Question about capturing

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

I have the following question about how HDV works. When I use a capturing utility, e.g. Vegas' or HDVSplit, they capture in .m2t format which is lossy. Now, if I use something like NeoHDV/Cineform that they save down the captured clips at their own lossless .avi format, do I "gain" one generation of encoding with fewer artifacts? I mean, is the following valid to believe that capturing in a lossless format will get you one less generation of encoding?
Vegas: tape -> lossy m2t -> editing -> lossy output
Cineform: tape -> lossless avi -> editing -> lossy ouput

[groblus]

As far as i know m2t is simply a copy of the data recorded on the tape. The loss of the data occurs while recording to the tape and not at the moment of transporting your data from tape to your HDD. So there is no quality loss if you use m2t files. And cineform doesn't use lossles encoding - it uses some wavelet compression algorithm which is better and faster then mpeg2 transport stream (m2t). So picking camera as a starting point or a m2t file is no difference at all as far as I know.
I've started a thread in this forum more or less about the same thing - looking for the moste efficient/lossless editing pipeline - let's hope someone more expirienced will give us the anwsers.