Mark,

 Here is the final image, the lighting in the animation doesn't look quite as nice but it is okay. I am using "light through transparency"  (but not in the gi settings) for the cloud haze layer and bump on the ground, so a quite a bit of bump in the image.  The image was at 322 X 480 and took 13 minutes to render a frame.  
  I increased the size to 429x640 and the time was 20 minutes for one frame.  My question is which one will most likely decrease the noisy animation. I guess I am not really set up to do animations so that is why I use low settings for the photon count etc., it just takes too long to render.
  Thanks for the input and you have some good info in there.