OK, I went all-out and did captures 2-5 last night. I'm exhausted, but I think it was worth it.

I will do one more capture tonight, as VirtualVCR reported 0 "Dropped2" frames for all captures except capture #2.

Observation: The Leitch DPS-290 sometimes (rarely) sends out duplicate frames to catch up to the genlock'd signal. This would be fixable in hardware if the Panasonic AG-1980P had an EXT SYNC-IN, but it doesn't. I believe the duplicates are exact duplicates, so I should be able to use pass 1 of MultiDecimate to identify them and manually replace them with non-duplicates from one of the other five captures.

Observation: The temporal luma variations mostly happen at scene changes. Furthermore, they're most disturbing when moving from a bright to a dark scene; e.g., Tatooine scene -> Sandcrawler scene. I believe that splitting the film by groups-of-scenes-that-should-have-similar-brightness and applying DeFlicker to each group will fix this issue.

Question: Does anyone have any idea as to why the big ugly lefthand-side curve changes in size and shape throughout the entire film?

Question: What is the correct size? Someone mentioned in an earlier post that all I need to do is double the width. Is this correct? If so, please explain further, as I'd like to know!