Hey, CS3 is driving me crazy.
 

So I've just gotten in from a day of shooting on my XL2, all in 24p. So I took a quick gander at all the beautiful footage, and I MEAN BEAUTIFUL, and then captured it in a new 24p widescreen project in PPro CS3.

So what happens? PPro decides it just wants to take all my footage and make it ugly. Here's a grab of the footage before it's dropped into the timeline in PPro, and after.

I'm not sure what the problem is, I've tried removing flicker, etc, and nothing seems to stop this horrible strobing and artifacting on export. Any ideas?

Check the image on a properly calibrated (broadcast) monitor. Also check your project settings. The XL2 does not shoot 24P, it records at the standard speed of 29,97 FPS. So use pull down.

Harm, I am using the pulldown. The footage was captured in PPro, and when the raw footage is played through windows media player out of my capture scratch folder on my hard drive, there isn't a problem.

Yet, when I import the footage into a 24p project in PPro, it looks like that, even after export.

Andrew, that is definitely interlace "comb" artifacting in the Program Monitor. The source and program monitors display frames, not fields, so on a progressive display you'll see that comb artifact if the fields were not shot at the same instant. That's merely a display issue and shouldn't affect export.

You mentioned export, but just to be sure, does an actual short Export>Movie using other than NTSC AVI settings look normal? (NTSC DV is only 60i so a 24p export would require 2:3 or 2:3:3:2 interlaced output). If a short test export looks good, then you know for sure it is just the Program Monitor playback settings that are off, most likely a substitution of 2:3 for 2:3:3:2 or vice versa. If the export looks like your example of the Program Monitor, there must be a setting awry somewhere in your workflow since PPro is definitely combining fields that weren't acquired at the same instant as would be the case with pulldown. Double check all settings for capture and playback to make sure you're not mixing 60i, 2:3, and/or 2:3:3:2 settings.

WMP is probably doing deinterlacing on the fly so you don't see the interlace artifacting when viewing the footage. Sorry, I'm not at my editing box now and also has been a long time since I worked with miniDV footage so I can't remember the exact settings to check in PPro.

Pete

After that post, which was very helpful, I'm trying to work the kinks out now, I got to thinking: Could the issue be that on the Canon XL2 there is a pulldown menu in the camera itself, which allows for the 2:3 or 2:3:3:2 pulldown method? I don't have the camera with me now, but if I had the 2:3 setting selected in the camera, and the 2:3:3:2 setting in PPro, could that be the cause of the problem?

It definitely could be. You can choose either 2:3 or 2:3:3:2 in the camera menu. The 24p NTSC Presets for projects in PPro use 2:3:3:2. If you created a project using a built-in preset and the camera was in 2:3, that'll be a problem. If you did that, you'll need to change the playback to "ABBCD" (or at least that's what it was in PPro 2) and hope for the best. Otherwise, a try at matching the cadence in After Effects, or a reshoot using 2:3:3:2, is in order.