AVCHD editing with CS4 works fine for me

Question

I saw a couple of threads discussing AVCHD with CS4. I was waiting quite a long time for Premiere Pro CS4 - tried some other applications in the meantime with no success - but now I can say it was worth waiting. I have a Quad Core Intel 2,4 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Vista 64, NVIDIA 9600 and editing AVCHD footage (1920x1080 50i, PAL, captured in my Panasonic HDC-HS9 with highest quality level of ~17MBits/s) is really good, although some artifacts (some, not many) are shown in the preview monitor. But editing is really fast, preview-playback within Premiere also. I have to render effects but after rendering, they are also very smooth.
Exporting to BluRay either with MPEG-2-BluRay or H.264-BluRay in AME/Encore results in great picture quality(!), and I mean great quality. No artifacts at all. Watching the video on a FullHD beamer on a large screen is really a pleasure. It took me (or my PC) 6:30 hours to render a 01:05 hours FullHD AVCHD video to MPEG-2-BluRay (max. quality, ~35 MBits/s), with a lot of effect-filters like cross fades etc.
Rendering to H.264 is roughly 3-4 times slower than rendering MPEG-2, but I have only done it for a sample video of 1 minute. The resulting Blu-Ray was also perfect from picture quality point of view (no difference to MPEG-2 except the volume size of the resulting file), but my PC needed much more time to render 1 minute video using H.264-BluRay than it needs for a MPEG-2-BluRay export.

Answer 1

>> Rendering to H.264 is roughly 3-4 times slower than rendering MPEG-2
...hmmm... this brings me back to the question I just asked elsewhere, which is: How does one properly export AVCHD to H.264 for Blu-Ray without loss of quality? Being as AVCHD *is* H.264, shouldn't the "transcoding" here basically amount to copying the existing data? I'd expect it to be WAYYYYY faster than exporting to MPEG-2 :-/
3-4 times slower than MPEG-2 would basically be a non-starter for me; I have a quad-core box with 4Gb RAM, and it took nearly 8 hours to turn 45 minutes of AVCHD (no effects) into DVD MPEG-2. Source and target were both interlaced. Strangely, exporting the interlaced footage as progressive cut the time by more than half :-? I didn't care for the choppiness of the result, however.
Cheers,
Aaron