Recoding overheats pent 4, 100% CPU, more ram help?

Hi, I've noticed lately my pavilion pentium 4 1050 mb ram has been overheating and shutting down suddenly when i'm encoding video. It seems to run fine otherwise, low cpu usage, etc. I went in and shut down a few services and that helped alot as far a the % of CPU usage, but the fan still runs like crazy but at least it didn't shut down. My question is, would it help to add more RAM, even though its the CPU running at full tilt, or any idea what service could be causing the sudden prob????