Render (both for preview and export) takes forever

Question

I'm running Premiere Elements 12.0 (really 12.1) in a MacBook Pro Retina running 10.10.1 (14B25)
It has quad Core i7 each 2.7 gH,  NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB, 16 GB of ram, and a 750GB SSD disk. There are no other applications running on the computer, and there is at least 300 GB of free disk space on the SSD.
I am trying to edit HD video from my GoPro Hero 3+. I'm just loading the GoPro files using Add Media. Then I cut out boring parts, add in image stabilization and some titles, etc. The sessions typically have 6 to 8 files, each about 2GB of video. It represents 2 to 3 hours of capture. The goal is to get maybe one hour of nice video.
Previewing viewing is terrible, with video out of sync from the audio by many seconds. You can't see any movement in the video for 10 to 30 seconds. This gets better if I use the "render" button on the timeline, but this process takes 15 to 30 hours.  And the improved preview speed only stays effective for a short while, as I do edits, add effects, etc. it gets slow (aka unusable) again.
Once I've fought the program to get ready to do an export, I've got another multi-hour wait. Usually this is a bit shorter than the initial rendering, since the editing process has removed an hour or two of content.
I know, these are big input files, and the resulting movies are big (a couple of gigabytes). But this is one of the fastest and most expensive laptop computers sold in the world. I'm just using a GoPro, not some fancy Red or 4K camera.
I need to have the editing process be 3 times faster, I want it to be much better, ten times faster.
I thought that quad real core with 8 threads, 16GB of ram, and a 750GB SSD was fast.
I'd like concrete answers as to how I can get there.
Are there settings for Premiere Elements that will help? Would I be happier with Premiere Pro? Would I be happier on a Windows machine with 2 or more high end graphics cards?

Answer 1

thanks for the reply. I'm new to GoPro and Premiere Elements, so I don't know exactly what some of your stuff is.
The video is taken on my dirt-bike, a motorcycle going through trails, woods and rocks. Its unwatchable without stabilization.
The files are all taken as a single ride, single push of the shutter, and I go off and ride for a couple of hours. The GoPro automatically switches to a new recording file when the old one gets to 2.4 GB (which is about the maximum file size for 32 bit file formats.
I copy all of the video clips to the SSD from the GoPro. Then I load them as assetts. Since that it the only disk I have, everything is there. But an SSD should be fast enough to handle swapping, file reading and writing.  I don't think that you can get two separate SSDs in a MacBook Pro Retina. It has no optical drive (which you could replace with an SSD in older models)
I'm not against buying Pro if I have to, I'm cheap, and would rather not, but if that will make the workflow feasible, I'll cough up the money.
All of clips (everything) have "Motion" "Opacity" "Stabilizer" and "Image Control"
I actually have no clear understanding of what Motion does vs Stabilizer.
Timeline rendering takes 10+ hours. More if the Mac sleep mode sets in. I have no idea where the rendered files are. Whereever PE defailts them. Still SSD
What is "the Edit area monitor"? Do you mean the smallish video window above the timeline? Sometimes the video looks pretty good, other times the viewing of it lags 30 seconds or more behind the sound and timeline pointer.
I don't think I understand your comment about when to stabilize. I agree that I should be able to work and do edits, titles, etc. without stabilization, and then just turn it on at the end. Or maybe even render it for export and then stabilize that file. But I don't know how to do any of that.
Thanks
Pat