How can I cut up a video file into smaller bits?

Question

I shot around 3 hrs of 1920x1080 AVCHD in 2 clips (a wide shot of the stage of a musical production I performed in) It all fits in the internal memory of my camera.
Two friends shot medium and closeups in Standard AVI with a view of making a DVD (2 disks)
They will be editing it in Premier Pro standard def.(a 3 camera production!)
When I convert my AVCHD to AVI SD, each of my 2 reduced clips is still too big to fit on one dvd disk as a data disk.
How can I cut each clip in half to fit on a total of 4 disks so I can send them the video?
If I make two AVCHD projects out of each clip in PE9 and share as DV, the quality is badly degraded. Near vertical lines become very jagged and the picture is much softer than if it had been originally shot in SD.
If I make a PE9 DV project and import the AVCHD instead, I get the red line and the picture once rendered is no better.
I have seen references to a lossless codec. Would this do the job in PE9 and how do I implement it?
The 4Media converter does a much better job of converting to SD but how can I cut the new file in half?

Answer 1

I would point out that Standard Def here in Australia(576) is 12% better vertical resolution that in USA(480).
So European & Aussie SD doesnt look quite so bad compared with full HD
In fact if you stand more than 4 metres from a 40" screen, most people cant see the difference between good SD and full HD.because the eye cant resolve such fine detail at that dustance even with perfect vision.
This is providing the original material was shot with a good camera capable of HD and it was downscaled properly.
Converters
I. downloaded trials of the following converters and rank them in the following order
1. 4Media version 6 AVCHD to AVI converter ($37)
2. Prism
3. AVS
4. Wondershare
5. PE9 making seperate SD projects
I found them obviously different with PE9 right at the bottom of the scale! I will never use it again to make a SD project.
Blurryness and jagged or twinkling diagonal lines were the most common faults.
4Media shone above all the others. When used on the highest bit rate was only slightly softer than the ACVHD material with no jagged diagonal lines but it produced an AVI file the same size as the AVCHD.
When I set the bit rate so the AVI file produced was half the original AVCHD, the quality was equal to original SD video Shot on my old Sony Camera that cost me $2000 5 years ago.
I can split the files with this program too!
Judging picture quality
All pictures will have errors and be less than ideal. It's just a matter of how many are acceptable.
The ONLY way to evaluate how good a picture is to view it on the best  possible setup. You can't judge vertical resolution on an old CRT TV  which is a different number of lines anyway (525 or 625) so evaluation  is impossible. Digital TV thru a set top box to a CRT TV is far worse  than the original analog.
Because everyone knows SD is worse then HD but it should only be half as bad (576 is about half of 1080)
Because I wear glasses that perfectly correct my focus and slight astigmatism, I have a good rough method of calibrating my eyes so I can relatively judge quality of different pictures on different systems.
I vary the difference between myself and the screen so the left and right edges are in line with my fingers inside the frames of my glasses!
This is equivalent to  sitting two thirds from the screen in the average picture theatre where  you can comfortably sit without being disturbed by deficiencies of  most film and HD projection.
Applying this to my computer screen I can now judge pretty well. If a picture looks really good under these circumstamces it IS good and I can easily see any meaningfull errors.
Using my calibration "method", I found that full HD on my 40" LCD is noticeably sharper than the best cinema in our city (we have 39 of them, some with 8 theaters ) and after enquiries found they are all 1440x768 and not true HD at all.If you get there earlier than when they boot up their projector you can often see this in their boot up screen.
Worse still they slightly defocus them so you can see the pixel structure close up!
The now rare 35mm Film projection ranks even lower by the time copies are distributed.
You can't buy analog TVs or CRT screens anymore here anyway and Analog TV finishes here completely next year.