All this info is supposed to go in the updated avtech that should be released in a matter of days hopefully, but for the time being, here's the info you need:
1) In order to rip Blu-rays you can use DVDFab. Notice that the free version of DVDFab won't be able to decrypt Blu-rays that have new encryption algorithms until a couple months later than the payware version. If you don't have DVDFab, you can get it
here?
2) Blu-rays can take any amount of space, really. Expect up to even 50 GBs of stuff to be extracted. Or you could be "lucky" and make do with even less than 20GBs of data per disc. Once you got it extracted, navigate to the "\BDMV\STREAM" subfolder to find .m2ts files. Some blu-rays have one episode per m2ts, so you'll have to look for the m2ts that weight the most, and you're likely to have the eps in there. Other blu-rays have all the episodes stacked together in a single huge m2ts. There's no way to know which .m2ts holds the eps in your Blu-ray until you check, but it's not hard. But now it gets tricky. Once you found the .m2ts, you'll want to load them in avisynth. You have a bunch of ways:
- You can use DSS2("blablabla.m2ts") and convert the whole thing to lossless for editing. Making clips in virtualdub should be okay, but avoid trims inside the script, as they sometimes fuck up with some m2ts for some reason or another that I still haven't quite figured out for sure. If you appear to not have the DSS2 function, then you can go to C:\Program Files\Combined Community Codec Pack\Filters\Haali, copy the
avss.dll and paste it into the C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins folder. Of course, this is assuming you have
CCCP installed.

- You can use ffmpegsource/ffmpesource2/ffvideosource to load them. I never had much luck with them with huge files, even when I get the indexing done, so I don't personally recommend it for blu-rays, but might work.
- You can use
DGDecNV? It's not exactly free software and it requires you to have an NVidia gpu with CUDA support, which you might not have. Alternatively you might "luck out" (but not really) and have MPEG-2 m2ts (which is possible)? If that is the case, then you can load the m2ts in DGIndex and use the old mpeg2source way as with DVDs, but MPEG-2 m2ts at 1080p look.?? like shit, and I am not kidding. If your m2ts is AVC then you could try using the last build of DGAVCIndex, but it's quite outdated, doesn't assure frame accuracy and might just flat out fail with your m2ts. If you have a VC-1 m2ts, then I'm afraid that either you get an NVidia GPU with CUDA support and buy the DGDecNV, or resort to one of the other two ways (personally I recommend DSS2)?
As you can see, you'll need quite a bit of space to hold the various GBs worth of data. A 25 minute AVC m2ts at 1080p23.976 (which is pretty much the most common format for japanese blu-rays) will weight about 5 GBs. Once converted to Lagarith you can expect it to weight over 5 times that - this one episode I'm basing my data on is 26.9 GB as lagarith. American and European Blu-rays are more likely to be VC-1 which might weight a bit more than AVC as an m2ts, but it doesn't change a thing to you once converted to lagarith.
On the plus side quality is generally stunning, with most of the filtering requirements being debanding and in some cases antialiasing. Unless the blu-ray you got is some upscale, blurriness won't be an issue, and even if it is upscale to 1080p, downscaling to 720p before converting to lagarith won't be hard, and in fact will help saving a lot of space over 1080p: an Avatar episode at 720p will likely be around 10GB in lagarith, versus the about 25GB lagarith for 1080p as stated earlier on.
In any case, once you got the lagarith ready, then you're good. Adobe programs seem to dislike big files when directly loaded so you'll want to load these lagariths through an avisource in avisynth and put the avs in premiere or after effects. If you use vegas to edit, then loading them directly should be safe, although I don't use vegas so I don't know.
That should be all the info you need. If you want me to expand on some part, though, feel free to ask.
EDIT: Hurf, qyot got me beat to it.
