Looking for compressed standard definition file format to share footage between Final Cut Pro 7 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 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
Your best bet is probably MPEG2 or MPEG4.  Both are going to have quality loss compared to your high quality DV format though, but proportionally, they should be pretty good.  You should be able to use Adobe Media Encoder to make the transition to whichever format you want to use.  Simply setup a profile and drag all the files in to Encoder and let it rip.  

As to the type of MPEG2 or MPEG4, it really depends on what you are trying to accomplish.  I would personally probably go with h.264 at a fairly high quality level, though there will be some amount of difficulty working with the format in an NLE since it doesn't store very frame.  You really have to choose a trade off between space and efficiency in your NLE.  Large, less compressed videos can more readily access a particular frame without hammering the CPU, but they take up more space.

Motion JPEG is an in-between format that compresses each frame individually (or you can use all I frame H.264) but both give up a LOT in terms of compression since they compress each frame individually instead of making use of multiple frames at a time (which complicates non-linear playback).

One final option, (which is likely what I would do in your shoes) is to not recompress at all, but rather move the DV format video to an MOV container.  AVI and MOV are just containers and while AVI may not play nice in Mac world, MOV should play nice in both.