I've been reading up on cineform and it seems to me that this intermediate is only applicable to video in HDV and above. Is that correct? If not so then what improvement could cineform bring to a simple dv avi video workflow?

Forgive me if this is a redundant question but i'm a complete newbie to cineform and just want to understand it more. I have a FX1 with which i predominantely shoot in DV PAL. I have both Premiere Pro CS3 and Vegas Pro 8c editing systems. I used to have a Matrox RTX card which i threw out. I currently capture using a DSR-11 deck with a firewire cable.

So here i am. Please do enlighten me on whether i can improve some aspect of my work using cineform and what sort of workflow are we looking at. Thanks guys :)

The Cineform codec provides an intermediate format that is 1) less processor-intensive to edit, and 2) retains quality through multiple generations/heavy editing.

HD and HDV folk benefit from both of the above; SD folk mainly benefit from the latter.

You can certainly convert DV to SD-resolution Cineform files, although there isn't (that I'm aware of) an on-the-fly conversion process equivalent to what is available during HDV capture.