Also, the fewer lights you use, the faster it will render. If possible, turn off shadows for as many lights as you can, too. All of that adds up to a lot of "set up" time for Poser for each frame. You can definitely go with smaller texture files, too, especially if the characters are moving quickly between frames.

Be sure that you're rendering to a realistic frame size, too. For example, if you're planning to post the result onto the web, you may end up having to reduce the results to 320x240 or so anyway, so you might as well render at that size.

If you do use the FireFly renderer, turn off ray tracing. You really only need that for ray traced reflections and a few other things that shouldn't make much of a difference in the quality of your animation. Ray tracing really slows down each frame's render time. You can also try increasing your bucket size if you've got a good amount of RAM in your machine.

Lastly, considering going with a lower frame rate. NTSC video (American and others) frame rate is about 30 fps, PAL video (European and others) is 25, and most commercial film is 24. However, American TV typically uses 12, prints each frame twice in post-work for 24, then stretches it to 30 (well, 29.97, to pick nits) and the quality isn't awful. Some Japanes anime shops even go down to 8 frames per second (tripling the results to 24) so they can concentrate on higher quality artwork. These are all options for reducing your render time, and sometimes these methods can generate some interesting effects.

The bottom line is that Poser isn't really the best animation tool in the world, but a lot of people make really nice animations in a reasonable amount of time by trading off the above parameters. You also need to keep in mind that ALL computer animation takes a long time. Even the big boys that make Hollywood hits spend hours and hours on their high-end machines rendering those huge frames. Just the nature of the beast, really.

Captain Jack