How to render images faster?

hi everyone,

question is simple, how to render images faster. i'm using blender and when i render i short vid (600frames 1080p) it takes a really really long time. does someone know to speed that up? i'm on a i7 4770k 4.7ghz and i have a r9 290 but i don't use my gpu. i really don't know how to use my gpu for rendering or other editing stuff. i can choose opengl in blender to render but than i get a different image. it's not the same when rendering with cpu. with opengl i get the same image over and over again. can someone help me? if someone knows better editing software on linux let me know!

This might help http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/GPU_Rendering

i can't change cpu to gpu in compute device. i can only choose cpu:( what now? i'm in windows 7 64bit now with the 14.4 beta drivers btw.

Sorry, I dunno, I don't use Windows.

Quote from link provided by Freq

"The implementation of OpenCL is only in an experimental stage and disabled in official builds."

You have to manually enable the support for OpenCL on GPUs

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.6/Source/Render/Cycles/OpenCL

i mainly use linux, but i don't have the amd drivers installed :P.

@echo off

cd "D:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender"

set CYCLES_OPENCL_TEST=ALL

start/d "D:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender" Blender.exe

exit

save as .bat and run

i can choose i7 4770k+hawaii for rendering, but it's not going fast. image rendering is still slow and my gpu is 0%. when making a video in video editer with the 600 images i made it's also going slow and my gpu is agian 0% and my cpu is ~20%. What to do? 

have you tried luxrender?

http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/download

why this is changed to windows? i'm having this problem on linux and windows.

what is it?

i turned ray tracing of :). i render now in 1080p on 50% for a test and it goes so fast now with only cpu. but the lightning is really really bad now. i'm working on a intro and i stole someones template (20th fox century). the first 100 frames are almost completly black without ray tracing, with ray tracing it's more brown which looks really nice. i don't know if there are some blender users here but if there are, can some one help me with good settings for image rendering and video rendering?

also when rendering an image. the image is finished, my cpu goes to 0% usage for 3 sec, after those 3 sec it goes to the next image. is that normal?