Help with getting high quality .avi

[hoops10]

I am brand new to DV editing but I have read a lot of posts and even made some posts myself. I am using Premiere and/or Ulead to capture the DV video. What I want to do, until I get really familiar with these 2 proggies, is just transfer the DV video to a high quality .avi. When I say high quality, I mean no quality loss. I would then like to use CCE to make an svcd. Here is my problem, when outputting the captured video from either Premiere or Ulead, does the codec matter? I ask because only the MS DV codec is used in Premiere (and I've read its crappy for quality). If the codec does matter, which one should I use? Also, if anyone can point me to a guide for using Premiere or Ulead, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

[theReal]

The MS DV codec is 100% pixel per pixel compatible with the Sony hardware DV codec. There is no quality loss at all when capturing from a Sony DV device to the MS DV codec.

Of course the codec for an avi file does matter when you output it from Premiere, avi is just the container for any kind of possible compression method.

If your source video is not in DV format, I'd output to uncompressed avi or lossles hufyuv compression for best quality (or frameserve with avisynth which is the same as uncompressed but without the need for a gigantic harddrive).

If your source is in DV, using anything else than a native DV codec (like MS or Panasonic) would be stupid.