[Avid-L2] All H.264 decodes created equal?

In the course of researching various methods for processing 5Dmk2 and 7D footage as dailies I have hit two questions for the lists collective wisdom.

1) Is there any difference between the various tools (Mpeg Streamclip, FCP log and transfer, Magic Bullet Grinder, Adobe CS5, Neo Scene, etc) on the
DECODE side of things?

From the research that I have done, all of these tools use the underlying quicktime framework to decode the H.264, and any differences in transcoding are the result of different types of encoding.
Possible exceptions are Neo Scene, and CS5, but even these may use the same quicktime framework to decode?

2) On the ENCODE side of things, what is people's real world experience regarding what type of datarate you need to go with to get ALL the information out of these source files...
Prores HQ? Prores444? Uncompressed DPX? Obviously the safe thing to do is go for an offline/online workflow with ProresLT for offline and Uncompressed DPX for online, but if ProresHQ would capture all the source data without introducing compression artifacts it would be nice to avoid offline/online scenarios.

Thanks in advance!

Best-
-Nat

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