Absolutely agreed with you on that point - I want the video as untouched as possible. I prefer frame-by-frame fixes over a "big paint brush" approach.
"that last time I used a Pioneer CLD-59 and a DV camcorder. Since then, I've figured out how to keep the video in sync with a cheap consumer TV capture card"
LOL. Me too. So many coincidences.
"If you apply heavy noise reduction, then of course you can compress the image more - you are effectively 'posterising' the image, so creating larger areas of block colour"
Which is why you didn't like my last transfer.
"zero sparkle artifacts"
Which I spent months removing from the first third of my transfer. God, am I looking forward to getting those X0 files.
"First off, these are LASERDISC copies.. they can only look as good as the source,"
uhm...color-correction?
"syncing a digital rip of the audio to the video would be far more of a pain in the ass and imperfect sync will be more of a bother"
It was tedious work, but Vegas makes this fairly painless. I was able to line up the audio under the video, and adjust the playback rate in small increments until they were synced. The best way was to copy the video and analog audio together so that they were already synced, and then overlay the digital audio onto the analog. Once they were in sync, I removed the analog audio.
"I now realize a PCM rip isn't quite the panacea I first thought.
LaserDisc PCM is sampled at the Red Book rate of 44.1kHz while DVD PCM is 48kHz,
so it would have to be re-sampled as you have stated above. Thanks for pointing that out."
I captured the digital PCM track (my soundcard has digital optical/coaxial input/outputs), and changed the rate digitally when I compiled the MPEG. I had this version on my DVD, as well as a 5.1 version derived from this recording.