ok, I know I'm double-posting... please forgive me;)
the reason for this post is simple... I know that if I saw a thread somewhere about the preservation of this series, I would be excited and await with anticipation, as I'm sure some people that have read this thread feel themselves. I appreciate everyone's patience with me, as this is my first preservation project, I'm learning as I go, and this is a HUGE project. There have been certain problems that I encountered as I have worked on this, and most of them have resolved themselves with the addition of new sources. In my TEMP folder for this project I have ~250GB of data with a total of 7 "unique" sources. Two, very high bitrate Russian sources (the no-logo blended source, which is mostly garbage and the disney-logo proper transfer version), 4 xvid sources (2 German, 1 Polish, and 1 English) ranging from horrible to ok (~800-1800kbps) and a AVC source (also Russian, ~1500-1900kbps) that is decent. I just finished going through all the sources and realized that from the high bitrate "editions" almost HALF of the episodes end up having the Disney-logo in them. However, ALL the episodes are now proper transfers (I haven't finished the conversions yet, but I did verify my sources first) and a simple de-interlacing, slowing down to 23.976 and syncing the audio will do the trick. So this is turning back to any easy project. NOW, I HATE the logo and agree with Andrea that this should be taken care of. So, just to see what I can do in terms of a "patch" for the logo (and animated sequence that I mentioned in previous post) I realized that one of the German xvid releases is also a proper transfer to PAL and once slowed down to 23.976, aligns PERFECTLY with the Russian Disney source. Now it's just a matter of syncing the color/contrast/brightness/gamma/slight sharpen and I end up having a logo-free version. Because of the fact that it's from an xvid release, however, there are occasional frames "in-motion" where there are certain compression atrefacts presents inside the "patch" but this is very seldom and most of the video ends up looking fine. I do HAVE to go through it frame-by-frame, but this really only needs to be adjusted scene-by-scene, NOT frame-by-frame, (for the most part, at least) so the "patching" takes about 4-5 hours of editing per episode which is reasonable and very doable.
So, I feel like I'm back on the "proper" track with this preservation and am pretty sure that in about 6-7 weeks it should actually be finished. This would be a great time to get the Swedish dub so I could sync that as well, as I now have 16 episodes, ALL "logo-free", completed and this is really moving forward now. In the last couple of weeks it doesn't really seem like I moved forward a lot, if people have actually read my posts, but now that there are no more "problem" episodes, this really will move forward reasonably, even with the "patch" work that has to be done. The only part of certain episodes that I will NOT be able to "patch," due to lack of sources, is SOME of the end credits, where I will leave them as-is because I don't believe in blurring of logos.
Again, thanx2ALL that have helped with suggestions/advice and, also, thanx2ALL4the patience.
Please trust me, it will be worth it ;)