Editing .avi files without losing quality?

[Cooncat]

Hey guys,

I have some .avi video clips that I got from my digital camera. I'm trying to edit them in final cut express...I'm not adding any fancy transitions or anything, I just want to make them shorter by taking out the stuff in the clips that I don't want. The problem is that after I've cut out the stuff that I don't like in FCE, I have to recompress them (into quicktime format) to get the file size back down to what it was before I edited them (i intend to put them on the internet, so the files have to be small). And seeing as I'm compressing the file twice, the quality goes to the crapper. All I want to do is be able to shorten up these clips whilst maintaining the original quality and filesize...is this possible?

Sorry if I don't make much sense, it's late and I've had a bad day.

 

[ftaok]

I think you can use Quicktime Pro to cut files without decompressing/recompressing. You'd probably want to comfirm this is you don't already have it as it's $30.

 

[Cooncat]

I'd really rather not spend $30 on quicktime pro...although it would be nice to not have quicktime keep nagging me to upgrade for once. You'd think there would be a way to do this in FCE, but I haven't figured it out yet if there is. There has to be a similar program to quicktime pro that is free or shareware, right?