Incredibly slow, no visibility into why

I bought this to convert and retime an AVI for a professional presentation.

Not only is it difficult to find the options to do this, but when I run it the jobs seem to hang, Activity Monitor says Compressor is not responding, and it is only using 1 of the 8 cores on my machine. Wow! I expected so much more from Apple. I wish they had a 30 day trial like Adobe and Sorenson; I would have known to not pay $50.

DaleF_avid_apple_fan about Compressor