How do you segment a long project and preserve HD 1920 x 1080 pixels at each step?

Question

I'm shooting video with a Canon HF S10 in the maximum quality (1920 x 1080 i) mode.  The resulting files in AVCHD format are coming into the computer and into Elements 7 okay.  The desired  Project output is BluRay.  I want to maintain the full image quality (1920 x 1080) end-to-end (lesser quality is okay on the timeline if that all that is available).  My current project is about 65 minutes long--future ones could be two hours or more.  All the 100+ trimmed clips and transitions are on the timeline.  Saving the Project file seems to work, but re-opening the Project takes a long time and doesn't always work.  Rendering this long timeline ulitimately freezes/crashes.  When the Project was much shorter, the save and reload cyle worked okay.
Per Steve's book a work around is to break the project into pieces around 10 minutes long, render and save them to AVI files, reload and merge the AVI files into a new "Master" Project and then render the whole thing to BluRay(?).  Better yet he suggests outputing to a folder and burning the disc with other software.  But Elements does not output BluRay to a folder.  And when I experimented outputing with AVI segment files, quality dropped a lot suggesting that the 1920 x 1080 is not preserved in AVI format.
It appears that:
     AVI files are just the DV 720 x 480 image quality of mini DV tape
     Output to a folder in BluRay image format is not available
     Elements 7 does not support breaking an HD 1920 x 1080 timeline into segments for long projects
Any ideas will be appreciated.  Canon does supply a crude editing software package that is claimed to do simple cuts and transitions and produce a file that can be loaded back into the HF S10 memory for playback (distributing product on SD cards instead of BluRay is a novel possibility).  I'd prefer to use Elements or a similar software product that takes me start to finish without losing any pixels.
Finally, I have a backlog of several long projects using HDV tape as a source.  I want those to go to BluRay too, but not giving up any of the 1440 x 1080 pixels.  I think the same limitations above apply to HDV.
After waiting several years to get this end-to-end capability, it is disappointing to find it still seems to be out of reach (maybe is just hidden).
Sometime soon, I hope Steve will write an edition that deals exclusively with the end-to-end HD (1920 x 1080) work flow including best scaling of still images, storage of image files and output to BluRay and creating slide shows using all the HD pixels (no SD compromises) again on BluRay.  That of course means Adobe may need to add some tweaks in Elements 8.
Terry 9391
PS, my PC is using an Intel Core 2 Quad processor, Vista OS, 4 GB of memory, has access to several TB of HD, and a couple of GB of Ready Boost memory (does this really help?) and a 1920 x 1200 monitor.

Answer 1

You could export each section as 1920x1080 MPEG2 using the Share>Personal Computer>MPEG option then selecting the MPEG2 1920x1080i export Preset.
You can also export as AVI... however this will be uncompressed AVI with a file size of over 1GB per minute... File>Export>Movie then in Settings under General>File Type select Microsoft AVI (not Microsoft DV AVI). Then in Video>Compressor select None, in Frame Size set 1920x1080 and in PixelAspect Ratio select Square Pixels.