Here's my situation...

I'm currently on CS2, but am going to switch over to CS4.

I'm primarily doing wedding, and event videography and post production. Nothing broadcast or specialized beyond that.
With a Matrox RT.X2 card, I capture, edit, export, encode, authour, and burn my DVD's. My Mpeg2 encoding is done with a third party app, outside the CS package..
My dilema is, when a customer needs a change, i have to go through all the steps again. It's very difficult to keep track and steady workflow..
Reassesing the footage in Encore is a PIA!!!

Ideally.
I would prefer to drop the .AVI's into Encore, and if need be, re-edit in Premiere, and have the Encore timeline update automatically..This is the perfect scenario...Adobe Dynamic Link should do this well.

I'm switching over to BD output.
Since I'm looking at either upgrading my current system (not likely), or buying a new system, i'm wondering if there's anyway that Encore can use a third party encoder, or hardware card to speed up the process...
I don't mind buying CompressHD, or using AME, so long as the encoder utilizes all cores, or gives decent speed vs quality...

Am i asking for too much??

Peter,

If you could wait, I would hold off until CS5 comes out, which shouldn't be too far down the road. CS4 will do pretty much what you are looking but you will have to upgrade your editing station and you might as well build one compatible with CS5. You will probably want to update to a 64 bit operating system anyways.

I have noticed that many plug-in companies have stopped working on fixes for CS4 and are putting their efforts in making sure their products are compatible with CS5. So if there are certain plug-ins you want to have, I would make sure they are compatible with CS4 if you go that route.

As a side note if you want to use the RT.X2 card check the Matrox site for compatible systems. I loved my RT.X2 but when I upgraded from CS3 to CS4 it caused me nothing but problems and I spent months waiting for updates, going back to CS3 and on and on. I finally sold the card and use CS4 without it. I did install another graphics card because I got so used to the third monitor.

If you can afford the computer, the CS5/64 bit software upgrade I think it would be a wise choice.

Yeah David....
In fact, i'm pretty well sold on building something similair to Harm's system.
I was also thinking of using my current system as the editor (simple A/B rolls), and have the new system work as a rendering machine...

Nonetheless, unless CS5 has something revolutionary, it's just another headache in the wings until the bugs get worked out...:)
Wedding season is around the corner, and i'd rather get all the growing pains out of the way ahead of time....

Peter, CS5 is rather revolutionary: native 64bit Premiere Pro and After Effects; the Mercury Playback Engine which uses the GPU to decode AND render/encode, reducing the time needed for encoding, but I think CS5 is still 6 months away (Adobe usually releases Beta versions a few months in advance).

However, CS4 should save you time due to much better Dynamic Link integration. And if you want the best quality encoding, TMPGEnc is the best I have used. There is also now an encoder card for TMPGEnc which is only $290 and includes the TMPGEnc software(which is $100 by itself).
Here is a review: The WinFast PxVC1100 Video Transcoding Card: Worth The Price? : Introduction - Review Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/leadtek-winfast-pxvc1100,2523.html)

Something else to consider: rendering from Premiere/Encore and using an external app to encode - the quickest & best quality rendering is uncompressed .avi but this requires a very fast Raid array for ENCODING because the encoding program reads ahead during the encode process. With the .avi being 120-150 MB/s, you need at least 3 times that speed or the encoding speed will suffer. With my i7 (like Harm's), encoding a DVD in TMPGEnc only uses 25-35% of the CPU because my Raid array is only 250-300MB/s.