So, I let the thing render for nearly 3 days to try out this new FCP plugin that supposedly cleans up DV color artifacts.
No go. It worked much better on interlaced DV video - working from this DVD, I don't know if it actually did anything. The artifacts are still there. I don't think they're worse, but they're there.
So okay, this is the best quality we're getting. And it looks good. I like Vader with the red saber, it makes it feel a lot more "Star Wars" somehow.
I've synced up the sound and am reencoding all the video.
What's left? Well, thinking about menus.
The original theatrical poster is my desired poster for this release - unlike ANH where there are many nice alternate covers, the alternate ESBs are merely "interesting" to me.
Rock on ...