Dave, ditch the notebook, get a high end pc, yes your notebook may have an"i7" but its a notebook, not a performance pc, big difference there. Forgot Apple, they are just overpriced bull crap for people that like shiny things. Stick a good encoder card in the PC and you will be sailing along. Stop playing with the toys if you want to play with the big boys. Video encoding takes time, ram, hard drive speed and space and lots of processing power. Laptops just can cut it.