HD Cam -- Best Output?

[ElementFilm]

Essentially I want to know what "final format" will produce the absolute best look for my film. Obviously taking an edit that is essentially 180gb's large and compressing it to a 4.7gb mpeg2 for a dvd, there's going to be some quality loss. I have heard that the best way to do it is to go from your online edit to an HD Cam master, or Beta SP. Apparently it makes your film look better than you've ever seen it because it is hardware based (an actual piece of film in the tape), and you're no longer dealing with the specific digital color codecs in final cut or whatever NLE you're using.
But now you've got your HD Cam master that no one can watch. But supposedly going from that HD Cam master to an Mpeg 2 will give you a far better Mpeg 2 quality than you would've gotten by staying in the digital realm.
Does anyone have any experience with this? It's a fairly expensive process so I want to know what my results will potentially be...

 

[mmm]

I DEFINITELY wouldn't go back to Beta SP! It's soft and horrid.

A top spec MPEG2 encoder will probably produce pretty good results from the HDCAM master, but if it is doing it in real time, I can't see it will do as good job as a 2-pass VBR. I may be wrong, I haven't used a top spec real time encoder.

What I do know is that a program such as compressor makes such a damn good job of encoding, that I can't see it is worth your money running back to HDCAM first. Also the HDCAM route requires another step of compression whereas Compressor allows you to encode to MPEG2 straight from the timeline.