Idea: The Sword in the Stone (1963) - Original Theatrical Mono Mix Preservation (* unfinished project *)

sighs disney once again screwed up a beloved classic with it’s blu-ray release. a heavy use of dnr, not presenting the movie in oar and the ommision of the original mono mix are three points of the let down. but we still can save the movie, then luckily apple had the movie in hd with the original aspect ratio and not “cleaned” to the death. though, it also only has the 5.1 remix. unfourtnatly apple has replaced this version with the new blu-ray master. luckily i still have the old version. so let’s restore the original mix. but i need the help of someone with the masterpiece collection laserdisc, who also can capture the pcm audio. this laserdisc contains the original mono mix.

if someone could send me the pcm, this would be sweet and i could start the syncing to the itunes version - maybe even to the blu-ray, if i decide to get it.

thanks in advance 😃

This sounds great. Just so you know, the oar for Xerography (1961-1981) Disney films is variable. They were animated at 1.33:1 so that when they were seen on TV they wouldn't be pan and scan, but they were intended to be matted to a widescreen aspect ratio for their theatrical run. The compositions for these films reflect that, and look better at a widescreen aspect ratio. (When viewed open-matte, there tends to be a lot of empty space on the top and bottom of the image.) These films were often presented at 1.33:1 on DVD because most people had 4:3 TVs and an irrational fear of black bars.

You might consider actually cropping (matting) the iTunes version to 1.75:1 to replicate the theatrical viewing experience. (But an open matte version would save you from re-encoding the iTunes version, so it's your call.)

I would love to see both (one of my favorite movies)!  If it's going to take too much time, no biggie though.

Are there any players out there that can do a soft matte while playing?  Kind of a strange feature, but useful in this case.

MPC can do a soft matte very easily.

So can VLC. I had completely forgot you could just matte in software.

So it can... I never noticed the Video -> Crop feature of VLC before (I've always just used the Aspect feature if the video flags are incorrect).  Thanks!

My vote would be for open matte then to avoid re-encoding.

don't know if this is still an active project, but if you're still looking for that laserdisc, it's ONLY $10 on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/THE-SWORD-IN-THE-STONE-DISNEY-cav-LASERDISC-Masterpiece-Collection-/261333491934

Doctor M said:

I disagree.  Many of the xerography animated films end up with bits cut off that don't look like they should have been when theatrically matted.

That could be just another example of Disney being slap dash in their home video releases, or the animators figured they had the whole page and used it.

FYI, the HDTV version floating around is less compressed looking than the iTunes version.

I think many of the versions released at 4:3 tend to crop the sides quite a bit. This would mean when matting to widescreen it would be over-cropped. This would carry over to their bluray releases if they didn't create a new master (and they certainly didn't for Sword in the Stone). One solution for us would be to just matte at a taller widescreen ratio (like 1:66.1).

So how does one remove a logo like this from hdtv capture?

[IMG]http://i1363.photobucket.com/albums/r720/doombot2/sword_zps0f5bafe3.png[/IMG]

I tried delogo without very good results.