Poor performance with h.264 VSE Sorry if this is a noob question but I started using Blender today as a free video editor and now that I'm rendering my project, it's taking a lot longer than I was expecting.

The project is basically splicing two 1920x1080, 60fps videos into one, 6-minute video with a simple fade out/fade in transition between the two videos and I have everything set up to use the correct resolution and FPS.

The problem is, I'm rendering at about 20fps (so about 3x realtime) while my CPU utilization is at 15% so I can't help but feel this could be going much faster if I found a way to increase my CPU usage.  I'm curious if I've failed to select the optimal settings for my system or if this is just par for the course with Blender's video encoder?

My specs:


Intel i7 4790k 
Nvidia GTX 970 
16GB DDR3 2400mhz 
Blender 2.73a
H.264 encoder with default profile and bitrate set to 30000kbps
As far as I know, the Sequencer has no multi-core support in the final rendering. (Surprisingly it has it for rendering proxy files). Also GPU rendering isn't available either.

I just found a recent thread in which a dev claims to work on multi-core support, so maybe it will come in the future. I definitely would appreciate such a feature.