Definitely. Gives you a lot more to work with in post, especially when you grade your footage, and as DV is not simply SD but compressed SD even without touching the footage inbetween you'll get a better image (due to the different ways DV and MPEG2 are compressed - you won't lose some of the image DV doesn't save very well but MPEG2 does).

I'm yet to put this to the test too much tho, my HD workflow is still a pain in the arse (720p25 support would be great any time now Avid, like you promised yonks ago).

One other thing on this subject, SD DV is 4:1:1 and HDV is 4:2:0.

Since DVD is 4:2:0, the final DVD will end up with all the color infor from the HDV file, while a DV file would lose half of the color info when going to DVD.

However, since the JVC cameras do SD 60p in HDV mode, you can shoot SD 60p and go to DVD and not lose any color info.

Yeah TMPGEnc.

Tsunami.

And the website is called pegasus.

:)