"we're looking at hundreds or even thousands of hours just to render a 30 minute movie. "

You should not set up an animation that will run 30 minutes
straight when rendered.
not even the "big" animation houses run sequences that long.
Look at any movie of your choice and "time" the shots
for example see how long the camera is actually on an actor before
it cuts to a different shot and you will see its a very short time.
and all those short "takes" are edited together in post production
to tell the story the way the filmaker intended.

Of course more powerful hardware is always better
but you should consider investing in a Good NONlinear video editing
program and start thinking in terms of short scenes/takes to be edited together later.
posers animation render engine is very , VERY!! Slow by todays standards. but quality 3d character animation is a patient mans game.

I render my poser animations in cinema via the propack plugin
and cinema has the fastest high quality raytracer in its price range
and it still takes me 3 -6 hours for 4 seconds a quality animation with
textures ,volumetric lights, and reflections.

Not preaching here, I am glad to see another Character animator
in this forum besides me,

but the more rendering power you have the more you will want to add to you scenes and your render times will still tend to be long
remember that Pixar with their custom sun enterprise32 GIG of ram render boxes still takes 3 hours to render one frame.

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