Quote - An hour to render?
Woah...
I am not impressed at all.
We do animations, at an hour a frame, it would take forever to get them rendered.

David,
Surely since you're in the professional business of rendering animations you already know:

1. Frame rendertimes depend on what you're rendering, what the output resolution is, what the render settings are, what the speed of the computer, how many computers you have on your network renderfarm and how soon the client needs the product. 

2. Then there are a number of paid for renderfarm services. The Ranch (www.ranchcomputing.com) is one that comes to mind. Frederic there does an excellent job of providing a very easy to use and reasonably priced online render service for Vue products. For instance, a Vue 7 animation which would take an entire week (7 days x 24 hours) on a Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (64-bit quad-core), would be rendered in around 2 hours on the RANCH.

3. And you probably know many Disney movies and commercial animations can take an hour a frame.

4. Typically, there are ways to shorten render times, as there are ways to increase them. It's all in the trade-offs one is willing to make, and one's understanding of how the program works.

Hope this helps,
C