>> Small Budget
On the low end of the money scale is Apple’s Final Cut Pro with Cinema Tools (each costing around $999), and Blade 2 from in-sync ($499). Both Final Cut Pro 3 with Cinema Tools and Blade 2 allow you to do reverse telecine, which removes all additional fields that were added when converting the 24-frames-per-second content to traditional video’s 29.97 frames rate. The downside here is that the reverse telecine process is software-based, so it can take a while to convert your footage.

>> Bigger Budget
At the next level up, you have the Mac CinéWave system from Pinnacle Systems, which starts at around $5,000 and goes all the way up to $20,000 for a system with all the HD bells and whistles (but not including the Macintosh computer, monitor or other vital accessories). The CinéWave hardware can work with your 24-frame footage—as long as it is in 1,080I or 1,080P format. Currently CinéWave has limited support for the 480P and 720P formats.

>> The Envy of Your Peers
Finally there is the king of the mountain: the Avid Film Composer. This proprietary system will set you back over $40,000, but it is the Mercedes of digital film editing. With the Avid you can reverse telecine all clips in real time, provide variable compression on each clip, and automatically process all telecine and film footage database information into the system.

>> The Big Question
Yet the big question remains: Do you really plan on sending your 24P masterpiece to film? And can you afford it? Transferring DV footage to 35 mm film is not cheap, and can cost anywhere from $25,000 to over $40,000 just for the transferring process. For example, DV Film (www.dvfilm.com) charges $325 per minute to transfer NTSC footage to 35 mm film, which, for a 90-minute film would work out to over $29,000—and that’s for just one print. —E.H.