Post Uncovered: Sky Post on David Frost Vs (Sky)

Sky Post Production has revealed its work on Sky Original David Frost Vs, which included a large amount of archive charting the legendary interviewer’s career.

David Frost Vs charts the societal and political changes of the past half century through Frost’s interviews, and has been produced with his son Wilfred Frost, who is now a Sky News journalist. 

Using footage from across a 50 year span required a large amount of restoration, which was completed in-house by online editor Jon Slade. Slade explained, “Alongside the more typical mastering videotape formats of the day (typically 2” Quad), in many instances the only surviving copy might be on a legacy format, or a 16mm film black and white telerecording. A number of episodes also owe their existence to having been recorded off-air by the President Nixon administration.” 

Before it reached Slade, 8600 files with a duration of 1014 hours 41 minutes went into the online - with 116 hours of masters resulting. 

Speaking to Broadcast Tech, Slade explained, “The last thing viewers want to see is a tape riddled with dropouts, dirt, glitches and the rest of it, and there’s,quite a lot of that in any material of this age 

“But it’s also knowing when not to tidy things up. You don’t need to remove every single scratch and all the rest of it. It’s not about making it like it was shot yesterday in UHD, it’s about making it look as it should, but also not distracting to the viewers.”

On the first episode to come to final post, which happened to be episode two, Slade painted out around 400 notable video dropouts or examples of oxide shedding or line sync errors. He then went on to Filmworkz’s Phoenix software, which significantly accelerated the process. The online grade for each episode took around two days, with another couple of days put aside for the pre-grade and restoration. 

Slade said, “When you start seeing it and painting out drop outs and glitches manually, you think, ‘there must be a better way to do this.’ So, a little bit of research led me to Phoenix which is obviously trusted restoration software within the industry. The trick was how I could incorporate it in a way where there’s no extra cost to the client and no extra time spent on it, but it still makes the programme look more polished.”

After all of that, Slade also found himself doing the opposite of restoring, “It was ironic that I’m spending all this time removing all of these video artefacts, but quite frequently I’m having to put film and video artefacts in deliberately in certain places as transitions.” 

The first three episodes of Sky Original David Frost Vs are available on Sky Documentaries and NOW. Part 2 will air later this year.