Well, exactly. 1 hour per frame is way too long for animation purposes -- just multiply it out.

Suppose you want to do a 5 minute short (which incidentally I have done using Poser and Vue). If it took 1 hour per frame:

5 minute movie x 60 seconds per minute = 300 seconds
300 seconds x 30 fps = 9000 frames
9000 frames x 1 hour per frame = 9000 hours
9000 hours / 24 hours per day = 375 days

So that means rendering 24 hours a day for more than a year to get a 5 minute movie. Nobody has that much patience, not even the pro studios.

1 minute per frame is more like it, and unless you have a render farm that means rendering smaller images with fewer effects. There are other tricks to cut time without sacrificing too much quality. Once I wanted to render a volumetric sunset with a soaring eagle. Rendering every frame with full effects would have taken 6 days for the 5 second sequence, if I remember correctly. But I rendered the volumetric atmosphere once, so the first frame took an hour. Then I set up that image as a background and superimposed the soaring bird over it. The remaining 149 frames only took another hour and you couldn't tell the difference from doing it the long way.

In any case I'm sure you'll have fun with Vue 5 once you get it, whether for stills or animations. I know I do! :-)