Burbank, Calif.- Matchframe Video, a post facility, completed restoration imagery for Lions Gate’s latest release, The U.S. vs. John Lennon.
The film’s 1966 through 1976 timeframe depicts the story of John Lennon’s transformation from acclaimed musical artist to anti-war activist and his efforts for peace while the U.S. Government attempted to silence him.
“The project was truly creativy,” states Michael Booras, vice president of Business Development at Matchframe Video. "We received a vast amount of stock footage from the sixties, sorted through all of it and did restoration work on the oldest footage."
Under the direction of editor Peter S. Lynch and post supervisor Terry Castagnola, the team at Matchframe went to work on video captured from a dozen different formats. The original recordings were made on HD and SD material, 16 and 35mm, Beta SP, DV cam, DVC pro HD, Digi beta, HD cams, and a few others.
Initially the film was not planned as a theatrical release, but directed toward television.
“We had to blend all the different formats so that the result would be a 23.98.1080 sequence and would be able to play theatrically,” explains John Nash, online editor at Matchframe.
The footage contained several green-screen composites shot on a 720p dvc pro HD. The team used Autodesk’s Discreet Smoke to do the compositing of the shots and blend them with the detailed background and foreground elements. Adobe’s Commotion was the restoration tool of choice for Matchframe. The month-ong creative project allowed the restoration artist to produce frames that replaced the not-viable frames in more than a dozen shots. The facility used Teranex standards converting tool to master the film to D5 at 23.98 fps. Colorist Mickey Rodriguez used the DaVinci 2K Plus to polish discolored shots discovered through out the vast footage of the feature.
"The McGovern speech sequence is taken from multiple news sources and archive houses and the quality of each was drastically different,” says Rodriguez. “I was able to take the footage and make it look new again, bringing the film back to life. This portion came out seamless as if it all came from the same source!”
Matchframe continues to work on the film even after its theatrical release and is currently concentrating on the Standard Def DVD added bonus footage and the VH-1 version.