i'm wondering what's the estimated time it takes to make 1-5 minutes of a good poser scene... say, two people having a conversation and walking around and picking up stuff. just anything that can make up 1-5 minutes of animation. how long does that usually take to make?

there is NO estimate..

it depends on type of light how many lights what kind of scene how many items are in the scene does it have shadows and how many shadows are there..

what texture size is used on the items... is there any light FX like AO is volumetrics used 

Etc etc etc etc etc  ...

So lets say it wil take TIME.. just try it out and fill up a scene with things that you need then count and add time from that until you know what you need and time of rendering..

Chris

You could time how long it takes to render a still image and multiply that time by however long you want the animation to be.  30 frames (images) per second x 60 seconds per minute ...

Best Wishes,
Rªnce

By the by, actually keyframing figures and scene setup also takes a bundle of time.  What I suggest above is just to estimate the render time.  Making 'good' animation in Poser, even with the help of BVH files or animated pose sets, is more than a little time consuming.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pixar_staff

Pixar needs about 4 a 5 people to make a short, I estimate it takes them say 2 months.

the famous Killer Bean 2 (7 min, no fancy lighting or any kind of realism, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMAkMLx-fqs) took Jeff Lew three years on his own computer. Don't know if he had a day job too but I guess so.

My own 3 min animations (http://www.artb.artbeeweb.nl/e107_expose/expose.php?album=10) took about 3 months = 600 - 1000 hours, either to get the scenes and story done (merry go round), either to get the rendering done (mirror in mirror). Cinema4D.

have fun.

you can get an animation really fast by rendering with preview options. Using the actual firefly renderer can take hours per frame. 

There are tricks such as compositing to speed up the render time but some sacrifice quality.

hold up

when people render scenes, they do it image by image?!

When rendering animations you should render them as individual frames, then assemble them later. That way you can adjust timings, tweak things, replace frames, etc, without having to re render all of it. It is also way faster if you have multiple machines working together when rendering the frames. I can use hundreds of cores when rendering animations using the Queue manager. I can only use 24 doing an avi.

The time it would take to set up a 1 to 5 min animation will be different with every single one you do. (drastically sometimes)

Some wont take to long at all, others will have you pulling your hair out. It really boils down to the complexity of the scene and how good you are at making it look right.

It also depends on how much of it you can reuse from scenes you have done in the past. Things like a convincing walk cycle can take a while to create. Poser will give you a very basic one, but I find it faster to just make them manually. Once you have that done you can reuse it with different characters fairly easily if the skeletal setup is the same.

If you are serious about animating people, I suggest you learn how they do it for video games first. (interactive animation) The reason I say that is because it will teach you about transistions, timing, etc.

It will also give you a base set of animations to work with. You will probably make about 50 different animation snippets that can be chained together to setup simple animations (video games usually have 150-200 snippets per character but you wont need that many to get started). You can do all of this in Poser, you do not need a video game engine or anything like that.

what program do you use to re-assemble frames?

(Architect)

Quote - what program do you use to re-assemble frames?

     Use a video editor, Flash, or GIF editor.  I sitll use ye olde GIF Animator 5 from ULead/Corel, SwishMax Studio, Adobe Flash CS4, and ULead/Corel VideoStudio 11.

     I think that some versions of both PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro came with accessory GIF compositors.  Animation Shop came with Paint Shop Pro;  ImageReady came with PhotoShop, GIF Animator 5 came with PhotoImpact (and was also available separately).   So, you may have a GIF compositor without realizing it.  Look in your installed programs for such, and/or see if there's a button/command in PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro to open the GIF compositor.

     There are almost certainly lots of others of which I'm unaware.

 it might take at least 15 minutes per frame. 24fps*300s = 7200 frames, at least 2.5 months.