How to convert an MTS file without loosing quality?

Question

I have shot some videos on a Panasonic v720 camcorder. The videos are huge. I used the internal feature of the camcorder to convert to MP4 and the quality was reduced very much.What is the best practice to compress MTS videos? What is the recommended output format (avi, mp4)? My goal is just to consume less disk space and upload to Youtube (and have 1080p there) with the least quality loss.

Answer 1

Since your goal is to upload to Youtube and then presumably delete the source video, I would keep the settings as high as possible (while avoiding .avi lossless, which is used mainly for animation). I would use a media compressor and output using MP4 at highest bitrate, same framerate, same audio... even with highest bitrate, the output will not be lossless and so won't be that huge. Alternately, I would test several passes on a section of the file using medium, low, and very high quality settings, then calculate total file size based on the sample.