Video conversion for "optimization"

[Picsel]

Today, the digital camcorders provided by world leader manufacturers are using h264 AVCHD and the videos are delivered under .mts or m2ts file extension.

If we want to reuse this kind of video clips inside a PTE project we have to convert them again in order not to "optimize them" as PTE said but to ease PTE work and avoid jerky effects.

The problem is that PTE converts them into an .avi file using a h263 coder whose performances are weaker than h264, and if, at the end of the PTE project we want to create an HD video, PTE will reconvert h263 into h264.

In fact to simplify we have the following process :

h264 AVCHD=> mpeg4 ASP h263 => h264 AVC

We are cascading coding disagreements and lowering the signal/noise ratio of the video.

For editing videos, it is quite difficult to avoid this cascading process but the result could depend on the data compression used by the intermediate coder.

I promote PTE for slideshow and video editing but I still must use Adobe Premiere (CS5) for h264 AVCHD conversion into an Mpeg2 High@High profile / GOP N=3 whose quality should be better than Mpeg4 Advanced Simple@L1 profile (h263) provided by PTE converter.

Should it be possible that PTE provides a video conversion which minimizes the cascading coding noise effects even if the resulting ("optimized") video file size is bigger (less data compression) than the original one?

Daniel