Well, the time has come, and my costumers are asking for Bluray. I've since bought the CS4 suite for such an occasion. I also thought i'd be smart, and archive last week's wedding to BluRay..

I simply opened up Encore, imported the 6 hour long sequence. Set an H.264 8.5vbr Kbps encode for a 1440x1080P 30 fps source (HDV).
It was a total of 6 hours of footage...

Holy CRAP!!! Over 24 hours later, with my HP workstation crunching with fans running at full blast!!!!
Never again!

I haven't even tested out a burn to see if it's within BluRay specs...

But nonetheless, there's two things i've walked away for the better..

A) I am very impressed with the quality of encode at 8.5Kbps of H.264. It is very sufficient for my needs.
Anything more than that, is a waste of bitrate. (I'll cross my fingers for a good burn next).

B) I definitely need to step up and get a hardware solution for my encodes. Perhaps even buying another PC, as mine is getting older..It's an HPwx9300 with two DualCore AMD opterons...

Is there any suggestions for speedier encodes? I don't mind investing in another computer, but i truly believe that software is not the answer...

I just bought one of these since I burn to BluRay regularly:

http://www.videoguys.com/Item/Matrox+MXO2+Mini+Desktop+Kit+with+MAX+Technology/44F28514D494E494D423F485D4.aspx

Can't comment on how well it works yet.

Thanks Perrone....

I've already got a Matrox RT.X2 Le card. Unfortunately, i've got no more PCIe slots left. Only PCI-X slots..

Nevertheless, i've seen this hardware before, but never looked deeper into it. There's also the CompressHD cards, but like i said, i'm out of PCIe slots..

Perhaps a render computer, and hardware encoder are in order.....