How long does it take to render a 20s animation? no too complex scene, fairly ok and what are your system spec?

How long is a piece of string? :) Seriously it depends on what size and quality. Maybe give an idea what you are rendering and people can give a rough comparison. With systems, a good way to speed up, almost essential for animations imho, are a few extra machines. This will improve you speed dramatically, far more than extra ram etc. You can build little shuttle systems for a couple of hundred pounds with no monitors etc. Bare bones and a good cpu. I am guessing you are thinking it is taking a while to render your animation?

How about rendering an average image, measure that and multiply that with the number of frames you plan to render? Will give you a good guess, better than every vague figure anybody can tell you. How about 500 hours? Or 2 minutes? You are the only one who can find out!

Just start it rendering when you go to bed, and hope its finished when you get up! :) Kutter

ya thats what I nor,ally do but when I wake up, OUCH comp is frozen. My system is BRAND new got it about 2 days ago. Its 3.0G p4 with 2gram. I have awesome asus 3d card with opengl and 2 hdds with 120g each. What can be wrong?

I think it still needs some more information. What format do you render to? Etc. Maybe you do a search her in the threads or in the backroom. I am sure that this was discussed before. That will be the fastest. I normally don't do much animation AND i am on Mac. So i can't help really technically. But again, i know that this issues are discussed before. Find them!

I output in avi format. I will output in quicktime in the near future. What should I do the search on? If possible can u post some links here?

Well output will not effect the render speed much. I would search on speeding up renders, render speed, etc. Seems to be lots in here go and have a gander :)

No, output will not have much effect to rendering speed - BUT to crash or not. Do a search for "animation" or "rendering" or "format" etc etc. Because i am not doing animation (very much), i can't remember precicely where the information is, but i am pretty sure it is in this forum.