[flotus1]

There are two factors that determine how fast Paraview can create an animation from multiple time steps:
1) File I/O. Paraview needs to load the values for each time step from disk, which can take some time depending on file size and file system throughput. There is probably an option to load all time steps at once into memory, which takes longer initially, but makes switching between time steps much faster. Not 100% sure about that, I never used it.
2) The amount of computing that has to be done. If your file only contains the velocity vector field, you need to apply a filter in PV that computes e.g. the the Q-criterion. This step takes some time to compute, but can be sped up using PV in parallel. By default, PV performs these computations on a single core. If on the other hand your data already contains the field for the value you need in your animation, processing times are much shorter.

I don't know what your professor did to create an animation in real-time on his laptop in Paraview. Maybe a combination of all of the above, or maybe he just showed a pre-recorded animation?
I am used to animations taking between a few seconds up to a few minutes per time step in PV, depending on mesh size and the amount of processing necessary in PV.