animate hangs on 30 megs of 500 images...?

[sippyCUP]

Hey guys, I have 500 .png images of around 1200x700 resolution and maybe 64kiB apiece (30miB total). They are named Scene_9H_3_50XXXX.png where XXX goes from 0002 to 1000. I'm trying to animate this with, surprisingly enough, the "animate" program.

animate S*

However, it seems to be taking forever. I gave it around 25 minutes and the disk was still not done churning. I'm running a centrino 1.73ghz, 1 gig ram, and a 1 gig swap on Ubuntu 8.04. I wouldn't think that 30 megs of images would give this setup a terrible time but... it is.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your time,
Eric