Ok, here are the results of my test.
First, I made the test with Podium Evaluation 1.6, using Saphua Plugins + Podium Animate. Here's a screenshot during rendering:
And another one when it crashed after rendering the first 175 frames:
After checking the rendered files timestamps, I calculated Podium took 55 minutes to render those 175 frames.
After that, I got bored and went to sleep, but I woke up and decided to make the Kerkythea test. Since Podium automatically adds reflections to glass materials, I added "TG_" to the name of the glass material before exporting it to Kerkythea, so Kerkythea would have to render reflections, too. Here's a screenshot of Kerky rendering the animation:
Since SU Podium had crashed after completing 175 frames, I stopped the Kerky animation after that same number of frames, to calculate how much time it took to do the same thing. It took 6 minutes, which means it was 9x faster than Podium.
(Feb-27 EDIT: I did additional testing experimenting with the number of cores and Kerky turned out to be 15x faster than Podium for this same test. You can read the report here.).
In both cases I used 230x150 as the render size, 03. PhotonMap - Quick.xml as the configuration file, and all the quality and antialiasing sliders were to the extreme left in Podium. In both cases I surfed http://www.sketchucation.com a couple of times during rendering, although this was next to impossible during the Podium render as it peaked at 100% CPU use, while Kerky only used half of it.
Conclusion:
Podium was never intended as an animation tool. I take back what I said in my first post recommending it for animation. If you need camera-only animation, use Kerkythea. If you need animated cars and people, use 3dsMAX.
