I have an i5 4440 CPU with a stock intel cooler. When i'm rendering in Maya or editing in premier or aftereffects My CPU never uses more then 25% of its total power. I feel like I'm not using the full power extent of the unit. any thoughts?
Haswell and stock cooler is probably thermal throttling. Run AIDA64 and see what the thermal throttle graph shows. I would guess either that or the settings somewhere are set to use software instead of hardware for renders.
Look to your I/O on the hard drive. I discovered that drive speed was way more important for video editing than CPU speed. In part my problem was the size of the files I was using. 1920x1080 with Fraps with videos of around an hour in length. Files sizes were 600Gb plus! I managed to bump up my CPU utilisation to 60% by reading from a HDD but writing to a SSD. I don't think I could have maxed out my CPU unless I made the move to all SSD workflow.
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yeah like @PendragonUK said check your hard drive. when i was making a video in after effects, my hdd was the limiting factor. my cpu idled at 5%-15%
There are a couple of bottle necks you can be having, as stated already Hard drive speed will always limit processor performance, secondly the amount of usable Ram will also limit the amount of the footage that you can work on before needing to write to disk which depending on the Codec used can be a limiting factor, and lastly the softwares ability to handle multiple cores. For instance Finalcut Pro 7 can only utilize between 1.5 and 1.7 cores in practical applications. this is an issue of 32 bit software in general and 64 bit software with legacy support for 32 operations can at times run into a similar issue.
Just change the codec
This actually isn't a problem.
Your cpu isn't maxing out because it doesn't need to. Whatever it is you're rendering doesn't require the cpu as much as a different component like your ram , vram , or gpu.
For example , your project might require large amounts of information to be swapped in the ram which is actually whats taking a long time , while it's doing that the cpu isn't very busy , but the drives and ram will be.
If you load a project down with enough effects in premiere , that cpu will hit 100% easy. Seriously , just add the median effect a couple times and watch your cpu max out.
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