here's my scenario:

i have film which was xferred long ago to video. i'd like to be able
to remove the pulldown and ultimately project this material at
the original 24fps in a digital environment. how do i do this?

i've exported deintelaced frames as sequences of stills and
written macros to discard the doubled frames from the xfer.
i've then renumbered the stills to get them sequential again
(deleting the doubled frames breaks the sequence numbering).

this gives me 24 progressive stills which i can re-import into an
nle system (premiere or premiere prov1.5 most likely). how
should i set up the project to recieve this sequence? what should
i ultimately output to? would i actually export as a 24fps (or 23.976)
file? 24p? 24pa? should i write another macro to re-introduce
pulldown in another specific pattern while leaving the frames
as progressive?

can someone walk me through the process as a simple outline?
bottom line question, i suppose, is can i really make a 24fps file
for digital projection (or dvd) and how would such film material
best be presented?

tia!

This shouldn't be too hard to do. Which NLE (edit software) are you using?

For example: I'd reckon that if you capture this footage (hopefully in DV)
and put it inside Sony Vegas with a 24p (not advanced!) project it should
do all of this for you.

Premiere Pro should be able to do this as well, just don't use advanced
pulldown (2:3:3:2) since that is not how telecine is done outside of the
TV world.

I think you would not need any of those stills or macro's etc.

How did you capture this footage?

You should not need to de-interlace since the footage can't be interlaced
(unless they re-introduced interlacing which is probably gonna cause
problems for you).

Just capture it and load it into a 24p project, all should be fine.

1- Unless you have a projector than projects at 24p, you might as well leave it like it is?

A DVD player will add pulldown to your material so it kinda defeats the point of what you're doing. There will be a slight advantage in compression if you convert to 24p though.

2- I have very little experience with 24fps footage, but from what I can gather:

When you load the footage into a 24p project, the film cadence may be wrong. Your editing software doesn't know where the 3:2 pulldown sequence starts/ends so it may pull the wrong frames. Play high motion scenes and look for any weirdness. If you see some, you will need to adjust the offset.