[James Stapleford]

Sorry, my post wasn’t trying to say that I get full cpu use, only that I get faster renders the more ram I allocate as opposed to removing all preview ram as someone had mentioned. I use a hacked gh1 and no longer bother to convert to cineform, so I typically see about 50 percent use and repeating jumps up to 70 percent when it hits the big detail frame. I’d love to see full cpu use aswell, but I just don’t think the Sony avc h264 codec can do it. Actually I prefer it as is because I don’t have to worry about crashes or overheating, and can do other computer stuff or sleep during the renders overnight:) 50 percent of a 3.5 i7 is still nearly realtime 1080p, which is good enough for me. I couldn’t do that 3 years ago.

Not sure if anyone had mentioned possible bottlenecking of audio material, I’m the sure original poster has tried rendering with no audio but I know sometimes the audio codec and sample rate can be trouble, such as 48k rendered to 44.1k or vice/versa, where the codec has to literally time and pitch correct the audio which can be quite slow.

[James Stapleford]

For me, the more dynamic ram I allocate the faster the render. I set it lower for those over-nighters so the cpu doesn’t melt:) And I go with straight cpu in Sony AVC settings.