Animation stalls

[stevirtvr]

I am trying to render an animation with a standard target camera as I always have before. I created a light cache file by setting both bounces to light cache. I created an irradiance map by then switching the primary bounce to irradiance map. When I try and render the animation using "from file" on both irradiance and light cache it bogs down. It gets through about half of the first frame and then goes no farther. There is no crash. No warnings popping up or anything. It just keeps trying to render. I let it run for 15 hours overnight and it was still halfway through frame #1.

Any ideas on what I am doing wrong? Not sure if it is SP3 or the fact that I have a large environmental fog gizmo box for clouds.

[stevirtvr]

Looks like it was the clouds. I didn't think about it until I was trying to describe my scene in the first post. I forgot to change my step from 4. Just changed it to 300 and now it works. Still takes about 30% longer to render frames than no clouds but that i can live with.