PrE8 very slow? Am I missing something?

Question

Hi everyone,
I just recently upgraded from Premiere Elements 4 to 8 on a newly built computer.  I have been fairly disappointed so far with PrE8 and wondering if I am missing something / optimizations that would make it work (and work efficiently) on my computer.
My computer: i7 930 oc'd to 4ghz (stable, stressed with prime95, used for a month), 12GB ram, GTX460x2 SLI with latest Nvidia drivers, 250 GB SSD boot/program drive / used for scratch disk, and a 2 TB Raid10.
PrE8 was upgraded to 8.01 already.  It starts up just fine.  The problem comes when I am trying to encode a simple project to burn to dvd.  I am just putting together numerous video clips to burn into a single double layer dvd.  File size about 7 GB.  Firstly, the encoding seems awfully slow.  PrE is the only program running and it is taking (4+) hours.  Looking at the task manager, PrE8 doesn't even seem to stress my system when encoding.  It is using only 2 cores with max 25% cpu utilization.  I have the affinity set to all cores and increased priority for the process to high with no difference.  This is no better than when I was using PrE4 to encode on my Duo-Core 2.8ghz, 4gb laptop.  I was hoping to save some time with encoding by building the new system but so far very disappointed.  Is it because PrE8 is poorly threaded or am I missing something.
Ben

Answer 1

Hi everyone,
Thank you for your answers and suggestions.  I'll clarify / rephrase my question.  The program itself works.  Every device driver has been updated previously.  My issue is that PrE8.01 does not seem to use all / most of my system's resources when encoding / exporting a video.  I understand that having other programs / antivirus running, fragmented hard-drive (ssd scratch disk and fresh 2 TB Raid 10 drive), different codecs, size, etc. can bog a system down and use up resources but when it only uses 2 physical cpu cores (+2 virtual cores) of a quad core system and only at 25% utilization max of those two physical cores with everything running and I wait 4+ hours to encode a 7 GB collection of 720x480 avi's, I cannot help but wonder how much faster and time saving it would be if it used all 4 physical cores at 100% ulitization.
My question is am I missing something in that it only uses a fraction of my system's resources instead of all that is available?  When you are working on your projects, is PrE8.01 using all your system's resources (100% utilization)?  I can understand PrE8.01 being slow if my system is old, bottlenecked, and struggling along at 100% resource utilization but that isn't the case.  Maybe PrE8 doesn't use more than 2 cpu cores?  But one would think it would at least stress those two cores a bit more than just 25%.
Sincerely,
Ben