You can't really then soften away the grain as the sharpening process has caused the grain to be emphasised over the top of existing detail.
THX, I have no hard evidence that the pressing master was used, but it certainly looks like it. I have seen parts of a LD master tape that is higher quality than the GOUT, so unless they deliberatley dumbed it down then they have used the D2 pressing master. A good D2 master doesn't really suffer from dot crawl, and dot crawl is easily fixed where it does occur, I'd put money on the GOUT coming from D2. (but I don't know of course - could be wrong).
I'd be surprised if the DVNR was done during the telecine process, there is usually a rough grade done during the process, but I was sure I'd read that there was a separate more extensive colour correction done to Faces/DC release, which would point to a master existing other than the one used.
THX, as to why they would do this - who knows. Could be they wanted to keep the colour correction done, but I am getting a sneaky feeling it was more a case of the D2 masters were handy, and it was quick cheap and easy to do it this way. My more cynical thoughts are that it would ensure that the GOUT continued to look very inferior to the 2004 DVDs, helping to make people see the 2004 release as the 'best' and vindicating all of the usual arguments (that the 1977 release was really pretty awful and only the re-release and additions to the film have made it truly great).
The cheap, easy and not worried about high quality statement is probably just me feeling cynical, but the failure to be bothered to release a *real* PAL version (when a master is available) and not going anamorphic tends to make me feel that way. The money and time argument just doesn't wash, there have been some very crappy films get at least an anamorphic release.
Moth3r, yep you could try to fix the few horrible jaggy frames by doing that in AVISynth, the offset will be random, but it is usually only a frame or two in a given scene that has the problem.
Boris, if you can't extrapolate that because the PAL THX laserdiscs have a ton more detail (and raw lines of resolution) than the NTSC laserdiscs,(and that even a *capture and re-encode* of the PAL laserdisc outperforms the NTSC gout in some scenes) then that the PAL master would have more detail than the NTSC master, then nothing else I can say will change your mind.
No-one except Lucasfilm knows what they did on this release and why - we can all make informed guesses, but the end result is that the PAL release is an awful upscale with VBlur and that both the PAL and the NTSC version are letterboxed and full of sub-par DVNR and excessive grain, sharpening and halos.
To say it is disappointing is an understatement.