That sounds interesting! But if these are prints that were used in cinemas, isn’t there a risk that the quality of these prints has deteriorated due to frequent use and/or their age and/or poor storage?
Yes, and this is why some of these fan scan projects take a long time to be released. Prints are beat up, faded, missing frames where some magic needs to be done to replace them, and other.
To try to be short-ish answering about OCN…
The select takes are all carefully spliced together (by a negative cutter) after the editor (somewhat to very likely with input from the director) finish all the editing decisions (which could take months [to edit a feature film]). The OCN and a 35mm release print will be identical in regards to the number of frames and those frames’ contents because “the OCN” of the movie is the raw camera footage turned into one long print that is now the movie. (I reiterate, this is all very general and not always the case. And I’ve never worked in a big film industry on these sides to see any of this in person, so…)
All the excess you’re talking about is “cutting room floor” stuff. Okay, that stuff is all also OCN, but that’s not usually what people are referring to when taking about THE OCN of a film. They’re talking about the final edit of all the carefully-picked takes that have been carefully edited down to the frame then assembled by a negative cutter. The excess ala alternate takes, bloopers, etc… I don’t want to pretend I really have good knowledge of what happened/happens to all that, but the general paths seems to be: a) thrown in the garbage b) stored on purpose/just in case c) weren’t intended to be around but somehow survived.
I obviously like talking about this stuff, 'tis fun for me 😃 but this thread is about Disney films so, Maleficent, I guess I recommend searching around for these kinds of answers on the 'net, in other threads, etc., so this thread can get back on track, eh? (If you really want to hear more of my blab specifically you can PM me, but again I’m not some super at-the-source fountain of this kind of knowledge.)