Ok, after improving the Neat Video treatment in After Effects I've produced what IMO is the best result so far - download
here. Admittedly, on a neutral display I suspect most people would prefer Stereodude's Ninja-version because it looks cleaner and crisper, though some critical viewers would prefer the more natural looking sky (stars in particular) in my Neat-version. However, add the vicious default sharpening that many displays apply and the situation is different. Comparing the two samples on VLC with sharpness cranked up, the Neat-version has less halos and a steady image. The Ninja-version looks nervous with artificial movement that is particularly visible in the snow and along the horizon. This is the same problem with smoothing changing between frames that I was complaining about above, just better concealed.
The Neat-version has some dark pixels peppered around the image though. These are pixels that are darker than their neighbors on average. Not enough to be noticeable at low ISO or even in a single image at high ISO due to noise. But when a temporal filter has smoothed out noise, these dark pixels remain - see image below. Spatial smoothing can take them out, but at the price of unreasonable loss of detail. It would be relatively straightforward to filter such isolated dark pixels out without having to spatially smooth the whole image, but I have not found a utility to do so. Suggestions? These dark pixels are numerous enough that I'm hesitant to start mapping them individually...
