Re: Blu Ray Baby

Hi Daniel,
Thanks for your advice. It's all getting a bit confusing now so let me explain where i am with this.
The original advice from a "cow " member and I think from Ken Stone too was to choose the MPEG2 preset in adobe media encoder to encode my files from FCP. ( Ken stone said he had great trouble with h.264 ) Upon further reading and research it seemed that the quality was going to be better using MPEG4 rather than MPEG2. When I mentioned this in a posting I got a reply saying MPEG4 is H.264 The quicktime wrapped version is just called H264. Blu Ray can be either H264 or mpeg2.
Raphael Amador posted saying :- "Probably Ken Stone's article was written some time ago.
I remember that 2 or three years ago (search this forum) there were problems when trying to use h264 with Encore, so people had to stick with the MPEG-2. things have changed and you shouldn't have problem using H264 with the software that you have mentioned."
So I used Adobe Media Encoder and chose the h.264 preset. I have just checked the audio now after reading your post and it was set to PCM audio which you say not to use The only other alternative it seems to have is Dolby digital. Should I use that? What is wrong with PCM audio ?
After much trial and error with Encore, researching this and that way to do things and finding all sorts of other problems I finally got my first page and my second page (with menus) constructed and as a test made a dvd disc image ( not a blu ray disc image, that will come next ) To get everything down to a reasonable test size I cropped the timeline down to a 50 minute movie which when I hit GO! started transcoding. This was at 1:45 a.m. this morning. I eventually went to bed at 4a.m. and it was about half way through transcoding. I don't know how long it was in the end because I was asleep but when I awoke today it had completed everything successfully. The finished disc image is 3.32 Gig. and at a guess took four and a half hours to transcode. I tested it by putting the disc image into Toast and used the DVD player in my Mac to test the menus all of which seemed to work. I now have to make the full Blu Ray version and the file size is over Eighteen Gigabytes with a one hour and fifty minutes long timeline. Can you tell me which part of this workflow you would consider to be sub optimal ( no good ) and how to improve it. Is H.264 called MPG4 like Michael Gissing said in his post? Which is right and which is wrong ( I notice there are both in the AME presets list ) and if you say to use H.264 ( which I did ) then why all the transcoding last night. Is there always going to be a final transcoding in Encore no matter how it is set up it is set up ?
Any more help and advice would be most welcome.
Many Thanks - BRIAN

brian paterson