Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

The film is scope, and all I did for the sample I posted was tell Vegas to change the aspect ratio. After I do the real capture, I'm going to need some advice as to the best way to convert 4:3 scope into actual anamorphic.

Out of interest, what does a frame from the raw capture look like? Are there no black bars at all (i.e. the actual capture is "more" anamorphic than 16:9)?

Either way, I can't see that the resizing is going to cause you any problems.

As for the speed, all I did was guestimate the fps and do a crude pulldown, then synched the audio as best as I could. There shouldn't be pitch shifting, because wherever I had to stretch or shrink the audio, I had the editor retain the pitch (that more often causes artifacts, but I didn't notice any here). When I do the final capture, I'll use the existing mono mix as reference. Is it pitch-accurate?

Yes, the mono mix is pitch accurate to NTSC-film speed (23.976 fps as opposed to 24 fps, but close enough).

Further analysis of the sample, while you're waiting for the gate mods:

As someone has already mentioned, there is a jump during the starfield pan-down after the crawl. Is this a section of missing film or a capture error?

I also noticed the blockade runner flying backwards for one frame!

Regarding what I said before about lowering the black level, it seems it's not as easy as a simple brightness adjustment. If you set it correctly for one scene, then compare other parts of the sample using this setting, frames with a high average luma level can still be too bright whereas darker sections actually end up with crunched blacks.

(I will get around to posting screenshots at some point...)

Obviously you won't want to go through the whole movie and adjust brightness and contrast on a scene-by-scene basis. I'm wondering if our resident AviSynth scripting guru (g-force, you reading this?) could come up with something?