Beachball and freezing while encoding?

[Risco]

Is this normal for Safari to freeze up, causing a beach ball and apps launch slowly while encoding or just remuxing a video using flicks / handbrake / mp4tools?

The reason I ask is I am wondering if I am having a hardware issue or not. I tried resetting pram / nvram etc, clean installing with and without it being plugged in and it still does it. I have booked a genius appointment, but as I am not well versed in Macs unlike a window based computer I feel I will get fobbed off?

 

[benwiggy]

Handbrake will max out your Mac's CPUs while it's encoding. It seems to use as much computing power as you've got. As a result, there's not much for anything else.
You can use Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder to see what Handbrake is doing (and what everything else has left).

I don't know if there's a way of limiting Handbrake so that you can have CPU for other tasks.