Matlab does have a 15 day trial, just fill in the form on their site and put something like you want to see if matlab will work for a colour grading project and they should release you a trial version.
Otherwise you could check out boneless.
Maybe I was incorrect in my theorem.
1) All Star Wars OT fans are geeks.
2) All geeks have been at sometime in their life programmers.
I was originially just throwing this out there for DE as I incorrectly thought he wanted to colour correct the SE but was struggling, and thought he could easily code this in C for his project - I didn't realise he was happy with the SE colour, so I thought I'd pop this on here anyway for anyone else.
If you walk through the code most of it is plain english and commented as well, and if you look at the code while following the article it should make sense.
I've never tried to write an AVISynth plugin, I'm not really a Windows guy, but if they use C# as their dev platform then it should be easy to port. It really is just a bunch of matrix transforms, some histograms and table lookups. You can do it all in matlab though.
Doom9 would probably have a bunch of people that could give it a shot in avisynth. Perhaps someone could post a 'call for programmers' over there and see if any Star Wars fans are lurking who are hot coders. There are a lot of small apps that could really help the SW fan edit scene, and a library could be built up that would help everybody.
The Open Source Fix Star Wars Project.
