Slow performance in episode Engine

I have just purchased episode engine, and I am not getting the speeds I had expected from it. To give some background, I have a mac pro and an xserve on an xsan and I am trying to encode about 90 min of footage into h.264. I have been using compressor to do this, but I wanted more flexibility in the codec settings than what compressor allows for. In compressor, I was able to compress the video in about 12 min. In episode engine the encode it taking over 45 min to compress.

Here are the settings I am using:

• Split and stich - 4 encodes on the mac pro and 4 on the xserve. I have varied the number of splits, but it has no effect on performance.

• H.264 baseline
• 2 pass encoding
• Resize filter (480x270)
• Frame rate filter (15 FPS)

The CPU on both machines is maxed out, but I am only getting about 60 MB/s off the xsan on the mac pro and about 25 MB/s on the xserve. In compressor, I am used to seeing 200MB/s on the mac pro and about 80-90MB/s on the xserve. I have changed the encode settings in episode and nothing improves the encode time, or the read rate from the disk. Changing the number of simultaneous encodes does not improve it, and only decrease performance when I lower the encodes below 4 on each machine.

Since we are looking to have these turned around very quickly for posting to the web, a 45 min encode time is not an option. any help that any one could provide would be greatly appreciated.