Doctor M said:
Noise reduction: There is some serious degrain/denoise/fft3dfiltering going on. It seems like you are guilty of scrubbing all the film grain with the noise.

Guilty. This was necessary in order to remove shake that was the result of poor telecine and then the DVD compression caused the shake to move different parts of the frames differently.

I'm assuming you all are being careful not to lose too much detail with the noise.

Yes, I actually worked on this for the better part of a year.

Interlace artifacts: When the GOUTs first came out and the first scripts for clean up were being discussed, filters for the interlace artifacts were heatedly debated. I don't see anything being used on them here. (Or did I miss it.)

You missed it (them). It actually takes the best of 2 different anti-aliasing methods.

Sharpening: Different sharpening algorithms can improve different features of an image. For any given filter you can only go so far before ringing or edge enhancement artifacts become an issue. I've found that MSharpen used mildly in conjunction with fft3dfilter's sharpen provides a nice balance. Here's some other sharpen filter ideas: http://www.aquilinestudios.org/avsfilters/sharpeners.html

I spent the year optomizing this as well.

Banding: Fft3dfilter use can result in color banding or posterization. I'm definitely seeing some of that in the stills and clips (look at the close up of Han's hand). The best answer is to either back off of fft3dfilter or use a deband filter. http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters#Debanding

I think the banding is coming from Dark Jedi's encoding. It does look bad on those stills.

Sample clip: In the still below, the silhouetted figure walking in the background leaves trails. Trippy and an artifact of agressive temporal noise filtering.

From good old DVNR smear on the GOUT.

-G