Render settings for movie!

Alfhak712

First I would like to thank all clever members for there posts or topics
about how to reduce the rendering time then making a movie clip!

I just wonder how and why the default render settings are set so high?
In my opinion it would be better if the default settings
for making movies was reduced!

Yesterday I was going to make a short clip!
In my scene I had a house from the La Villa set in the back ground with
two chairs and a table! In the front lower part was a short hedge!
A genesis figure with simple defaults cloths and hair was walking
from the left to the right of the camera! The clip was 25 seconds!
I tried to render with 3dlight and default render settings!
460x325 Pixels Aspect Ratio 1.41.42: 1

It did not work cause each images had a render time over 3 minutes.
I also noticed my Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz was at 100% usage
all the time and my RAM of 6Gb only used less that 3Gb!
I had to cancel it and then after some reading on the forum about
changing the render settings I managet to get each frame render about 10 seconds!
So it took about 35 minute to render this clip!

Another time I used the inbuilt lipsync and the default genesis with default hair and cloth
and nothing else talked for about 22 seconds, 571 frames! Rendertime was 2 ½ hour

Here is the link for the short clip I made
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tj_NnXuSEI
and I only used 2 lights and both are distance lights!
One as the sun and one below the ground for get little better reflecting lights!
The render settings I used was from some tip on the forum but I have forgot how I set it up!

Thanks!