Hi to everyone. I wasn't sure if this belongs in this forum or the NLE w/mac forum so here goes.
My XL2 is in route so you can understand my glee . . . but I have been doing a lot of reading on the web about 24p on the mac and advanced pulldowns. My concern is that as my title describes I am only using FCP 3.0 which does not support advanced pulldowns. Can I expect to have that 24p look w/the movies I will be creating, or will I need to upgrade to at least 4.5? I thought I was on a track for a work-a-round on a site, but came up empty handed. Up until this point I have only used 29.97 and standard analog cam's. This is my first venture in pure digital capture from start to finish. Thanks in advance.

Hi Ron. I think you'll get a better response here in the Mac forum so I moved your post. I haven't worked with 24p so I don't have specific experience to offer, but IIRC Apple supported 24p in FCP 3 with something called "Cinema Tools" as an add-on package. Maybe you can find a used copy somewhere? Otherwise, I think you'll find that DVfilm Maker can also do this: http://www.dvfilm.com/maker/

Again, unless you can find an old copy of 4.5 that won't be a solution since Apple no longer sells it. I can tell you however that FCP 4.5 is a big improvement over FCP 3. FCP 3 began as an OS 9 application which was adapted to OS X, but it did not run in full native mode and didn't take advantage of all the OS X performance tweaks.

What sort of Mac are you using? On my G4 1ghz Powerbook FCP 4.5 lets me edit multiple tracks in realtime (although you have to set the quality at a lower level, but still works fine). FCP 3 can't do this, pretty much everything has to be rendered before previewing. FCP 4.5 is a big productivity increase on a slower machine like that. On a dual processor G5 - or even a G4 dual - you will see a huge speed increase and much more realtime capability.

I haven't upgraded to FCP 5 yet, but probably will soon. People are saying the realtime performance is even better in this version. But I think the answer is that you can find work-arounds if you really want to use FCP 3 for 24p, but you will probably be a lot more productive if you upgrade to a newer version.