Questions about AECS3, HDV m2t and intermediate formats

Hello,

I've read many bad things about working with m2t files (captured from HDV cam thru HDVSplit) in After Effects. Most people state reasons such as because m2t is a inter-frame codec, it causes problems with AE, but I'm still a bit unclear on the whole thing...

I have been doing this for a while (i edit in premiere with m2t files and import the project into AE for further post work so basically i'm working directly with m2t files) and haven't got much problems, but I'd like to evolve my workflow and I'm not sure what the benefits of using an intermediate codec are so I'd like to ask some questions just to clear things up:

- Using an intermediate codec instead of m2t will speed things up when working with the footages in AE, is this correct?
- I don't have Cineform but I do have ProCoder and will the Canopus HQ codec work well as an intermediate codec for me?
- I read that Canopus HQ has higher color depth than m2t, how exactly will this affect the quality of my final rendered images, note that a major part of my work in AE is color correcting footages. I tried to do the same color grade (using Looks) with an m2t file and a canopus HQ file of the same footage and rendered them out to uncompressed AVI, them encoded back to SD format for viewing, but I don't see much differences.
- are there any other specific issues I would encounter if I work with m2t directly in AE?
- similarly, what other specific benefits will I gain using an intermediate codec, particularly Canopus HQ?

Thank you very much for reading.