over entire weekend (42 hours) my second PC was running preparing first BD-Video disc.

AMD 4400+ @ 2.8ghz with 2gb ram

I was running the project at 1080p MPEG-4 AVC with highest quality setting with 2-pass VBR and 5.1 sound.

3 hours of video, end result wasn't great.

in faster scenes I noticed artifacts, quite bad artifacts.

I would not recommend Nero Vision 5 for HD work.

Video playback is much worse in PowerDVD Ultra then in WMP11. But even in WMP11 where quality is better, video still looks bad in couple scenes, no where near original quality.

I think many people recommends Sonic Scenarist and Roxio DVDit Pro HD. But they are not as cheap as Nero.

problem is to buy Scenarist i would have to sell my liver, and roxio hasn't been updated in ages, and from what i heard simply will not work on vista.

I was looking at Adobe Encore, also supports Blu-Ray authoring, and should be better then nero. Not sure if there is any trial out there.

I don't think there are any consumer level tools other than Nero that offer MPEG4 at all. Haven't tried Pinnacle HD yet. We really need TMPGEnc or Canopus to get with the program and offer something. Although Canopus will probably not release anything for consumers.

@ nekrosoft13

What format are you starting with? If you're starting with HD video, have you tried TsRemux to simply remux to BD files?

i had two files, this wasn't anything important, more like a test to see the results

first clip was 1080i HDV from Canon XL H1 camcorder, second clip was M2TS MPEG2/5.1 AC3 clip from BD.

M2TS clip was only 11gb, so it seemed like a waste just burning the clip by it self.

Thats why I decided to see what results I would get, and i tried MPEG4-AVC because of higher compression ratio, in theory should give better results.

Right now at home I installed Adobe Encore trail, and running same project again in Encore, I will see if its any better.

When i left house after 14 hours it was about 30-35% done.

Adobe Encore has a lot of options, some of them a bit confusing.

u mean to tell me that it took u 42 hours to re-encode 3 hours of video at 1080p MPEG-4 AVC, highest quality with 2-pass VBR and 5.1 sound?!

yes

I need to buy skulltrail with dual quad cores

adobe encore been running for 37 hours now,

what codec r u using?

MPEG4-AVC, on highest setting with 2 pass VBR

my quad core can run MPEG2 from 1080p to 1080p in about 3-4 hours. but with AVC it should be better.

so the source is 1080p MPEG-2 or 1080p MPEG-4 AVC?

What is the length of the movie or clip u r transcoding or converting?

two clips

1) about 1 hour and 30-40 minutes 1080i HDV clip from HD camcorder

2) about 1 hour and 30 minutes 1080p mpeg2 m2ts movie

I'm doing this in Encore now to see what kind of results I will get.

but is this the same project u were running on Nero Vision 5 that took u about 42 hours to complete?!

yes, its the same stuff, running it again in Adobe Encore CS3 because results in Vision were kind of bad.

If scene was slow, it looked perfect, for example once something started move fast, a lot of arfifacts on the screen, and sometime major blocks.

r u doing this procedure on your AMD 4400+ dual core @ 2.8 GHz with 2 GB RAM or on a quad core PC?

Is it almost complete?

its going on the dual core, i don't know if it ts done yet. I left the PC running, I'm at work right now.

@nekrosoft13

when the procedure is complete I'd please like to know the following:

Source

1. How many gigs is the 1 hour 30 minute MPEG-2 M2TS file?
2. What audio stream is in the 1 hour 30 minute MPEG-2 M2TS file?

Target

1. How many gigs is the 1 hour 30 minute MPEG-4 AVC M2TS file?
2. Did u select the same audio stream as the source file?
3. How long did it take on your dual core AMD CPU to convert a 1 hour 30 minute MPEG-2 M2TS file into a 1 hour 30 minute MPEG-4 AVC M2TS file?

i can't tell you how long it took just for that one clip, because both clips are in one project, so all I can give you is total time.

rest i can answer right now.

Encore doesn't officially take M2TS files, i had to split the streams.
video stream was 10.59gb, audio was 5.1 ch AC3 at about 500mb.

Output file size, i will let you know later
and audio is the same, you have an options to leave streams as source.

project just finished, 49 hours to complete

file is 11gb (video + original audi)

I will double check quality

maybe I'm wrong but I thought that MPEG-4 AVC occupies less space than MPEG-2 using the same or a similar average bitrate

so it took u over 2 days to complete

anyway how is the picture quality?