Low-complexity and high-performance surveillance video transcoding methods play an important role for a wide range of surveillance video transmission and storage applications. Towards this end, the special characteristics of surveillance video should be utilized for transcoding. In this paper, we propose a fast and performance-maintained transcoding method. This method firstly divides macroblocks (MBs) into foreground MBs, foreground border MBs and background MBs. Statistics show that the three categories have different distributions of prediction modes, motion vectors and reference frames. Following this, we adopt different transcoding strategies in terms of removing the redundant prediction modes, narrowing motion search range and reducing reference frames. In particular, we propose an algorithm to exploit the decoded motion vector to adaptively calculate motion search range. Experimental results show that, compared with the recent background modeling based fulldecoding- full-encoding, our transcoding method saves more than 93% time with ignorable quality loss.