Currently I'm using premiere 6 and AE 6.5 just FYI.

From my understanding, if you make any changes to DV footage, other than cuts, you need to rerender the clip and if going back to a lossless codec like DV you'll have a generational loss.

My question concerns using dissolves between clips. In premiere, it appears that it only has to rerender the portions of the 2 clips that are enveloped in the dissolve. Everything else in the clip does not need to be rerendered and doesn't suffer a generational loss. Is this correct?

I shot a small high school production and I'd like to do some post in AE, but I think it'd be easiest for me to edit down the captured clips, export them as DV since it wouldn't be a generation loss, do the post in AE and render out to a lossless like Huffy, and reimport them where they should be in premiere, keeping the audio from the originals as I usually only render out the video from premiere to AE and back. Opinions on this workflow?

Currently I'm using premiere 6 and AE 6.5 just FYI.

From my understanding, if you make any changes to DV footage, other than cuts, you need to rerender the clip and if going back to a lossless codec like DV you'll have a generational loss.

My question concerns using dissolves between clips. In premiere, it appears that it only has to rerender the portions of the 2 clips that are enveloped in the dissolve. Everything else in the clip does not need to be rerendered and doesn't suffer a generational loss. Is this correct?

I shot a small high school production and I'd like to do some post in AE, but I think it'd be easiest for me to edit down the captured clips, export them as DV since it wouldn't be a generation loss, do the post in AE and render out to a lossless like Huffy, and reimport them where they should be in premiere, keeping the audio from the originals as I usually only render out the video from premiere to AE and back. Opinions on this workflow?

Your understanding is pretty much on target. Perhaps it was a typo, but DV is a lossy codec, not lossless.

Assuming you are going to ultimately send the final video to DV, you might as well stay entirely within the DV environment rather than create Huffy intermediates. If, however, the final output is going to a different format, e.g, DVD/MPEG2, you *may* benefit but it's unlikely to be worth the extra time to convert to and from Huffy. And, though it shouldn't be an issue (i.e., such is life, it probably will be!), stitching the original audio and 'posted' video back together could be a pain....

Hope this helps....

I do not think one generation loss from DV is not a big deal, especially with a good implementation like Sony or Mainconcept.

You won't ever be able to see the loss after a single generation - or even 5. I think you have to get up into the 15-20 to even notice, and that would be on some high-end monitors.

on fine detailed work, detail loss IS noticable on affected work, such as multiple CC passes etc etc irrespective of the generations..

If however your using a smart rendering engine, ie only newly affected clips are processed, while others are COPIED across, then the generation loss is virtually indistinguishable within those copied elements. If however ur running multple fx passes, then it will be noticable at EVERY generation..