1 crispness ofcolour. I do use avisynth but mainly to remove jaggies, add subtitles and crop. colour correction is done in vdub.
i) this was all done in virtualdub outputted as an avi then run through sony vegas 5, all colour correction done in vdub first
ii) filter to use white balance. this allows you to set a base colour values well. it cures a lot of the DVD colour correction issues almost right off.
iii) colormill, I got this through Neurons forum. this is again a vdub filter done by some russian if I remember correctly. super filter for lifting colour out of muddy backgrounds.
2 jerkiness. this is down to what there is to play with footage wise. the jerkiest bit is the beginning of the shot and the bit before the wipe, basically down to speed of the moving ships in the panning move combined with reduced frame rate, just no way of getting round it. the wipe is there to help hide this. also, if you reverse the panning move into a 2 shot with a cut, its a bit odd, but a wipe or crossfade helps reduce this.
3. I refuse to use the original shot because then the quality in comparison to the surrounding footage is awful.