I decided to give Blender another shot. After 3 weeks I was able to create a simple cafe scene from scratch in Blender, and then import my model of Auto from Cheetah3D. The video portion took 12hrs to render on a quad core i7 gazelle professional with 16GB RAM.
Blender Settings:
1280 by 720
output PNG to 230 Frames Quality 100%
Samples: Render, 200; Preview, 16;
output to avi
OpenShot Video Editor for SFX & TITLE
exported to avi
music from Sony Acid Music Studio
...
