Still one of the most entertaining and involving evolution documentaries out there, by National Geographic.
I still remember this, more than a decade ago, how it glued me to the TV and and felt like I was there, on this journey, living through the creation of our planet. Almost wish you were there (but then again, also glad you weren't. But it sure felt as an adventure.
As there aren't many resources of this documentary anymore, I took the 'best' one I could find and tried to upscale it to 4k. I did around 3 passes of upscaling and downscaling (to upscale again). Afterwards I got rid of as much as compression artifects and banding as I could, to get some details back (unfortunetly, it has introduced some compression artifects and banding again, by uploading it to Youtube). And also did some color enhancements, to give a bit more punch to the video, as they were looking kinda drab.
Considering the sources and the heavy reliance on motion blur effects, this is probably as good as it's going to get. They were only to be found on Youtube, which inherently puts some hefty compression (and banding ) on it, especially since they were uploaded long time ago. As this also was still early CGI, textures were muddy to begin with. I also noticed that all the sources had frame-blending, which causes the footage to be blurry, especially when things go a bit faster.
I did the enhancements because I just wanted a better version out there, and because I want to see if I can get this documentary converted to stereoscopic 3D. Although I doubt that is going to work, as the footage still doesn't seem clear enough for AI depth generator to make distiction on what is what and at what depth.
The video I used as a source, also was in another language. So I have changed that to English aswell. I was contemplating between the American English and British English. But apparantly the American version is shorter somehow and couldn't get it to synch in any way with the video. The British audio also had timing issues with the video source, but I managed to synch it by speeding it up slightly. There is an occassion where it doesn't synch up, but couldn't really go cutting in the audio.
