I'm taking a cinematography course right now, and it's my first time working with cameras that can handle 24p. The professor has required that we shoot in 24p because that's the 'film' standard. He CLAIMS that as long as we take care to set our projects up properly we should be able to import, edit, composite, do whatever else and KEEP the project in 24p until we render it out and print to DVD. So far we haven't had any luck with that.
We are capturing with a Panasonic DVX-100 in 24p (not 24pADV) mode, capturing using a digitizer. We set the capture settings to 24p, and capture from within Final Cut. One thing that I found kind of odd is that the footage that it captures is pixelated garbage, which makes no sense to me, since things that we render come out looking pretty good as far as picture sharpness is concerned.
The other, rather WORSE thing is that when we export the project after editing or whatever, so we can put it in Shake or After Effects, or whatever, no matter what we use to export, it's INTERLACING the footage. It looks like it's using 3:2 pulldown to do it (every 3 frames it interlaces 2 frames), resulting in 30i footage. The interlacing absolutely destroys any kind of motion-tracking shots, not to mention making anything involving high-contrast and movement look like garbage. When we play it in Quicktime or open it in Shake it's all too apparent.
What do we have to do to keep the shots in 24p throughout the timeline? This question does not specifically relate to Final Cut, but we did some tests today using strictly Final Cut, and we didn't have any luck.