This is a very intriguing idea. Of late, I've been racking my head on this damn encoding crap, and also the difficulty in manual color correction. I ended up giving up on automatically color matching 2004 to the GOUT because the results weren't coming together very well. That's until Adywan's Star Wars Revisited was released.

I neglected to bring it up in any threads yet. Adywan spent a year carefully correcting the 2004 DVDs for his edit. The issue with matching 2004 with GOUT or other laser-disc transfers was the quality of the transfers you were matching to. But with Adywan's hard work finally completed, I, as well as others, can rip it off for their own selfish use (hehehe). I created three separate histograms from Adywan's early xvid release, and the results I got were amazing. I'll eventually post the histograms in the correct thread.

To address your other suggestions, I did get a copy of the stabilizing script for the GOUT footage, I haven't implemented it into any encodes yet, as it causes GOUT to go very slow, so I hope it doesn't cause any crashes. I'm also very interested in adding film grain, I remember the consensus developed that the natural film grain was truly part of the original release, and would be an important addition to a true preservation. This is something I hadn't thought before, and I believe I will pursue.

I'm going to give the HD a little more time before I nix it completely. It's just too damn slow to do what I need to do. I have a few more options left that I'd just be kicking myself over if I didn't give them a chance, but just in case I give up on this bullshit, I have a 480p equivalent project in production.