Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Regarding the stills, remember that they are just stills. The hard part is getting the moving version to not contain artifacts in the process. I actually spent quite a bit of time experimenting with limitedsharpenfaster, descratch and despot myself, and while I liked many of the results, I didn't like that they occasionally produced artifacts, or removed some detail, along the way. Notice, for example, that in stills #2 and #5, the number of stars in the starfield that have been removed.

Although you're wrong about the stills #3 to #5 (I didn't use DeSpot on those shots, as it DID in fact kill most of the stars), you're absolutely right about the moving version being not THAT clean. Of course I've picked the best stills to show the quality that can be achieved with careful filtering.

Still, ultimately there would be a lot of manual masking and painting to remove all artifacts and more of the bigger dirt spots. Also the test now shows the image in letterbox format, which of course looks a bit sharper... doing this anamorphically will cause it to be more blurry in the end. Noise removal might be a bit strong as well, as there's practically no moving film-grain left, and I guess that isn't desirable either. Color-correction though was a breeze... there was no manual masking necessary, just straight forward full-frame corrections (although I didn't use any other transfers as color guides here, and only corrected by eye).

But before anybody regards this one as a replacement of the GOUT you should keep in mind that it's heavily cropped and missing a lot of image information on all edges, so doing a full clean up of this might not even be worth it in the end... after all the charme of the gritty film look might be this transfer's strongest qualities, so some careful color correction and a bit less filtering than what I did might be the way to go.