Hi all,
after 3 months of work I have completed my music video:
It took about 11 days to render on 3 computers @ 50% HD. I’m using cycles render engine with 2000 samples.
I know, the video is not perfect - especially the camera movement is too fast sometimes. But after that long time nearly consuming up all my spare time, I can’t see any pyramids anymore 
Hope you like it.
Your camera movement is just fine not TOO fast. Its a nice little video well done.
2000 Samples is quite a lot. I have been making an animated film for a while now and trying to keep the render time under 4 minutes a frame. There are a number of tricks which can seriously reduce the number of samples you can get away with. http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/7-ways-get-rid-fireflies/
There are also tricks in compositing using render passes and bilateral blur which can clean up renders in post.
Then there are Special Materials using the Light Path node.
For example making the wall of a room transparent to the light but visible to the camera.
And recently added. Render Baking. All worth a look at for your next project.
Thank you for your comment.
I have followed all the Guru tricks I could get hold of I did not know of render baking - will have a look.
There are 2 major reasons for the noise: 1st is the floor. The image is quite noisy, which was portrayed into the bump and specularity maps. It improved considerably after I filtered the maps.
Furthermore, the shiny material of the pyramids provides a kind of reflectivity I did not want to miss.
Finally, more than 1000 emitting objects, transparencies etc.
On the graphics adapter of my computer, each frame took around 3 minutes. (Had 3200 frames to compute). On a notebook graphics adapter, a frame was computed in about 10 minutes. A 8 CPU Xeon server @3.5GHz took about 19 minutes per frame.
I must admit That I had not considered the injection of noise from the source texture images.
That’s is something I must look out for in the future.
The 3 minutes with the GPU is pretty fast to be honest. I think you have this tuned up pretty good to be getting that. Still at 1440 frames a minute it takes a long time. I know CPU is supposed to be slower than GPU but still its surprising how much faster than 8 * xeon! What kind of graphics card are you using ?
Render baking is usually used in video games to create surface textures which can be rendered quickly. Using cycles/blender internal the object is baked to generate a surface UV mapped image which contains the surface properties for example lighting. The material is replaced with a pure emission shader that uses that lighting pattern. It is also possible to bake out a number of different surface properties corresponding to the render pass options in render layer tab. This can save time with complex materials as some properties can be pre-calculated.