Converting 1080 24p to 1080 301

Question

Seems I'm needing to go the opposite direction from most folks here, convert 24p to 30i. And I'm new to HD, so please bear with me.
I'm doing an off line edit for a project that will be finalized elsewhere to air in HD 1080 30i. We are sending them the HDCAM tapes, they are sending me time coded dvcam dubs of the HD material. Some of the material was shot on film, and we got the HDCAM tapes in as 1080 23.98. The dub house (who will online the final project in HD) told my producer the material can not be converted to 30i because it "would have to be rendered and then the quality would be unacceptable". They also work with Final Cut.
Can anyone give me a heads up as to what's involved in this process? Is it something the Final Cut suite doesn't handle? I looked here and online, but most folks want to convert the other way. I did see answers here suggesting simply dropping the 24p material into a 30i timeline, then rendering. Does that give choppy results? I had thought that Cinema Tools or Compressor would be able to handle this smoothly, though there might be a bit of rendering involved (creating frames versus removing them). Obviously movies do end up being broadcast on TV, so it can be done. I'm looking at maybe 6 or 7 clips, 2 to 4 minutes each. Is this something that has to done during the initial conversion from film? Best case scenario is that I just had 2 non technical people talking to each other. Worst case is that it will be an expensive lesson. I'd welcome any thoughts. ("Find out all the details before you agree to anything" has already occurred to me)
Thanks
G5 Quad   Mac OS X (10.4.5)   4.5G RAM, DSR-11
G5 Quad   Mac OS X (10.4.5)   4.5G RAM, DSR-11

Answer 1

Thanks guys, I'll do some of the heavy reading after dinner Zeb. As to Shane's questions:
But of course leads to the question can the 29.98
frame rate be easily converted to 59.94
Yes, quite easily. But...what are you converting
from and to? What are you shooting that is 29.97 and
needs to be upconverted?
Some material that was originally shot on film came to me as HDCAM 23.98
Most material was originally shot on HDCAM and is 59.94 (I must assume), there is no problem converting this material to DVCAM.
then have that converted to a DVCAM tape I can
work from?
Downconverting to DVCAM is easy as well. All this
can be done at a post facility. Even converting
23.98 to DVCAM at 29.97 is fairly standard. Then you
can reverse telecine the footage to 23.98 and do your
offline cut.
HDCAM downconverted to DVCAM is standard. It would
be better to remain in an HD realm if you can,
transfer the HDCAM to DVCPRO HD and capture and work
with that. All you need is a firewire 800 drive or
better yet, a couple eSATA units. I am using the
caldigit.com S2VR Duos myself for DVCPRO HD.
I am still curious as to why you need to convert
29.97 to 59.94?
Good advice on staying HD, but late in the project for that. The workflow from my last project was this:
1. Post house dubbed HDCAM tapes to DVCAM, sent them to me, I put together the project.
2. I sent my project files to the post house along with a reference DVD and associated files
3. Post house batch captures from HDCAM using my project file time code, does regular post tweeking.
The only new element that seems to be a problem this time is that the post house is telling me they can't convert the 23.98 material to a format they can use (59.94), then get me DVCAM dubs of that material.
And an update, just got an email as I was writing saying they can do it but it would take too long. They can ship the tapes out of house but it would be "really expensive".
Shane
G5 Quad   Mac OS X (10.4.5)   4.5G RAM, DSR-11