Yeah, even big studios don't often use actual GI/HDRI calculations in their renders. For years, the meathod of choice has always been to fake the look using standard lighting. It's faster, and can be made to fake the look of actual GI quite well (if you know how to set up the light rigs). Nowadays, there are renderers out there for higher end programs that make true GI and HDRI rendering "production-capable", but it's still much slower per frame than using standard lights, and also... HDRI rendering for animation requires your GI sampling to be set quite high to avoid artifacting and flickering. HDRI lighting is still unpredictable at lower settings for animation, even in the best renderers. I've used Vray for 3dsmax (which boasts some of the fastest GI calculations in the biz), and still it was up to 3 times slower than using a standard light dome to fake GI, and when I tried HDRI lighting on anything less than very high settings, I got problems with flickering and surface issues. Looked really GREAT though at high settings, but the frames were just taking too long to render.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.