telecine

The process of converting motion picture film to the NTSC video format used in broadcast television. The most common telecine approach to converting film’s standard 24 fps frame rate to NTSC video’s 29.97 fps frame rate is to perform a 3:2 pulldown (also known as a 2:3:2:3 pulldown). If you alternate recording two fields of one film frame and then three fields of the next, the 24 frames in 1 second of film end up filling the 30 frames in 1 second of video.

As shown above, the 3:2 pattern repeats after four film frames.