@-1: I thank you for the reply. With regards to video bitrate and such I understand where you are coming from. I personally prefer higher bitrates but I understand if you must not push them too far to keep filesizes down. Also I can certainly understand if doing a 50GB version would more expensive like you said with the cost of blanks and needing a dual-layer burner. If nothing else I thought you might do a 25GB version burnable to Blu-Ray and then do a 50GB .mkv version for those that would just keep the file on their computer/server and would welcome the extra bitrate and such. Either way though I do understand you decision.
With regards to the audio my preference of lossless audio isn't so much about pushing the audio to be something more it's more about being all it can be. I mean look at music files. You have .flac files and .mp3 files. If you make a .flac rip of a CD you know that those files are going to sound about as good they can. However if you go with .mp3 you are compressing the audio and you might lose some of the highs and lows of the music, especially if don't use a high bitrate like 320kbps and rather something low like 128kpbs. My main point is that by using a lossless codec you are taking the raw source and while maintaining its quality you're losslessly compressing it to save space. Where as if you go with Dolby Digital you are compressing the raw source in such a way that it could cut out some of the finer points in the track, if you get what I am saying.
I mean I'm not sure what the raw format of the audio is and in fact I'm not even sure how you convert the audio from a 35mm film reel to a digital file. I would imagine though however you do it the resulting digital files are probably .wav. Once you are finished editing these raw .wav files (depending on which program you are using) you could easily save them as a lossless .flac file or whatever the format for TrueHD/DTS-HD Master Audio is.
One more thing, when you say you are considering uploading the raw files, what does that mean? Does that mean you'll upload the raw files as they were when you first scanned them in or as they would be after you've made all the edits and clean up and such?
Oh and last thing, I keep seeing the acronym GOUT, but I'm not entirely sure what it means. All I can gather without searching real hard is that GOUT is a standard of what these fan edits are in relation to the original unaltered theatricals, I think?