New to Blender. My simple scene has really long render times I am a Max user and I have been trying to learn blender for the last couple of weeks. I created a simple animation: a rotating sphere with a rock generator applied to it, a few lights and that's it. I got a reasonably powerful computer (threadripper 1950x 16 cores/32 threads). I get a lot of noise in the render and if I tried getting rid of it increasing the samples I get crazy render times. It takes about 8 minutes per frame with 1500 samples (the animation is 1000 frames long) and the render is still really noisy. If I increase the samples the render time goes way way up. A scene like mine would take barely a minute or two in max and vray. I am obviously doing something wrong. Could anybody help me out a bit? Thank you!
I would recommend the following changes:


Remove the second render layer, because it doesn't contribute anything to the compositing result and doubles the render time.
Use Branched Path Tracing with high samples for the diffuse sub samples and mesh lights and low samples for everything else. This reduces the noise significantly.


If you would be switching to the most recent version of Blender you could also use Open Image Denoise, which can reduce the required samples significantly.