CatBus said:

I think that puts a point on the question of what exactly this project is doing--a warts-and-all GOUT fixup (in which case distorted AR might be preserved), or something more akin to the actual theatrical prints (in which case they may want to skip right past the D1 master--which might have its own issues--and go to a theatrical print as the reference)

Are we sure the AR is truly distorted? I think we should make a distinction in this circumstance between distortion and cropping.

The GOUT is only missing 2 scanlines to make it a proper 2.35:1 release (648x274 at 1:1 PAR rather than 648x276 at 1:1 PAR).

A distortion in this context would imply that a circle drawn on the film (after applying an anamorphic lens) would not be a circle in the GOUT after PAR correction and I'm just not sure that that's the case.

The easiest solution to this would be to grab a frame from the film, apply anamorphic stretch, downscale to get it close to GOUT, get the cropping close, and then apply an image registration algorithm to spatially align the two images.

I'll grab a frame from our 35mm IB scan tonight. Do you have any particular frame in mind? I have reels 2-6 currently.