Inverse pulldown is the opposite of what you want to do, see below for explanation of nearly everything you need to know.
Pulldown - quickly explained
The term 2:3 pulldown comes from the idea of:
Pulling down the display speed (as seen on a NTSC TV) by alternating the frame duration between 2 and 3 fields.
Why pulling the speed down?
If you should run your 24/23.976 film footage at 30/29.97 fps, without pulldown, then the movie would play 25% faster on the TV. This would of course be intolerable and had to be fixed in the early days of television history. The solution is called 2:3 pulldown a.k.a the Telecine process. The idea was, and still is, to "pull down" the frame rate, as perceived by the TV viewer, from 30 to 24 fps to get the same motion speed and movie duration as in the cinema.
What's the idea?
The goal was thus to accomplish a slow-down of 25%. Let's see now - by displaying one frame for 3 fields instead of just the normal 2, it will take 50% longer time to display it on the TV. Since that would be exactly twice as much as needed, it is not surprising that the television engineers of the time decided to play this trick on only every other frame, instead of every frame. So, frame1 is shown for 2 fields, frame2 for 3 fields, frame3 for 2 fields again ... and so on. Mission completed!
Elegance of MPEG-2's solution
In an analog NTSC broadcast signal you have to transmit all the extra (repeated) fields to the receiver because a plain old analog TV set cannot remember, or look back in time to see what the signal looked like some 33 milliseconds ago. In a digital world, though, it would be a terrible waste to send exactly the same information again to a decoder which already have this picture information in its memory, decoded and ready to display without any extra effort at all. In the pulldown mode an MPEG-2 encoder will toggle the so called pulldown flags (only 2 bits per frame) in a certain pattern. These flags tell the decoder exactly which fields to repeat (reuse) and when.
That is why you don't want to MPEG-2 encode a movie that has already been converted for TV (telecined). In such cases it is often better to do an inverse pulldown first and then encode the original progressive images, using the pulldown flagging technique.
Historical note
Initially it was called 3:2 pulldown, because in the early days they used to start the field repetition already on the first frame - 3,2,3,2. Nowadays it is usually done the other way around, like - 2,3,2,3. Therefore you may have seen that both 2:3 and 3:2 are being used.
Roger Andersson / Innobits AB, Makers of BitVice MPEG-2 Encoder for Mac
http://www.innobits.com/
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