confused by filesizes resulting from AVCHD in Encore CS5

[Drew Wallner]

I just installed CS5 for the first time yesterday and have to say, all around I am absolutely loving the new suite. I have run into one bit of confusion though related to video and am hopeful someone around here might be able to help. I've searched Adobe's forums and watched a bunch of Lynda content trying to find a common "gotcha" that I might be missing as a newb, but no luck so far...

Here's the situation. I'm trying to burn a very simple Blu-ray project just as a workflow test. I use a Mac, it runs 10.6.7 and has 8GB of memory and plenty of drive space. My footage is from an older AVCHD camera, so it's in 1440x1080 (anamorphic). There are about 130 clips in the AVCHD disk image that I'm working from, and they total about 11GB in size and about an hour in duration. I'm just trying to burn a very simple Blu-ray project to a BD-RE as a test.

I can bring in my MTS files just fine, they appear as assets and I can add them to a timeline. I make sure to check my project, everything seems fine including that I've remembered to tell Encore what to do when the timeline finishes playing or when someone presses the Title button. I can hit the Preview button in Encore and watch my stuff, even skip through the chapters, no worries.

I make sure that everywhere I can find a drop down mentioning anything about quality or output format, everything is set to "Blu-ray" and "Don't Transcode."

I go to Build, and everything checks out and Encore is happy to proceed...then it tells me there isn't enough room on my media and that's when I realize that according to the bar indicating disk use Encore thinks, for some reason, that my project is over 25GB in size (around 25.4GB to be precise). However, I'm only working with 11GB of footage and I don't want to transcode any of it. So, what am I missing? I'm sure a few assets need to be created like a blank menu and what not, but how is my project more-than-doubling in size? I'm presuming I've missed something key about avoiding transcoding between AVCHD input and Blu-ray output?

Thanks in advance for your advice!

[Lars Siden]

I might be mistaken, but I believe that AVCHD is MPEG4 and the default setting for an Encore Bluray project is MPEG2 - so I guess that he thinks he will need to re-encode all files...

In the "new project" dialog, you can press "default transcode settings" and there choose H.264 and 1920x1080

// Lazze

[Drew Wallner]

Originally Posted by Lars Siden

I might be mistaken, but I believe that AVCHD is MPEG4 and the default setting for an Encore Bluray project is MPEG2 - so I guess that he thinks he will need to re-encode all files...

In the "new project" dialog, you can press "default transcode settings" and there choose H.264 and 1920x1080

I wish that were the case, but sadly no...the setting is already set to H.264. Besides, the "default transcoding" setting should only matter for assets set to "Automatic" and these are all set to "Don't Transcode" anyway. Anyone have any other ideas?