HellBorn, You don't need AA set to superior. AA just gets rid of jaggies - try setting it to Standard - hit the edit button and set min subrays to 10 maybe 15 - the main thing is set the quality threshold slider past the middle - leaning towards best - not too far just past the middle a little. Keep doing test renders and keep nudging the quality slider to best until you get rid of the graininess. This should buy you back a lot of render time. I did a test render that looked pretty good with min subrays 12 and quality slider a few nudges past the middle. If you were doing a studio type animation you would use z depth maps and fastblur in a post processing app like After Effects or Shake. Depth of field blurs are strictly for still renders - same with HDRI. Both are done much more efficiently after the render in multi-layered passes. But the HDRI really does shine in still renders. Good luck. I bet you'll be able to cut your render time in half with what I just suggested. Scott