Yeah when you’re working with a 480i Analog (Laserdisc) or Digital (DVD) source you can only squeeze so much out. What the pro's here are doing is very complex up scaling and filtering, which believe it or not is done on some commercial blu-rays today. Unless you can produce some 2k negative scans of the 70's/80's masters (Which are said by Lucas to be destroyed) the work these men are doing is to be commended.
I know your not trying to slam on the guys, but keep your expectations real as they said. Everyone has expectations on what they feel blu-ray is and I get that, but remember blu-ray is a medium, not a criterion of quality. When i create blu-rays I can either have 4-6 hours of 480i DVD source material to put an entire season of a show on one disc, 2 hours of video at 1080p for today’s standard of "HD", or if i had the resources probably 30 minutes or less of 2000p material.
When you upscale a 480i or 480p source your adding lines of data to increase the resolution to give an impression of smoothness, but it’s an extrapolation of what that data (or video in this case) would be IF the information was there.
I don't like all this "HD" "Blu-ray" buzzword stuff that the mass market has propagated on us. It just confuses people. If 1080p is HD... what will 2000p be XHD... or when they can actually reproduce the filmstrip...HD "REAL"
Ha ha my rant is over... just wanted to drop in and say good job guys you take as much time as you need. I’ve waited 15 years for a decent release of GOUT (Which i received with v3) I can continue to wait, because unlike Lucas you have nothing to gain by holding it back. Having a 720p copy will just be the icing on the cake :-)
P.S. I hope people remember that a single layer blu-ray is 25 Gigabytes to download at most. I bet when the torrents flood the net for the BD-25's people will ask for them to be scaled down to MKV's and or converted to DVD cause "The files too big" If there are some Laserdisc Raw PCM audio in there along with DTS-HD thems going to be some very very large ISO's