It still takes me nearly 20 minutes to render the animation with or without ray tracing on. My GPU is 3060ti and my CPU is i711700k
It might be down to how fast it can write it to the drive, if automation is on a HDD I could see that being the main issue. They should only take a 5 minutes roughly.
No expert but check your graphics drivers, if you have another drive to use then try reinstalling it over there as well.
I’m not sure, but it may just be a problem with the MP4 decoder.
I found that my CPU and GPU utilization is less than 40%.
That’s a completely normal amount of time for an animatic to finish rendering, depending on the length of the animatic.