Mr. Anderson said:
So I have this nice new Quad PowerMac with 8 gigs of RAM and I'm doing a little simple video conversion and its taking much longer than I would have expected to export the damn thing. I look at the activity monitor and FCP is only using max 110% of a total 400% of the CPU power.
What gives? Anyone know if I've got to set something up for it to run faster?
D
THis isabout exactly what I'd expect. The transcoding operation is single threaded and runs on one of the four CPUs leaving the other three un-used.
In oder to fully utilize a quad core computer you need to find four CPU intensive tasks. The advantage of a multicore system is tham compressing or transcoding video does not slow down you other work. Yu can play iTunes, conpress video and edit video all at once and they al go full speed.
to make an automotive analogy, a fleet of pickup trucks is not the same as one dump truck The quad core machine is like the fleet of pickup trucks.
That said, Apple _could_ have written the software to be "multi threaded" in fact they did. The user interface is one thread, disk access is another and so on but vdeo transcoding is 'another" but not "some others".