Funny seeing this here. I was playing with ffmpeg settings earlier and decided to encode a game highlight with AV1. It's only 20 seconds and seven hours later, it's just about done. I'm certain I can twiddle more settings to make it faster, but at this point I can't give in to the slow speed. Only ~21 frames to go!
The ffmpeg page for AV1[1] seems to recommend the SVT-AV1 encoder. Using the SVT-AV1 encoder and -crf 17 I was able to get an 8x encoding speed (about 250 FPS) with a very basic set of options similar to this:
I concur, both options help a lot. I noticed that the ffmpeg packages are sometimes a bit outdated, yielding a gigantic gap between what the stock ffmpeg can do, and what a freshly compiled one does.
For some reason, none of the AV1 encoders choose sensible (practically useful without adjustment) settings as the default, but such settings do exist, rest assured.
I've only played with some of the earlier codecs and studied them in detail, but I wonder what exactly makes it so slow? Is it basically doing a lot of bruteforcing to find the best way to compress each frame?
