CS4 Q: workflow, proxy, etc.

Hello -
I just left the question below with the CineForm support folks on their site too. I thought you all may have some great feedback about what codecs are available in Media Encoder (CS4 for now) that can repserve as much of my source footage quality as possible.
My main question for this forum is - what is the best codec I can use to cut my full HD footage (AVCHD - Cannon HFS21) down to qHD(960x540 range) or smaller and keep the best quality?
If I can do that as losslessly as possible in getting them down to quarter size then I can pump up my high res one from there in cineform and also export low res for editing (proxy/offline)
Thanks!
Rich
=========================
I have a new editing workstation on order (4 weeks.. ugg!) and so I'm looking for a workflow that lets me proxy files first. Even your full frame HD low res files are too big for my laptop to deal with pleasantly (no surprise, huh?) I really wish your tools would allow me to drop to qHD for both low and high res. Or even smaller. At this point I'm be happy working in that size range for the rest of my workflow.
So..... any tips would be appreciated. I'd be happy to drop to some intermediate format before coming into cineform but at this stage I am not sure which of the codecs in my CS4 (yes CS5 next month when the 64b OS box arrives) would be the safest in terms of preserving what quality there is in my AVCHD/MTS source files. I'm thinking AVI since that seems to be your preferred format. Are there others?
I'm thinking this for a flow...
AVCHD (HD) -> AVI (qHD) -> CFM AVI (qHD) Low (Proxy) & CFM AVI (qHD) High (Final)
Being a newbie I'm sure that I'm missing some key insight. Workflow advice appreciated!

Good to get that confirmation of my assuption. I spent the better part of a weekend trying out every combination of downsizing combined with proxy files and nothing could extract from h.264 ACVHD and retain any quality. CineForm does really well and recreating larger files with higher color data in it's own app window, but it sucks at downsizing via media encoder as a code selection. Of course I am in CS4 until me new hardware arrives in 4 weeks.
Thanks
Rich

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Message was edited by: thowle (reason; added information about QuickTime version)

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