How Lossy is Editing Within EditDV?

A bit of background on how DV codecs work and how EditDV performs in regards to maintaining image quality after multiple generations.

The video content is compressed and coded into digital form in the camera, and laid down in this form on the tape. When you do anything with it in a NLE like EditDV then it has to be decoded so that you can see it on the screen. The NLE also needs the decoded R,G,B information in order to do any processing. When you come to render the edit back to DV, EditDV will sense those parts of the program that are unchanged and simply paste the source code back to the output unchanged. Even when the code is sent through the codec the losses are minimal since most of them occur at the first generation stage in the camera. Some time ago we had a discussion about this and I did a 25 generation test with very acceptable results; that is 25 passes through the codec! Now although this is rather a false test, it does indicate that the codec per se doesn't lose quality in any significant fashion for existing DV material.