Zion said:
Now, there are some obvious limitations here. What I've done is taken a still shot and blended together successive frames to end up with a single clean frame. This wouldn't really work for moving shots.

As Moth3r said this is just temporal softening, which is the same thing applied to the Laserdiscs which is why we are left with 4 eyed stormtroopers.

Well, unless you figured out a way to take a high number of separate captures of the same LD and blend each frame together. That would actually be a fun project to test.

Is that not exactly what the X0 player does? it was my understanding that it averages out the signal from 5 NTSC decoders in order to give you a less noisy output. Merging of multiple captures has been discussed a lot and is generally agreed to be a good method for obtaining a cleaner capture.

The other thing I didn't try was auto-aligning all the frames together before creating the Smart Object. With how wobbly the film in these transfers is, the image could probably be even sharper with an alignment and/or video stabilization prior to import.

It would be interesting to see if this could auto-align corresponding video frames from multiple sources accurately enough to give an improved average without any distortion artifacts, for example you could align the NTSC GOUT DVD with a PAL laserdisc capture and average them to make the most of the hortizontal resolution of the DVD and the vertical resolution of the PAL transfer.