AVIDEMUX is an excellent little program..

Rough cuts video of any format and saves to any format rapidly. I used it to chop up a 7GB MPEGTS HDV file and it took one minute to render out a 2.7GB! This is much better than using Cinelerra to reduce it via a re-render via Quicktime. Sweet! I don't see any loss in the image, but that will need more investigation. Still, initial impressions are very good!