Searching the net for awhile I was unable to find evidence that anyone has managed a high pass filter sharpen method for video.
The best of what is out there is an unsharp mask. So to humor myself I gave it a spin.
It's slow to process, but the screen captures I made were BEAUTIFUL.
So I encoded the video (23 hours on a 3400+ CPU!), and synced the audio (half an afternoon). That's when I discovered the flaw. Although there is some noise generated in the process, single frames don't look much worse than the film grain in eps 3 & 4. But in motion it looks like a VHS copy of bad cable. Lots of dot crawl, and moving aliasing. Single frames still look great, but the final product is unwatchable (and can induce naseua).
I want my last few days back.
I nearly saved the screen caps for posting April 1st (yeah they look that good).
So, I once again surrender. If ANYONE finds a way to apply a high pass filter mask to video (VirtualDub or AviSynth), please PM me. Otherwise...
Really sorry guys.