Hey Everyone,
In the last one day, I've read through this topic - all the 29 pages, yes. First of all, it's very nice to see someone who knows what he does, and can go near the limits. Thank you g-force for your commitment and hard work - and everyone else's work you based your script on.
Some suggestions for the script:
1. Levels() causes clipping in the video, burning out some details in the brights spots (perhaps even in the not-so-bright spots). It'd be better to draw an arbitrary curve and apply that to the video. It takes a while to draw the perfect curve, but you'll bring back some of the details you've lost before with the brightening. For instance, it'll very likely make that light grey smoke better.
You can draw the curve with BugsBunny's Gradation curves filter in "RGB weighted" mode, save it to an .AMP file, then feed it in AviSynth with GiCoCu like the following:
MergeChroma(GiCoCU("GOUT_levels_curve.amp",photoshop=true)
It's highly recommended to save the curve in .ACV format too to make further editing possible. Be careful with the curve though, make sure you don't brighten up anything more than it is neccessary. With a little rougher curve than the optimum you'll loose a lot of fine details. Check (and compare) the result on people's face in particular.
2. There's some halos around the edges; try YAHR() to reduce them. If you find YAHR's strength a bit too high (losing details), try increase sharpening first and stop right before the halos appear again. If you don't like to result, you may want to use supersampling. Anyway, you'll see what YAHR() does and if it improves your video or not. Probably yes.
3. From the screencaps I have seen there seem to be a very slight chroma problem. Try MergeChroma(aWarpSharp(depth=32, blurlevel=1, thresh=0.5, cm=1)). (Values are not set for this video.) Merge() instead of MergeChroma() can help too (perhaps combining too would be the best), although that causes small deformations. Still worth a try.
4. I don't have the GOUT discs at hand now, so I can't check the smearing. If it's a smearing similar to color bleeding, YAHR() and other aWarpSharp tricks above may help. If it's like fieldblending (that means the trails are coming from the neighbour frames - the smearing led to four-eyed startroopers) then there are a few filters to remove this. But I don't know how to use these, so it's really just a guess. I'm just hoping you'll find some solution for that. It'd be too bad if the smearing would hold back this being the best source for having the untampered trilogy.