Doing a small animation.  About 2 minutes worth.  Total of 28 scenes so nothing is terribly long.  But Im worried about render times so on.  It is not important that this looks like whoa great.  It's just a fun thing really.  Shadows aren't terribly important and I definately don't want to wait hours for individual hair reflections.

Could someone please tell me what settings I could change for to have the animation visible - look ok, and take the least amount of time rendering/loading what not.

Thanks in advance.

you can set the parameters to render the movie using current display settings rather than current render settings.

Make sure your window is set for full tracking and a textured display mode.

Its the fastest  anim you can get out of poser.   Its good enough for client approvals of the action.

here is a fun test on render times load a cube from the poser library no texture, no material use the basic render setting and watch how long it takes to render that would be the minimum time you can expect to spend per frame

couplathings,

in your movie settings,  render every 2nd frame. This will cut your render times in half and still give very acceptable smoothness.

do not use any dynamic clothing, dynamic hair, raytracing, anti-aliasing or other render intensive settings.

use the lowest res versions of figures for medium and far shots. Only use higher res for closeups.

use either the preview or poser 4 renderers, not firefly.

turn off shadows on all but a single (key) light and turn off casts shadows on everything except the most visually relevant figure/prop. If possible, eliminate the ground entirely.

There are many other tricks to help minimize render times, but many are sequence specific, so impossible to explain every one -  experiment. 

Output sequentially numbered *.tif files and then assemble them into video sequences in a program like Avid, Final Cut, Premiere, etc.

Use the smallest size required for the final project. e.g., 640x480 or 320x240 for web-based animations, 720x480 for standard 4:3 NTSC video and 848x480 for 16:9 widescreen video.

jerr3d, 

in actual fact, I believe the one-sided square would yield the minimum possible render time as it has 1 poly and 4 verts. 

The box has: 

     box_1                      384 polys          486 verts

HTH,

 
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Use reduced texture resoutions. A 4000x4000 texture map is complete overkill when rendering to a 640x480 animation. Smaller textures load and render faster, and Poser is far less likely to run into memory problems. 1024x1024 is good enough for anything except extreme closeups, for background figures 512x512 is usually enough.
Use texture dimensions that are powers of 2 (256,512,1024,2048). Those are handled more efficiently.

Conforming clothes render exactly as fast as dynamic clothes at the same polygon count and texture map sizes. Hi-poly dynamic clothes might render somewhat slower.

Dynamic hair - this varies greatly. The dynamic hairstyles that comes with Poser 5 render very slow and gobble up RAM. The P6 dynamic hairstyles are significantly more efficient.
But the best dynamic hair for simulations is the hair made by kirwyn. Simulates blindingly fast using a proxy (2 seconds/frame or less!), and renders quickly, about as fast as transmapped hair.

If you have to use raytracing for one reason or another, set the property 'visible in raytracing' to OFF for actors that have transmaps. That greatly increases render speed. Same goes for dynamic hair.

Was away for the weekend.  Thanks ALOT for the answers to this question.  They will all help very much.