My question actually is, "Will it always take this long??
If you haven't already checked out my system information, I am at the tail end of of a 6 year old HP 8400. I have (finally) received the OK to acquire a new system. While I know that this new system (http://www.pugetsystems.com/saveconfig.php?id=111597) will vastly improve "timeline" speed and After Effects previewing & rendering and should export most CODECs much faster, I'm concerned about the straight transcoding work that I do in AME. Specifically from ProRes to anything else.
The company for whom I work stages and produces lots of live corporate events. I create content for the event and then handle whatever the client wants done with the recorded footage afterwards. Sometimes it's the full boat and sometimes it's just for them to share internally and post on their website. Either way, typically the first thing that they want is to just see the footage. So, regardless of what will become of the footage later, I run it through AME and turn it into H.264 using the YouTube friendly preset.
Currently, on my aging machine, AME is using only ~30% of my 8 cores. Only 7-8 GB of my 20GB of ram and obviously 0% of my GTX285. So am I to assume that due to CODEC limitations, AME will still take this long to transcode on a machine with twice the cores (including higher clock speeds) and 3 times the ram? Will it simply use even less of the system and still take 22 hours?? Will I at least see a reduction in time from the move from DDR-2 to DDR-3 and the other lower latency benifits of current hardware?
I was going to include the "MediaInfo" for the source and final files along with the AME log and some other info but since I've already made this a wall of text, I hold off until someone needs it to answer my question.
Thanks in advance.
Jason
BTW - I've been using Adobe products since the mid 90's (Premiere 4.0, After Effects "Melmet") and I've been lurking here and scraping info from all of you from at least 2 forums ago 
This is my first post in the "new" forum.