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There is a strong probability that this is due to the fractal params themselves. Have you tried to individually calculate a keyframe from the beginning and another one from the end to compare?

By the way, you can use the render preview feature, very useful to check that your anim looks good, instead of rendering it multiple times.

Two nights ago it was at 45 sec. per frame and now it's about 1:12 per frame to render. And I finished 3122 out of 8160 frames in 4 days with the render time increasing with each frame.  Is this a normal behavior?  Does everyone have to deal with this?  It just seems a little extreme only to render a 2 minute video especially when it takes less than an hour to complete the entire animation sequence.  Gahhh...I guess it is what it is.

Ok thanks I just needed to vent...and get some reassurance that this is indeed normal. 

My 2 cents:

My renders (typically @ 800x600) with AA=1, generally take 1:00~1:30 mins per frame. But that is on my quad core Desktop running nothing else. I have 10400 frames being rendered on that machine and its been up for 5 Days + and its almost done.

Now on my laptop which is a Dual Core model I've been able to render only 2000 odd frames in 5 days. Huge difference in computational power. So the underlying hardware contributes a LOT to your render time. RAM not so much, Number of CPU's and their processing speed is your key component, as per my experience so far.

Reiterating what Sockratease said: the render depends on the complexity of the image. You're lucky if your frames are rendering in seconds as opposed to minutes. Plus your image size is quite a bit larger than mine.

I tried mine at ~1200 and it clocked 3:00+ mins per frame, shooting my render timeline to weeks. On my other thread I got feedback saying its not uncommon for people to have renders running for months and such.