I've been limping along lately on a Dell laptop while I wait for my new workstation. The laptop is a core i5 with 8gb of ram and an onboard intel graphics chip, so not exactly a speed demon. I'm trying to encode h.264 videos from After Effects at a target and max video bitrate of 8mbps. However, the output file can't seem to get over 4mbps. Is this a limitation of my machine, or am I doing something else wrong here? See the encoder settings in the image on the left below, and the output file properties on the right:
