I have 16:9, 24p source material logged & captured into FCP4. The editing timebase for my sequence is 24fps. But when I compare all of the footage I have captured in the Browser, the sequence itself is 24fps and the all the clips are 29.97fps. What, if anything, have I done wrong?

24P or 24PA? If it is 24P, then it should be playing at 29.97, as 24P just simulates the film look. 24PA is actually 24fps footage recorded on a 29.97 tape, and needs to be either captured using the Advance Pulldown Removal option, or reverse telecined after capture.

Shane's Stock Answer #23

Quoting Ken Stone's site found at:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/24p_in_FCP_nattress.html

24p Normal
When shooting in 24p Normal, the camera is adding normal standard 3:2 pulldown to the video, which results in 24p footage designed to work with any non-linear editing suite and it will play back and look good directly to any NTSC monitor. You can use 24p Normal footage just like normal video from any DV camera, and everything will work fine, but obviously, the footage will have a film look to it. If you’re just going straight back to NTSC video tape, then using 24p Normal is the simplest, easiest workflow. No special treatment of the footage is needed and you really can just edit as normal.

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24p Advanced
Before you shoot 24p Advanced, you should fully understand it’s workflow implications. If you watch 24p Advanced footage before you’ve removed it’s pulldown, then it will look a bit jumpy and jerky. This is totally correct, because 24p Advanced is not designed to be viewed as is.
To use 24p Advanced and gain all it’s advantages, you should know that you cannot edit it as is (as this would leave it’s jerky looking pulldown intact), but you must first remove it’s pulldown. Final Cut Pro will do this for you, leaving you with the 24p footage without any of the extra “padding” fields that are added to make it’s frame rate 29.97fps. Now that your footage is 23.98fps, it must be edited on a 23.98fps timeline, and this can cause problems if you, for instance, want to include other footage, B-Roll, or stock footage, that comes from a different source. However, once you have your finished edit at 23.98fps, you can make a 24p DVD, which will allow you to compress your MPEG2 less than if you were making a normal 29.97fps NTSC DVD, and hence attain higher picture quality. Similarly, if you’re making a web movie, you will find it easier to get a higher quality result from 23.98fps media than normal NTSC media. 23.98fps movies are also easier to take out to film that 29.97fps movies.
If you are editing in a 23.98fps timeline, Final Cut Pro will add pulldown on the fly, over Firewire, so that you can see your movie on a normal NTSC monitor. Similarly, it will add pulldown when going back to DV tape. However, this will not work on a non-DV format output, say to Digital Betacam, and slower Macintoshes do not have the power to add 3:2 pulldown in realtime, falling back to lower quality pulldowns which although are not too bad while editing, will not make the final project look as acceptably good on television as a final product.

What that tells me is that 24P just adds a "look" of 24 fps to the footage that resembles that of telecined film, but that you work with normally at 29.97fps. Or, if you want to, you can add a reverse telecine and work at 23.98. Either way.

BUT, with 24PA, the footage looks jittery when played on the tape. So sure, you can work with it and output it to tape, but that tape is useless to anyone OTHER than someone who can capture it and perform a reverse telecine to work with it. It will not work as a Master tape for any viewable purpose: Broadcast TV, projected video from tape, a master tape for dubbing purposes. So, in effect, it is useless as a tape master, and should be avoided.

If you want to have a tape master, shoot and edit 24P at the 29.97 framerate.

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the footage was not shot in advanced pulldown so i figured out (after staying up pretty late) that i should edit everything in 23.98 fps which got rid of the quirks i was experiencing on the timeline. but since i will eventually add footage not shot in 24p and plan on eventually outputting to beta, i guess the best bet IS just to edit in 29.97 and avoid a whole lotta complications later. thanks!