I can't follow none's Holmesian focus. So a couple of my vague things - if you crank up sharpen in VLC its starts to look more like 35mm could it be the original 1978 capture was not as in focus as it could have been? As well as the flicker the motion seems a bit jerky and theres slight light trails on some of the ships - could this be a disparaty between the frame rate of film and the frame rate it was captured at in 1978? Some of this stuff might not be able to be remedied by a better vcr/capture card.

Also: this is still a really good preservation to have out there