Light mix woes

[YoyoBoy]

I'm always having issues when there is a combination of outside light with inside light. See the this video for an example.
https://vimeo.com/294070282/6d6de7e51a

The scene renders nicely in just a few minutes when the camera is outside as well as when it's deep inside, but while the camera is coming through the doors and there is a combination of outside and inside light, the render times can be well over an hour. The adaptive dome light does seem to make this a little better than having portals in the doors, but it's still pretty excruciating.

Is there any way to speed this up?

Just a little info: I have to render animations like this from this model and others once or twice a year, since museums around the world have artifacts from these places and want to show their audience the context they came from. And I frequently make small updates to the models as experts weigh in, so it's almost always necessary to render these things from scratch, so each new one reflects the latest thinking.

[Morne]

Is it not because of the change of exposure?
As you JUST go into the door, things are very dark (which makes things harder to clean up)
Maybe do the transition between inside and outsiude exposure quicker (just the animation of the exposure, not the actual camera movement)

[YoyoBoy]

It's not the movement of the camera, it's just the noise from all the very indirect outside light. In the past I've ended up putting extra lights in the scene to clean things up and rendering it in two passes and handling the transition in post. But, since archaeologists want everything accurate/scientific, I like to try to steer clear of that sort of thing.

The Denoiser seems to help, but sometimes that causes artifacts in animations for me. The NVIDIA one is faster, but I've found that it often smooths over textures that have a lot of grainy detail in them.

[Morne]

yes I wasnt suggesting its the movement of the camera. I was suggesting its the animation of the exposure of the camera

you're going from example from an exterior exposure of say 1/200 seconds to and interior exposure of 1/60 seconds. The transition happens from example from frame 100 to 150. I;m suggesting make the 50 frames animation shorter. For example do the exposure from 100 to 125 or even start few frames earlier and do the exposure from 75 to 100

basically anything from stopping the frames of going dark. Rather have them go too bright for few frames