Hi Vince and thanks for your answer.
It seems though that my process still work in terms of minimising the quality loss. If I understood correctly, using cineform allows to convert quickly all my rushes, but the quality will be the same as if I convert my rush from AVCHD to HDV in Premiere?
to tackle the problem of having to convert all my rushes one by one, I’ve actually put all of them in the timeline and export all the rushes into one file in HDV format.
I then reimport the HDV file (which includes all my rushes) into première and I edit this single file.
I still don’t see the benefit of using Cineform: it seems that Premiere CS4/5 can do the same job… unless I missed something?