I am shooting with the Canon XH-A1s. When I capture in Premiere Pro the file format is mpeg-2. Is this a good format to edit my clips in or should I be transcoding the footage to another format for editing?

Thanks in advance.

HDV is the best you can do with this camera. No sense in converting in CS5.

Ben,

I've shot with the XH-A1 for the past 4 years and the native MPEG-2 editing in Premiere works fine. If you are planning a fair number of effects and expect to generate many generations of content, an intermediate codec like Cineform will exhibit less generational loss than the original MPEG-2. However, this will be at the cost of file space as assets captured using the Cineform 4:2:2 codec will be much larger than the original MPEG-2 files.