I've been playing around with creating short avi's (Poser 5 sr3) and noticed that when I used the current rendering for the animation it takes A LOT of time to render even a simple short clip. Are there any ways to shorten the process? Does anyone have any experience with that. What kind of hardware do you think is required to handle this load?

Well with me I fortuantly have 3 programs that help realtivly well Cinema 4d xl7 Truespace I export my movies into obj files and export the obj file into truespace which also texturizes them then I export it from there in 3ds format into cinema for final rendering and use a flash program to place the frames of the movie in order. My way sounds rather hard and LONG though I am still searching for quicker ways to do my movies. If you don't have those programs can't help you than. If you just have cinema they have a poser plugin that imports the textures to cinema.

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/firefaq.html

You can always try and optimize your render settings. In many situations, increasing the bucket size will increase your render speed. I have a couple of tips on my website.

There are tips and tricks to keeping animation render times down. But look at it this way, if you are doing a sixty frame aniamtion, you are basically rendering 60 pictures, and that just takes awhile. I like to set my animations up, do some low rez tests, then start my hi rez render and go to bed! When I get up in the morning it is usually done!