Any way these days to reverse an NTSC 2:3 pulldown without transcoding?

Topaz Video AI General
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Hi, since applying Topaz’s brilliant AI to standard resolution sources is one of its prime specialties, that of course means there is an abundance of 480 line material out there that has been subject to a 2:3 pulldown.

Although there have been feature requests for Topaz to handle this, I am not sure the features are working properly - they seem to be designed with telecine interlacing in mind rather than my situation which is 480 line progressive that needs a reverse pulldown back to 24 fps before processing with Topaz will work.

So my question is: is there any utility out there still in use these days that can reliably and flawlessly remove the pulldown without the need to transcode the material? In my case, at the present time I run the material through Handbrake to the best possible quality output file that I possibly can. Yes, the losses are small and in many cases you might only tell the difference in a direct A / B comparison, but a loss is a loss on material that is already pretty marginal to begin with compared to modern Full HD, let alone anything better. Furthermore, a slow encode at high quality is time consuming whereas just changing flags would be extremely fast.

The problem is that even after extensive searching,I haven’t found anything that actually works other than re-rendering the material. Anything that used to claim to work doesn’t appear to, has long been abandoned or is so complicated to do it is hardly worth the effort versus the Handbrake method.

So if anyone has a simple near instant process, I would love to hear about it short of simply being able to select an output frame rate of 23.97 fps in Topaz from 29.97 progressive input and Topaz takes out the pulldown automatically (pretty much as Handbrake or Vegas Movie Studio already does). At the moment, Topaz of course does not recognise this possibiilty and instead wishes to enforce interpolation.

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Tsmuxer is a good tool do convert from 29,97 to 24/23.97. it only cut out the double frames and doesn’t do anything else to the material.
It only works with the original video. After the material was converted (maybe to mp4), it can’t find the „doubles“

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Thank you very much for the reply. I am going to have to look into the command line options since it appears that by using the GUI version, there is no way to pass through the audio without re-encoding. And I double checked that it did re-encode the audio by extracting it to WAV via Vegas Pro and then using Sound Forge Pro to do an inversion copy paste - and there were the tell tale signs left of a re-encode. If the audio had passed through without re-encoding then it would have been identical and the inversion copy paste would have literally wiped the waveform out entirely. As an aside, TXmuxer also added some silent audio samples into the output file, but only at the end of the file where it has no relevance at all.

So it seems that Handbrake will let the audio through without re-encoding and TSMuxer lets the video through without re-encoding!

I think though there is probably a way through a command line to pass the audio through so I will have to experiment. As we all know Topaz will pass the audio through “as is” and I like to pass the one combined video and audio file into Topaz as my very last processing step in the chain.

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MKV lets to pick and choose what: audio, subtitles, chapters, images, videos and probably more go into the container… MKVToolNix is what I feel like digital videos have needed since the dawn of time.