I'm running Premiere Pro CS3 on a Mac Pro with no problems whatsoever. Issues with HDV audio/video sync on capture were resolved with the recent 3.2 update. Very stable. Burned my first blu-ray disc yesterday (on a Mac!). I tried FCP and honestly couldn't see any reason to switch. They're very similar programs in most respects. I've got the full CS3 Production Premium so the integration between apps (particularly After Effects) is a real bonus for me.

Hi Ron,

I encoded the blu-ray files directly from the timeline in Premiere and imported them into Encore. You can choose either H264 or MPEG2. Both work fine but H264 allows for much more content per disc at a given quality. I had heard that transcoding to H264 was very slow, but my Mac Pro burned through a one-hour program in a few hours. I was expecting a few problems along the way but the whole process went very smoothly. It was pretty much the same experience as authoring a DVD, except the transcoding took longer.

Encore works exactly the same for Blu-ray authoring as for regular DVD. In fact, you can author for both outputs in the same project and just choose the destination when you burn the disc (blu-ray, DVD, or Flash). They haven't implemented any of the new features that are part of the blu-ray spec yet (e.g. pop-up menus, interactive links, etc.) but for me that isn't a drawback. I assume Adobe will begin adding these features in future versions.

I hadn't really given any thought to providing a blu-ray authoring service. Not sure the demand is really there. Also, the file sizes involved are pretty large... I suppose you could export HDV to tape and send that, emailing menus separately.

I'm not sure why Apple is dragging its heals on implementing a blu-ray authoring option in FCS. Competition with Apple TV? I would imagine it's coming in the next version.

I'd be interested to hear your comparison between Premiere and FCP. When I first got my Mac I thought it would just be a matter of time before I switched to Final Cut, but after trying it wasn't so sure. Premiere Pro has been very stable for me, and I didn't see enough differences in Final Cut to entice me. The ProRes 422 intermediate codec, better camera format support and a larger selection of 3rd party plug-ins (Mac versions) were probably the single biggest advantages I saw.

That being said, Premiere's biggest weakness, in both Mac and Windows versions, has been in how it scales HD footage to SD (for example, when creating a standard def DVD). If you edit in HD then encode from the timeline to SD output the results will look poor. Premiere does a rotten job of scaling interlaced content. There are some free frameserving apps available for the Windows version which can be used to solve this, but they don't seem to be available for the Mac. This is where having an intermediate codec like ProRes 422 is very useful. I've got the 3rd party Cineform codec for Mac which essentially fulfills the same function for Premiere.

By the way, a good resource for blu-ray burning with Encore and various issues involved can be found here (also discusses integration between Encore and Final Cut):

http://blogs.adobe.com/davtechtable/

Bob