Is there a difference between capturing native HDV M2T file and converting to Cineform AVI later and capturing directly to Cineform AVI? Thanks!

In terms of the resulting files, no difference at all.

Capturing directly does save some time, because the conversion is happening as a background process concurrently with the footage transfer over firewire.

I do both and have found that avi is ok but if I want to use conversion to mov I capture as m2t then convert, vegas 8 does like large amounts of mov. files at once. the more I use mov. conversion in cineform the better I like the rendered files, rendering into mpeg4 gives me slightly better quality. cineform is fairly fast conversion either at capture or later on

I was asking mainly about quality, I know that later conversion takes some time.

Thanks!