Hi rockket .. we are rendering on 4 different machines and have done heaps of 30 second renders and our average is about 6 hours per render and it was working great on my machine until I moved a couple of settings.. (gwad!) and now it just won't move past frame 1 no matter what animation I try to load. It's driving me a bit nuts and I am copying the same settings as our other machines .. and still no joy. In fact we even have 1 toon character that just won't render on any of our machines! grrrr very frustration .. however our other 8 characters all render fine.  I'm at a loss what it's due to. I feel like it needs to be RE_SET back to a default or something and that might give it the kick in the guts it needs??  Hmm wonder if there is such a button.

Yep aware that lots of props take heaps longer ... a trick we do is turn the whole scene with props into a jpg and drop it back in the scene as a 2d background and it will cut your render time down HEAPS... (as long as you don't need a 3d prop that is).