Editing in Premiere Pro without quality loss?

[Johnws]

Hi,
I am trying to find out if I can import MPEG into Premiere Pro,edit and burn back to dvd without re-encoding.
Here's an explanation of the work I am doing.
I have full length movies which were telecined (rank) from film,some sound,some silent.
These were transferred to dvd-r (mpeg2).
These will be imported into Premiere,and some need a lot of editing.
For the sound movies,the editing might just include adding a logo in the corner of the frames for short periods of time throughout the movie,and this wouldn't be a "huge" problem if just those sections were re-encoded (although any quality loss is not good).
The Mainconcept plugin might handle this,and just re-encode the edited sections,from what I understand?
The silent movies -
These need considerable work.
I need to add music,and for most,I will need to change the speed of the entire movie (to get them at the correct speed they were meant to be shown,as these were filmed anywhere from 16fps to 28 fps).
Also need to create new intertitles,and add tints,so basically instead of just minor edits (like the sound movies) these need a lot of editing/work all throughout the movie,from the opening titles to the end.
Is there any way I can import these mpeg2 files into Premiere Pro,do the needed work,and get the finished project back to a dvd-r (or likely dvd-ram) without suffering the quality loss of re-encoding?
Many thanks in advance for any suggestions,
John.

[guns1inger]

The short answer is no. The long answer is that you can probably do it so that the loss is minimal and not noticed by the majority of viewers.

I am assuming you cannot access the source material, so this is the only way to go.

The mainconcept plugin is your best bet for loading and editing the mpeg-2 clips.

For the logo problem - if the logo is a (very) simple, you might even be able to use a sub-picture stream instead of embedding it in the video itself.

If this doesn't suffice, and you have to make changes to the clips themselves, I suggest reencoding at the highest bitrate you can, with at least 2 passes (I don't think mainconcept allows for more than 2 passes). Where you are making large changes (tints, framerate changes etc.), you might consider a subtle sharpening filter as well, as encoding can soften images.