The footage from the PAL LDs was captured 5 times then the 5 DV avi's merged into a single huffyuv avi (if you try this then have at least 2 fast harddrives in your system to reduce drive thrashing during the merging, I spread the 5 files across my 3 drives), this process helped eliminate background RF inteference in the laserdisc player and connecting cable to the Canopus unit, resulting in a cleaner capture than just capturing a single time.
To gain a more 'film like' look to the resulting video the footage was resized 3 times using 2 different filters, the first doubles the width/height using an edge directed resampling filter that helps enhance the edges without making halos, two sharpening filters and two different smoothing filters also in with the mix, none of the filters used work on a temporal basis so there's no blurring from one frame to the next in an attempt to reduce noise (they already did that when they mastered the LDs so why add to it).
In all ~30 hours computing time to output a huffyuv avi at either anamorphic PAL or NTSC resolution, or XviD @ 1024x436 for that particular version. And that ~30 hours doesn't include the 10 hours of capturing just for 2 hours of film footage.
Why the XviD versions? I built myself a projector, not one of those cruddy £5 plans off eBay but a proper 1024x768 res LCD projector with a 400watt bulb behind it that connects to my PC as a normal monitor, see Lumenlab.com, so I wanted a version of the Star Wars trilogy that will play on it in it's native resolution without any resizing going on during playback, hence the 1024x436 XviD versions with mp3 audio.
I initially went with dual-layer discs for the DVDs despite the high price for blank media because with the 3 audio tracks and the extras taking up so much space, but I also created single-layer versions because they were so easy to do after making the dual-layer version, the single layer versions don't have any extras but have the exactly the same audio/menus as the dual layers and are cheaper, easier and quicker to duplicate.
Menu screenshots:
A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
