Setsanto

P.S. A kind of related question, why doest the daylight system show up on mental ray?