VSE needs so much love... For my podcast I wanted to use all open-source tools, but rendering sequences of mp4 with some chromakey in Blender took 10 hours for 1.5 hour video. I ended up switching to the free version of DaVinci Resolve
Blender’s VSE currently lacks GPU acceleration for video rendering, which results in the CPU handling the entire workload. Additionally, it performs a full frame-by-frame render even when re-encoding isn’t necessary, unlike DaVinci Resolve which can bypass this process. Enhancements in this area would be greatly beneficial for Blender’s performance and efficiency.
One problem is Blender's multithreaded rendering doesn't scale well to VSE work because it focuses on breaking up each frame and as a result doesn't well utilize multiple cores. I've experimented with making a plugin [1] in the past to start multiple render jobs different points in the timeline in separate processes and was able to massively speed up renders.
I have since switched to Resolve on linux as well but due to using Blackmagic cameras that work better with it.
