3 options for editing TV movie

I'm going to be editing a TV movie on FCP. I will be working offline. When I'm done the producers will perform an online edit with an EDL somewhere else. The movie will be shot in HD 24p.

They way I see it I have 3 options:

1 - Capture at 29.97, edit movie, then convert EDL to a 23.98 EDL using Cinema Tools.

2 - Capture at 29.97, then use cinema Tools to pulldown the clips, edit in FCP in 23.98.

3 - Buy a third party capture card that can perform 2:3 pulldown while capturing. Edit in 23.98.

I'm kind of interested in option #3, but I'm not sure what to buy.
Has anyone had experience with option #3?

This will not be of as much help to you as you might like but it may be informative. I can't advise on the cards and conversion issues but...

I am just finishing cutting a show shot 24p (23.976 XDCAM HD). We imported in file copy mode so we avoided the whole pulldown issue. Our sequences were 23.976 sequences and our EDLs were as well. The online house was able to ingest the XDCAM signal over HD-SDI with 422 deck control using our EDLs. That part went very smoothly. Our off-lines looked great. We did a test by sending them a 24f EDL.

Depending on what HD format they are shooting, your expenses for the deck to digitize could be huge. If you want to avoid that you'll have to get them dubbed to a cheaper format which will increase (but not guarantee) the likelihood of problems with the final conform.

One other small gotcha is that if you edit at 23.976 in FCP there is no "drop frame" version of 24f timecode. This means that your sequence time will grow increasingly inaccurate as the sequence gets longer. You can do some calculations to compensate, and I think Shane uses a method of dropping the sequence into another sequence but either way it's fairly simple to account as long as you know it's there.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

You can check Walter Murch's book, "Behind the Seen":

[www.lafcpug.org]

I think the card that he used on that show was the Aurora Igniter and that hardware is probably obsolete by now. However, it did work--even before FCP could make 24p EDL's!

--Dan