Can I overclock my Macbook pro?

There may be a way to do it, but it would be profoundly inadvisable. It would certainly void your warranty or AppleCare if you still have coverage, might cause the machine to heat up beyond its ability to cool itself, and would very likely make it less reliable. If you need a faster computer for your work, buy one.

Nope... Actually, very few notebooks have a BIOS (or EFI) that has overclocking features enabled (that's not to say that you can't find tools out there thay may hack the EFI). The thermal tolerances on notebooks (especially ones packed as densely as MacBooks) are very tight. They tend to run on the hot side under normal loads. With something like video encoding, you're already maxing out the CPUs performance and probably already pushing some high temps. Any overclock that you might be able to achieve if the settings were available would be very minimal as to make little difference. You would likely run into stability issues pretty early on.

Desktop systems tend to have a great deal of open space and much more efficient cooling options which is why they tend to overclock better. But even with that, most serious overclockers would replace their stock fans or go with other cooling options.

Why dont you max out your ram to 8Mb?
That might help a bit.....

Welcome to Apple Discussions!

SSD drives have been found to be faster.
And if you have an Express/34 compatible MacBook Pro, the hard drives that hook up via Express/34 SATA II cards are much faster than the internal drive of the MacBook Pro, or the attached Firewire or LAN drives.

Not recommending it. Just pointing you in the right direction for further research.

http://www.zdnet.de/einsatzvon_apple_macintosh_in_unternehmen_exclusive_zdnet_overclocking_tool_enhances_pe rformance_of_mac_prostory-39002307-39192217-1.htm

That tool "supports only the Mac Pro and the Apple server Xserve." A Mac Pro is not a MacBook Pro.