Nerfherder said:
I think white balance is very important. Parts of the Puggo Grande seem very 'blown out' (almost like too much light was being projected through the film?)

I think you may be confusing "white balance" with "brightness/contrast". White balance refers to shifting the color balance so that the things that are supposed to be white are actually white. Actually, both things (white balance and brightness/contrast) are difficult to get accurately in a film capture. Film has a much larger spread than video cameras of being able to reproduce detail in bright areas and dark areas, and so one is always balancing whether to favor the details in the dark areas or the bright areas. The blowout of some of the whites in PG had nothing to do with white balance, and was more due to my trying to get people's faces to look as good as I could.

I'd be tempted to try out a raw capture without any processing at all and see how that looks, otherwise one is altering the print. It's nice to preserve exactly how one would see this if projected, even though the temptation is there to keep tweaking the settings.

See, that's the problem. A telecine capture doesn't ever preserve exactly how one would see the film if projected, because of a myriad of factors. The range of colors you get on the video depends on how the film is illuminated (what type of light), how the lens settings respond to the lighting used, the white balance setting on the camera, etc. Cameras don't work the same as our eyes do. And if you find a setting that works on one scene, it generally doesn't work as well for other scenes... sometimes it's way off. So, if you want it to look as close as possible to an actual viewing of the film, you HAVE to tweak it scene by scene in post.