The Tips in detail

 "How can I speed up rendering?"

Rendering scenes can take quite a while. Without spending big money in faster equipment you can still speed up things doing the following:

Without damaging the quality of the render by changing the lighting, simplify your scene instead! Reduce the amount of faces and vertices where possible. In some cases you can trick the eye (aka: fake) by using images (as textures) of objects instead of the object itself.

Delete stuff that isn't in the render window. If deleting is not an option try hiding objects. This speeds up rendering, too. Since the visiblillity can be animated, this comes quite handy.

Thought about changing your quad patch to a zero depth box? Quad patches often take a lot longer to render compared to standard mesh objects. It shouldn't make any effect on your scene, but will most likely speed times up as the face count would be much lower.

You could also try optimising your object(s). I know this would most likely look slightly different to your previous frames, but to smooth the transition try animating the optimisation value so it amends it over time so it'll be less noticable; also, if you've got some motion blur applied, it should blend in nicely. Also you should keep in mind that the distance between the object and the camera is an important point for noticing details. A highly detailed object seen from a large distance looses a lot of it's details in the rendering so you might want to reduce the poly-count on such occureances.

Collapse your stack, as this may decrease rendering times due to max not having to work out all the steps in the stack to get to the next frame, but be aware that you loose all the modifiers and therefore you might not be able to do any further work to your objects easily.

Omni-lights are consuming much more time then any other light. Try using spotlights or directional lights instead (where possible) as they are calculated much faster. If you need light to emerge from one point in several directions, you can also align several spots in one point shooting off in arcs that fit together without overlaping. Actually an omni consits of 6 spots centered in one point each of them looking through another face of an (imagined) cube.

If you want a faster ratracing renderer, try RayMax. It is distributed by cebas. It's really fast with raytracing, although I can't vouche for it's rendering quality (I haven't tested the demo).

Another way to simplify your scenes and speed up rendering is not to build what is not visible. If you build objects that are viewed from only a few directions you might ignore those areas that can't be seen. To put it simple: don't build what can't be seen.

Have an eye on the antialias-setting. The higher you set the pixelsize, the more rendertime will be used. Nomally a setting between 1.1 and 1.3 fits to most needs.

Keep your texturefiles small. Large image-files as textures consume much rendertime because Max needs to recalculate them intensely.

Raytracing slows rendering dramatically. So do complex materials in general, too. Using complex materials is a good idea, but if you start using them everywhere this will result in very slow rendering. Think about using simplified derivates on small or distant objects where possible.