I’m going with the scaled down option to preserve the 4:3 ratio and so I don’t have to alter the pan and scan composition to account for the reframing.
Yeah, it looks fine. I would be much more concerned about slight resizing BDs of digital films from recent years where pixel-level sharpness is already dialed in.
I managed to re-NTSC the clip using avisynth.
https://mega.nz/#!SwYjiBDD!WcUZxy7NFgKp7se_kubOnXkHtQ40L98cuWErgg8zD1I
mpeg2source(“ABC RIC 2.demuxed.d2v”)
yadif(mode=3) #smartbob
repal() #returns a 24.975 clip
AssumeFPS(24000,1001) #slows the clip back to its original film speed
BilinearResize(640,480, 10.0, 0.0, 704.0, 480.0)
The frame blending is baked in, but the combination of a smartbob (either yadif mode 1 or 3, and they seemed about the same in output) and the old repal plugin is probably as good as it gets.