Thanks for the input. I really appreciate your posts here - they are very helpful, at least for me, because I'm learning as I go. Thanks so much for your information and help!

I was hoping no one would notice that yellow blob. I had some problems with it, and took the lazy way out. That was me correcting in a very sloppy, hasty way - I would not correct the final version like that. One of the problems I was running into was the low resolution of the source. To save space, Poita and I had agreed to save the files as a very high-compression video to run tests on, and for me to familiarize myself with PFClean. I imagine (just a guess) that a higher resolution frame will provide an easier go at correcting that error.

Can you describe/illustrate what you mean by macro-blocking? Also, would you elaborate on why you would do luminance stabilization before frame stabilization? Antcufaalb and I have been doing those steps in reverse order...

I'll do another render tomorrow morning, with no settings at all, to see if it is the render in Virtualdub or in PFClean that is causing the artifacts.