Adventures in 24p, things we can all laugh about (but I need help!)

Question

Hello everyone!
I'm walking into a disaster area, I have a friend who's shot over 100 hours of footage here for a documentary recently. She's handled all the production herself and it looks fantastic, she did a great job. The problems here is her current logger has absolutely no clue what he's doing.
The knowledge I have of the project here is limited but bear with me. First off, it looks like he's about 2/3 of the way done logging and he's been at this for nine months. Yes folks, nine months to log 66 hours of video. He's got NO bins ANYWHERE so basically there are a few thousand clips on the root of the browser window (yay!). That's not really the issue I'm coming to you guys with though. Reorganization will be a pain in the butt but I can manage if it becomes my responsibility.
My issue is that she has come to me to make a DVD for her trailer. Upon opening the project I notice that not a single deck in my post house is taking the firewire signal. Upon further inspection I noticed she captured and her timeline is in 3:2 pulldown. She said she did it on some Panasonic camera in order to be able to do 24p. Firewire output wasn't the biggest concern, I was just doing it to be thorough in monitoring, though I took note that it could mean issues later.
So my first question:
Coming from a SD DV NTSC source, shouldn't the capture preset and timeline option just be all glorious default 29.97 NTSC regardless of the shot framerate?
Final Cut seems to be playing it alright in it's viewer but... again no firewire output.
So! Trying to ignore the issues I saw coming up and moving along trying to get this trailer out for her (and upon fixing every title which was nowhere near even action safe, HELLO!), I exported the sequence as an mpeg in DSP3. As I had predicted there were massive framerate issues, stutter central.
There are many issues here which I'm trying to compel her to get a new guy for her post management and I may even have to step in myself to help besides this possible framerate issue. But, any issues on capture seem to be the biggest concern right now, especially if this all needs to be relogged.
And thus my second question:
Based on the limited information I've given you guys, does it sound like I'm going to have to re-log everything?
Believe it or not this is gonna be a big documentary picked up by a major cable television network so things need to be fixed and in a hurry so the actual editing process can begin. Any advice will be helpful! Thanks!
-Jim

Answer 1

Yes. But. Was it shot 24P or 24PA (I hope 24P).
When you check the clips, what frame rate do they
have in their properties? When you say her sequence
has 3:2 pulldown, do you mean the sequence is 29.97?
The FW output is likely unrelated to any frame rate
issues. FCP will insert pulldown on the fly to
display a 24fps sequence (I believe). Can FCP see the
FW decks?
Well when this job completed production, our house dubbed a backup of every DV via firewire on our old DV decks running DV SP mode. As far as I know, those decks won't play back 24PA (speaking of the Sony DSR-30, DSR-11 and an old Panasonic DV2000). So I assume it's just plain 'ol 24P.
The sequence settings said the framerate was 24 and if I try and toss the clips in a 29.97 sequence it's looking to render out. Unfortunately I don't have access to the materials now for further investigation.
For the record this is FCP 4.5 I'm working on. As for why FCP isn't sending out the firewire properly, I assumed it was cause of the sequence settings, it works normally with no problems. FCP will toss out the first frame and will play the audio but no video.. looks exactly like the problem if your canvas viewer is set to high.