Please forgive me if this is a stupid question, but I have tried searching a lot and cannot find an exact answer so thought I would reach out here...

If I want to shoot and edit my footage at 24fps to achieve a more filmic look, can I then render that edited footage into a 29.97 fps clip and if I do this will I lose the look I was going for?

Obviously I will experiment and try this on my own, I just wanted to pose the question here first.

The reason I am asking is so far everything I have shot has been at 60i on my Canon XHA1s.
I dont use tape, I record to a Firestore drive in .m2ts format. (I havent purchased the codec to edit .mov files on my Windows box) I then edit on a Windows machine in Vegas/After Effects, and typically render to a .mov or xvid.

I am wanting to enter a local film contest and I wanted to shoot in 24p for the project, but am nervous to do so because of my lack of experience with the format and short timeline.
(Also I just received an email from the contest producer and he says they have had issues with screening projects shot in 24fps in the past so that makes me nervous as well)

Thanks in advance for any assistance/insight anyone can offer....

You can playback 24p footage as 60i if you apply a 2:3 pulldown (also called telecine). It basicaly breaks up the frames into fields and then duplicates them in a particular pattern so that it plays back smoothly and conforms to 60i standards. This is exactly the same method which is used to broadcast 24p movies on television, so as you can see the result is practically imperceptible.

Shoot in 24F for a film festival.

If the festival will accept a DVD, then master a 24p standard definition DVD with 2:3 soft pulldown flags. This is the format used by almost all commercial DVD releases and is very compatible. Do not export as 60i to DVD because the resulting 4:2:0 interlaced colorspace will cause artifacts in the chroma channels.

Thanks for the responses guys