Moth3r said:

Firstly I looked at the luma levels. It's interesting that there is a substantial amount of "super-white" information in the clip - pixels with a luma value greater than 235, which would normally get clamped when converting to RGB for display. This detail can be recovered by lowering the white level.

I also lowered the black level to roughly where it should be.

Although I didn't come up with anything, I think that some colour adjustments are needed, particularly to reduce the blue levels. The catwalk that Luke and Vader fight on should be more of a steely grey than a blue-grey.

I also had a play with the DeSpot filter for AviSynth. After a bit of parameter tweaking, I was getting some pretty impressive dirt spot removal in the Hoth scenes; the natural film grain was untouched.

Thanks for the feedback. A couple of questions:

What filter would you suggest for dialing back the white areas? (in Avisynth, VirtualDub, or Vegas preferred)

Yes, I will back off the blues (and reds). However, I have to do it scene-by-scene because I'm using several captures and their white balances are not all the same.

I've been scared of DeSpot. I tried it on the PG, but it always seemed to remove other stuff too. Even on the DeSpot page, in the sample image the boy has lost his nostril. I may only use it for the beginnings and ends of the reels, where the spots are most distracting. And I suspect it will work well in the crawl, if I can get it to avoid the stars. If you have any recommended settings, I'd be interested in hearing them.

By the way, I finished merging clips for reels 1 and 2. I may skip merging clips for reel 2... the results just aren't as good. So my next step is starting the editing process. This will be a bit tedious.