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 I noticed that the ffmpeg packages are sometimes a bit outdated, yielding a gigantic gap between what the stock ffmpeg can do, and what a freshly compiled one does.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:a copy -c:v libsvtav1 -crf 17 svtav1_test.mp4
Hopefully using the SVT-AV1 encoder helps speed up your encoding.
[1]: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1