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.

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