Can someone tell me if one uses an intermediate codec for capturing HDV footage is there a loss of quality as oppossed to just editing in native hdv or is the only draw back of intermediate codecs the extra space one needs. Sorry i know this is worded badly. i hope there is someone who understands what I'm asking. thanks in advance, tim

When you capture to an intermediate codec (assuming it is a lossy codec, not uncompressed), there will be a degradation of the image. With a codec like Cineform's the loss is not significant (visually lossless). A big advantage to using a codec like Cineform's is that you can re-compress several times with far less degradation to image quality (compared to HDV MPEG2 compression).