I know it's trying to help, but..

I’m editing a wedding video at present. I’m using Pinnacle Expression to write it to DVD. I have a dual xeon 2ghz machine with hyper threading enabled and it insists on using no more than 25% of my cpu…

It doesn’t seem to be IO bound. I’ve tried boosting it’s priority, but nothing I do will make it use more than exactly 25% of cpu. I guess it’s trying really hard to be nice to me, I wish it wouldn’t.

Way back when I first started editing DV on a PC I had a dual proc something or other running NT 4. The software I was using at the time was either Adobe Premiere or the ULead Media studio… I think it was the ULead one. Anyway, this app, much like Adobe Premiere today, didn’t really place nicely on a multiproc box. It guess it’s too hard for them to write proper thread safe code… Anyway, I used to restrict the program’s affinity to a single CPU and it ran fine. It gobbled up 100% of that CPU when rendering etc, I had multiple CPUs so that was fine, I could still compile or read mail with the other…

Anyway, back to the plot. Pinnacle Expression came free with my DVD burner, so I’m giving it a go, but ideally I’d like to it work as quickly as possible. I know it’s just being nice to me and I know it’s designed to be easy to use and I know that it’s a pain when an app that’s CPU intensive grabs 100% of your machine and doesn’t let go. But. I’d like the option please. If I had the option I could decide that I wanted it to have my machine 100% and let it make a disk quickly. I could also let it have 3/4 of my machine by setting the processor affinity myself. As it is I have a machine that I’m not otherwise using and it’s been running for an hour and a half now and it’s only 19% complete on its task of compressing the 25Gb of raw DV footage into 4.7Gb of DVD compatible stuff…

And why oh why can’t someone like Adobe write thread safe code after all these years. I have to use my single proc laptop if I want to edit stuff with Premiere without random crashes. :( Pinnacle can obviously handle the concept as they have 27 threads running, perhaps that’s part of the problem…

Let me hear you say Bleugh!