We present a full HD (1080p) H.264/AVC High Profile hardware encoder based on fast motion estimation (ME). Most processing cycles are occupied with ME and use external memory access to fetch samples, which degrades the performance of the encoder. A novel approach to fast ME which uses shared multibank memory can solve these problems. The proposed pixel subsampling ME algorithm is suitable for fast motion vector searches for high-quality resolution images. The proposed algorithm achieves an 87.5% reduction of computational complexity compared with the full search algorithm in the JM reference software, while sustaining the video quality without any conspicuous PSNR loss. The usage amount of shared multibank memory between the coarse ME and fine ME blocks is 93.6%, which saves external memory access cycles and speeds up ME. It is feasible to perform the algorithm at a 270 MHz clock speed for 30 frame/s real-time full HD encoding. Its total gate count is 872k, and internal SRAM size is 41.8 kB.