File encoded with x264 takes forever to load in Encore CS 5.5

Question

I use Encore mostly because it takes h.264 video encoded with the x264 compressor, which provides much higher quality than any other compressor. The problem is that these files take forever to load. For example, right now I'm trying to load a video that is about 1 hour and 20 minutes long, encoded at 38 Mbps, and the file is 20.9 GBytes. Now it's 3 PM and I imported this file along with the AC3 file over an hour ago. The Encore process shows as not responding, but when I open the Windows 7 Resource Monitor, in the disk tab it shows that it's reading the video file at a rate of about 45 MB/s, so I didn't kill the Encore process. I know eventually it's going to stop and load the file, but I don't understand why it takes so long. The encoding parameters that I used in x264 are these:
x264 --level 4.1 --bluray-compat --preset slow --bitrate 38000 --keyint 30 --min-keyint 2 --open-gop --weightp 0 --slices 4 --vbv-bufsize 30000 --vbv-maxrate 40000 --rc-lookahead 40 --tff --output "output" "input"
This comes from a family video that is 1080 59.94i. This time these two parameters appeared because I selected Blu-ray as the target:  --bluray-compat and --open-gop, which I don't normally use, but still, even when I don't use them, video encoded with x264 takes forever to load. Does anybody here know what could be the problem?

Answer 1

What's weird is last year I encoded a file that was almost two hours long and Encore took it without trouble, although it was CS5, not 5.5. Since I had kept the avs and bat files, and also the x264.exe from that encode, I brought them into the current working folder and I just modified the file names in the avs and bat files to point to the new avi and encode to the new h264 file. So I encoded this file, I imported it into Encore, and it still hangs. Maybe it was a change from CS5 to 5.1 that introduced a problem. x264 has been certified to be Blu-ray compliant since over a year ago, and I already put this file to a Blu-ray with TSMuxer, since it was a family video and I didn't really need menus, and it plays perfectly fine in my Blu-ray player.
But I'm sure there must be something, one or two parameters that would make it compatible. For example, after encoding the file again the last time, now I can import it into Encore, and it doesn't stay frozen forever, but it doesn't show me the video and as soon as I try to move the timeline cursor it freezes and doesn't let me do anything for several minutes. So still it's not usable. But it's a change from the first encode where the progress dialog would be there for several hours and do nothing at all.