Brief Background
I have a 30 minute film originally edited on Premiere Pro 1.5 in 2005/2006 that used 4:3 720x576 PAL interlaced DV AVI footage imported by firewire from a DV Cam. The entire raw footage totals at around 100Gb. I have archived/backed up this.
My question
I'd also like to work with the footage in a more efficient codec/file format (but preserving quality) that used much less space than the DV/AVI format and that works in both Final Cut Studio 7 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.
Further background
I have both licensed copies of Premiere Pro CS6 and Final Cut Studio 7. I am in the process of importing the old Premiere Pro 1.5 project into both tools. This has worked with reasonable success with the original AVIs (used Premiere Pro CS3 as an intermediate step) though there are some effects that didn't migrate but I am happy to tweak these manually.
I would like to keep the project that made this film in a current format so that it is still workable and to serve as practice for learning both tools. I believe that modern codecs provide efficiency in file size compared with the AVI file but still retaining the quality. I believe that FCP7 still does have some fans even though FCP X is said to be improved.
Detail about my technique for replacing the .AVI with the newer efficient file format
I am hoping that I can batch create copies of all the original footage files but in a more efficient commonly compatible format. I would expect the efficient version of the files to have the same name but with a new extension, e.g. .MOV for quicktime instead of the original .AVI. Assuming that both tools use a text-based/XML project file, in a text editor I should be able to global replace .AVI with .MOV so that the tool refers to the new efficient version of the file.
Research so far on a auitable codec/format
I have done some research including the FCP7 manual and on this site but not found many options. At the moment QuickTime seems to be the common format to use, but how efficient is this compared to the original AVI. I am not so concerned about Adobe Premiere Pro as this seems to be compatible with many formats.
What digital file formats are compatible with final cut pro? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090729091700AAFR72i
Video Formats Supported by Final Cut Pro http://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/usermanual/#chapter=C%26section=13
https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/final-cut-pro+file-formats