Synching at in-points / losing audio on backend

Hi All

Two issues here.

I have 35mm footage that was telecined to DVCam tapes. Captured it normally to FCP and am now synching everything up with my DAT tape files that have been converted to .mov. Using in-points as the DATs have no timecode, so just synching slate on each.

The first odd thing is that my 29.97 footage synches perfectly with my sound. I was under the impression that I would be able to remove telecine to get back to my original 35mm and then edit in the 24fps timeline. When I convert the video to 24 however, the audio synch is off. Everyone that I have spoken with tells me the audio should synch with the 24fps and not the 29.97. Ideally, I need to be editing this in 24, so that I can match back to the film better. Any ideas what's up?

Secondly, just to get some rough cut stuff to look at, I've been editing some of the synching 29.97 footage. Most of it is great. I'm merging by in-points and I'm getting 29.97 clips with perfectly synched audio start to finish. On a few of the clips, however, the merged audio is missing the end of the audio file. The synch is fine until the last 1/4 or so of the clip and then the audio gets dropped. When I look at the clip in the timeline, there's no audio in that section. If I look at the audio clip by itself, the clip is full sized (included the section that is missing in the merged clip). Any notion as to why the merge is dropping this piece of the audio clip???

As always, thanks for the help.

L.

One other question re: the merging, what if I drop the video and audio files into the timeline indep., link them and then move to bin. Looks like a new merged clip. Is there a problem doing it this way? It seems to take care of the missing audio sections. I'd still like to know what's up with the audio not matching the 24fps footage if anyone has a guess.

> One other question re: the merging, what if I drop the video and audio files
> into the timeline indep., link them and then move to bin. Looks like a new
> merged clip. Is there a problem doing it this way?

That's how I do it, although while assistant-editing for a TV show, I encountered an issue where clips correctly linked using the method above would just blast themselves out of sync. Not just by a little, but something like a second or two with no discernible pattern (eg. not by the same amount every time, and no detectable format/capture issues with the clips that do this). The two assistants I trained and I spent one night going at half-speed, triple-checking every synced clip to make sure it wasn't a human error, opening every clip after it was dragged to a bin to check sync. I also posted a question on here with no responses and no prospective solutions.