I'm wanting to create a short animation at around 10 minutes in Vue.  There will be a somewhat dense scene and lots of varying keyframes. 

I know this is a very general question and it will be hard to give an answer, but I'm hoping that I could render a 10 minute AVI animation video in about 8-10 hours using Vue with decent quality.  I'm not looking for super high quality just something decent, that is appealing to the eye.

Zanzo

Do a simple test. Render an average image of your animation and look how long it takes.

Now you have 10 minutes = 600 seconds. Let's say you render 15 images per second (if not 25 which is normal) it means 15X600 = 9000 images (15000 for the 25 images per second).

Now you multiply the time Vue on your system needs for the average image from the animation and you get an approximation of the time that will needed.

Your math is the same conclusion I came to. My current render time in poser is 3 minutes.  15000 images where each image takes 3 minutes to render = 31 days of rendering time.  If it were 1 minute it would be about 10 days. 

I was hoping to render out a decent quality 10 minute avi in about 8-10 hours.  I'm hoping that a basic render in VUE looks better than a medium render in poser. Do you see what I mean?

Well, where do you expect the miracle to come from? When one frame renders three minutes it renders three minutes.

The only "miracle" would be to use a professional Renderarm that can render much faster than you on your system. But this has to be paid of cours.

In my eyes a 10 minute animation is a very ambitious project. Render times are (always) a major part of the problems one faces there.

Technically a 10 minute animation can be 50 keyframes repeated over & over again though right? Then again camera motion adds to it. BAH. There is no winning here. lol

Technically an animation can be one frame repeated 15000 times. Maybe this is a solution. :D

It depends where you want to put it.

If you want to put it on YouTube ( 320x240) or widescreen presentation ( suggest you rent a renderfarm lol ).

Is it possible to render a scene with decent quality in about 30 seconds?  I've got a intel quad core.  In poser a high quality scene takes 3 minutes, super high quality takes like 10 minutes and quick & dirty about 45 seconds.

Very doubtful.

One trick is to render at decent size but don't antialias...do it post work with gaussian blur filter OR resize down. Last antialias pass is a killer.
(render ot invididual frames to do that).

OR...do the reender in parts, render to still, or short sequences of frames, say 20 to 100.
Render when asleep or whatever.
:)

Two questions: 1) As xpleet suggests, the size and quality of the render will make a difference; what is your intention for the animation? Is it going online, or on DVD, or Blu-Ray, or all of the above?

1. Is it essential to the quality of your project that it be a single-shot ten-minute animation?

Quote - Two questions: 1) As xpleet suggests, the size and quality of the render will make a difference; what is your intention for the animation? Is it going online, or on DVD, or Blu-Ray, or all of the above?

1. Is it essential to the quality of your project that it be a single-shot ten-minute animation?

It will be online or possibly on a dvd.  It is not essential that all the project be a single shot ten minute animation. I was thinking of rendering out different scenes and re-using and re-piecing them together in a movie editor.

However I"m curious if VUE is clever enough to know where certain keyframes are being repeated over & over again and will not render redundant keyframes.