I am about to be shooting a project for a client with the JVC HD100 and we are planning to shoot 24p (720). It is possible that there will be a few assets that end up in the final project (less than 5 percent) that will come from HDV 108060i or SD.

My question is: what is the best way of dealing with and conforming the other footage to 720/24p?

I am editing with FCP 5.1.4 and I have Cinema Tools, Compressor and Sorenson Squeeze. I did a test of taking both DV and HDV1080 footage and just dropped them into a 720/24p sequence and rendered and they play and definitely look different (i.e. not like they used to in regards to frame rate). It looked fine, I guess, but I assume the whole pulldown thing is not being done in the proper way. Scaling up the size of the DV footage to 720, looked surprisingly sharp, though. How do you obtain the best quality with the tools I have.

What is your deliverable format? Is it best to conform to 720p? That having been said you can use the reverse telecine tool in FCP or the conform to 24 FPS in Cinema Tools. You might also try an app like mpeg streamclip to transcode the files (both size and FPS) prior to import. I'm not committed to one method over the other in terms of quality. I do however like to transcode the files prior to import so FCP doesn't have to re-render everytime I make a minor change. Good Luck.

The deliverable will be a projected HD program (720p cause that is what we are shooting) and then SD DVDs and web video from there. I opened Cinema Tools and found it confusing but I imagine I can figure that out.