Can I get an idea of how long export will take from Premiere cineform environment into a Blu-ray compatible image.

Say 1 hr of footage on a quadcore 3Ghz. Is it purely a CPU issue, or does cineform benefit this in anyway.

I read that exporting from unccompressed for example, speeds things up a fair bit - does this apply for cineform too?

Encoding to H264 or VC1 will be slow, no matter what your source format is. If you want to accelerate BluRay mastering, there are a range cards for that. Latest : Pyro AV's Kompressor http://www.pyroav.com/

I encoded my 38min short film at 1080p/24 in h.264 out of premiere and it took about 19 hours on my dual core 2.4 ghz w/ 4 gigs ram. It was originally a 20gig Cineform file.

Hope that helps.