Another Media Export Woe

Question

Do these time results make sense?
I have the latest CS4 Production bundle updates
Running with Vista Business 64bit with a lot of stuff turned off (I like the classic mode)
ASUS P6T Deluxe Mainboard
12GB DDR3 1333MHz Memory
i7 965 3.2GHz Extreme CPU Quad Core with HT (8 Threads)
Nvidia GTX 280 PCIe 2.0 x16 Graphics Card
Promise EX8650 (Intel Hardware RAID 6 Engine) PCIe x8
8 Seagate 1.5TB SATA-300 drives (Raid 6) at about 400MB/sec avg. Read & Write, (2 - 3.8TB Partitions)
Intel X25 80GB SSD for Operating System & Apps
LG  6x Blu-Ray Burner
PC Power & Cooling 1KW (1000 watt) Single Rail Power Supply
Dual 24" Samsung 1920x1200 Desktop Displays Setup as Dual View In Nvidia Settings.
This systems runs strong though when I take a simple Premiere timeline with sequence settings at XD Cam EX 720p and put 60 mins of 720p, M2T files from my JVC HD Camcorder, the editing part is smooth and clean, but when I try to simply export via media encoder to a multiplexed MPEG2 for DVD (720x480) progressive widescreen with dolby digital audio and 2 pass VBR. It takes 4 hours! Is four times real time considered fast?
It seems that a friend of mine with Edius 5 can accomplish this in a fraction of this time. And, even burn it to Blu-Ray while I am still exporting. and that is on a system that is half of the specs I listed above. I am new to CS4 but not new to video editing. Am I missing something or is Adobe Media Encoder Slow?
I am all ears and I value feedback. I hope to be able to share some in my future here on this forum.
V

Answer 1

Doing a high quality render to MPEG2 for DVD with CBR 8Mb/sec and Dolby Digital Audio at 192Kb/sec and CBR multiplexed is now taking 2 hours for a 1 hour timeline.
Not having used Encore before, will Encore accept this single MPEG2 video file with embeded Dolby Digital audio?
For Encore I suggest to use elementary streams and not multiplexed. It should not be a problem, but the general consensus is that elementary streams are the preferred way. One advantage is that when you need to make some minor adjustments in either audio or video, you can just encode the stream you have modified and leave the other stream intact, as long as the total duration has not changed.
I can't exactly compare your material, but on my system with a HDV 1080i timeline of 1:30 hours encoding to MPEG2DVD takes around 33 minutes.
Here are the settings used:
Mind you I had the quality slider at 4 but the rest comparable to your settings, CBR 8 Mbps, 1-pass and 224 Kbps 5.1 audio.
So your encoding times appear to be long in comparison to mine. I got around 3 x RT. This is on a i7 920 running @ 3.6 GHz. The major difference between our systems is the raid controller and raid format used. I have an Areca ARC-1680iX-12 with 2 GB cache and use a 12 disk raid30. My average read speeds with HDTach hover around 800 MB/s instead of your average of around 400. But that does not explain why you get only 0.5 x RT while I get around 3 x RT. Maybe using quality at 4 instead of 5 explains the difference. If so, try it and look if you can discern any visual degradation.