I didn't see a thread on this here in this forum so I hope I didn't overlook it.

After looking at my footage before and after compressing it made me uneasy. What I mean is, once i bring my footage into Premiere and do all the editing then export through compression to a file the footage is noticeably worse.

What steps do you guys take to preserve as much quality as possible?

My flow it MTS files to Premiere then export. Normally I export H.264 to a MP4 file, but I loose alot of quality in the process...

It seems in order to get a good render I have to select no compression, but then the file is so large. Just with the file that threw together really quick mentioned above was 4 1/2 GB with no compression for approximately 27 seconds of footage.

i use Canopus HQ as intermediate, then encode with mainconcept reference to h.264 for blu-ray. i got great quality.

Thank you for your input. I have have that option in my render panel. I will try that and see how it comes out.

Does anyone happen to use Adobe Prelude? If so, what method are you encoding with?