Hi, I have been using blender for a little while, but have never experienced the render being so slow. I am doing a still image that requires a lot of detail so I have a few levels of subsurf on a model of text that makes it pretty high poly. Its an ice block text that has raytrace transparency and raytrace shadows. I feel like im doing something wrong because one image took me 10 hours to finish. Does anyone know how I can speed up this process? if I bake any elements or anything??? its really slowing down my progress

Thank you!

oh btw, Im running blender 2.62 on a mac pro tower 2 x 2.26 quad core intel xeon. mem 16 GB 1066 MHz DDR3

thanks~!