animation - parsing the scene

I’m doing a preview animation, but with my scene using about 24GB ram it’s proving to take more time parsing the scene between frames than the actual rendering (1 min) takes. Is there anything I can do to improve this, apart from touching the scene itself?

not much, the scene parsing cannot be done multithreaded. You may try to experiment with running multiple 3dsmax instances in parallel, with each rendering different frame

Ok I can live with that, thank you Ondra!