excessively low CPU utilization in VS X6

[texcoaster]

When I use the Batch Convert feature in VS X6 I see extremely low CPU utilization for vstudio.exe on my Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium desktop with 6GB RAM and 8-core i7 CPU. vstudio.exe hangs out around 13% to 15% while total CPU utilization (including that from "all users") hangs out lower than 20. The videos I am batch converting are in AVCHD 1920x1080 30fps and I am converting them to 25fps or to 720x480 DVD-friendly MPEG2. My source videos are on an e-SATA drive with my VideoStudio working folder on a SATA SSD drive and outputting to a third SATA drive that is a traditional hard drive. My video card is an ATI Radeon HD4800 and VS X6 says I can use hardware encoding and decoding but the ATI System Monitor shows me using 2% of GPU utilization, so it does not appear that having hardware encoding enabled is benefiting me in any way. My Windows 7 is completely up-to-date as are my system drivers, video driver, and VS X6 itself. I've seen other threads about people not being able to enable hardware optimization in some form when they believe they should be able to that is not the same issue I am having. If it was a matter of 2 minutes vs. 10 minutes it would not be such a big deal. However, I am dealing with 60GB+ of source video and it is taking in excess of 14 hours to do some of the batch converts which would not, in and of itself, be a big deal if I saw that CPU utilization was cosniderably higher. But it isn't. Utilization seems far lower than it should and I have no reason to believe this is an I/O issue and the computer is doing virtually nothing else at the time.

Any ideas or suggestions?