D.
Are you dubing from a deck or your camera? If camera, are you using the SDI output board?
As I understand it... the 24p and 24pa footage is interlaced and put to tape at 29.97 in the camera, but the pull down cadence is ordered differently between the two. I believe that you will get 29.97 footage out the SDI of the camera(although 8bit). 24pa footage is used for a project to be posted in a 24frame timeline as the firewire equiped panasonic decks can remove the extra frames at ingest into your NLE. Hope that this is some help. Contact me as a may be able to help if you need a deck.
Taylor