Any settings to speed up video rendering?

[Boy_Narf]

Hello Everyone!

Long time reaper user here and have been using it for the past year or so for our live videos (I tried many different video editors but kept coming back to Reaper as I greatly prefer the workflow). My biggest issue is that speed of the rendering. A 1080p 30 fps clip sits around 0.8x realtime. Most of our videos are an hour or more so it takes a while to render.

Now I know Reaper is not a video editor so I don't expect speeds like Premier Pro, but I'm wondering if there are some settings/rendering options I could change to speed things up?

I currently have it set to the default settings under qt/mov/mp4. h.264 95%, aac, 128 kbps. I always set the size and fps to match the camera.

My other question is if it's possible to force reaper to use more CPU power? I'm currently doing a render and the total CPU package is locked at 34/35%. Not sure if there is a setting anywhere to "use more system resources during render". It seems if Reaper would use 100% of my cpu things would go much faster. My SSD is also jumping from 1-4% during the render so it's not a storage bottleneck.

Thanks everyone.