@srpohl @johnebaker

Hi Stephen.

To add to what John has said.

In some respects, it's a bit of a mystery as to which bit of kit (CPU, GPU, etc.) is doing what at any particular time within the export render. Ram use can be one factor as data is loaded into it prior to use. Most of the time MEP seems quite efficient and I rarely get much more than 11GB of ram in use when using MEP but yesterday with a graphics intensive project running it got above the amount of ram I have (32GB) and started to move extra data to disk which in turn slowed the export even more.

When exporting and choosing to use hardware acceleration, although still much faster than using purely software acceleration there are still limitations. The intel GPU is still doing the major share of graphic processing that has to be done before it can start to render (encode) that portion of the file, so the encode process seems to be done in bursts. This, if being hardware accelerated, has to be done by a GPU, and the Intel GPU's clock speed is about the third of that of the CPU, so the CPU is not getting as much work to do so will always appear do be not doing much.

If you do by any chance get to a point where you can max out the Intel GPU you will find that your pc almost becomes unusable and sluggish and possibly unstable. Note when the GPU is working frantically the Video decoding is only happening in short and widely dispersed bursts.

So, anything that is graphically challenging and needs a lot of number crunching will slow down the export. That can be Titling, some forms of wipes or fades, colour correction or noise reduction, and a whole bunch of other effects. Butt joins and fast fades almost do no slowing down of exports at all beyond your computers abilities to render but also choosing what resolution and quality the export has can also have an effect. Trying to compress a file to a smaller file size means more number crunching, Choosing better quality but not above that of the original using a similar codec normally means less processing and faster rendering in my experience.

So, as John said, it is not unusual for the program to not tax the computers components. If it did, (and it used to on my old machine) it can put a lot of stress on the CPU and other components and care should be taken to make sure they do not overheat. My old system easily got into temperatures of 90c + and I had to frequently pause exports to bring temperatures down. Not an ideal situation in my experience.

Ray.