I'm having a bit of difficulty understanding the "generational loss" side-effect of native HDV editing within Premiere Pro. The reason why I ask this question in the Cineform forum is because I am interested in understanding what the difference is between native HDV editing and using AspectHD.

Say you are editing HDV natively and you place a clip on the timeline. It plays realtime and does NOT need rendered at this point.

Then you throw some color correction on that clip and you hit "Enter" to render the work area which is the whole clip.

Then you throw a "color emboss" effect on that clip, hit "Enter" and render the clip again.

Then you throw a "Solarize" filter on that clip, hit "Enter" and render the clip again.

If I were to then export the entire timeline using "Export->Movie.." and choose a lossless codec like Apple.Animation, what's the quality loss from the moment the clip was placed in the timeline? Has there been any generational loss?

Not if you are exporting to a lossless codec. But exporting out to M2T you would get loss. On the other hand, with Cineform, the loss of one generation is minimal. Hardly noticeable, if at all. In fact, you can have multiple generations without loss.

But if you export to Quicktime Animation or other huge lossless codecs, be prepared for tremendous file sizes. No loss except from the wallet.