I got into reading about avisynth last night and I had to stop for fear I was going to liquify my bowels. It's not too hard to understand how to create a script, it just that I could literally, spend the rest of my life playing with settings combinations.

Converting the HD captures, animated and some live-action content, will be my main tasks, saving a lot of storage space that I can't afford to take up long-term on my DVR machine. But I also have some DVDs of classic 70's anime that I've just ripped without transcode that I'd love to tune-up somewhat before final conversion. A touch of saturation, contrast, line darkening and maybe a tiny bit of noise removal for example.