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They look dodgy because they are literally from the 90s. Haven't bothered to update their design since then because why mess with what works? They are what remains of Women's Physique World, one of a handful of fbb-centric magazines from back in the day, and their back catalog of material is bigger than nearly everyone's, again dating back to like the early 90s.
There was a local video store that had all of the WPW, Ray Martin, etc in a room that was like a porn room. I got all kinds of stuff there back in the 90s!
Yep, and the digital downloads on wpwmax.com tend to be higher quality than the versions on muscleville2.com. Although in a lot of cases still not as good as getting the DVD and doing a lossless rip of it yourself. You can get the DVDs at https://wpw-magazine.myshopify.com, they also have downloadable versions there, which I'm honestly not sure about either way.
The video quality is never going to be HD though, since they're standard-def transfers from the 1970's through early 2000's.
Great selection though older now. No sideways and partially upside down shots like some of the other places that wasted great muscular females talents by being too “Artsy Fartsy".
Agreed 100%. Those ridiculous angle shots are garbage. WPW, Premier and Ray Martin got it right back in the day. You used to get 90 min to 2 hours of material on a VHS. Granted the video quality is nothing like what we have now, but the camera work was 10 times better and they left no stone unturned. You got tons of posing, wrestling, lifting, armwrestling, you name it. Now you get 7 minute clips where the moron camera man is too close or at some cockeyed angle. You all know who I'm talking about probably. It's a shame because some of these guys have access to great girls but they could be doing so much more so much better and I know they grew up watching Tom Jackson in these old WPW videos like I did so they KNOW better than this. It's all about the money I guess. A 7 minute shit clip is easy and you get paid.
Yes, got tons of them. They have sales regularly with half price videos and cheap photos, so watch out for those.
Yeah but the only thing is they require a minimum purchase. As I recall, for photo sets you need to buy at least 10 sets to get the rate ($1.95/set), and for videos I think it's a minimum of 3 at $9.95 per vid. So you'll be spending at least $20-$30. It's nice for when you do have your eyes set on a few vids, but if you only really need one then that deal isn't for you.
I purchased a few digital downloads from them. My biggest gripe is that their videos are poorly resized to 640x480 leaving interlacing artefacts all over the moving parts. I wish they'd update their catalog with their older material going back to the earlier 80s and 70s even. I'd throw money at them for that, but it seems they only transferred their VHS videos to digital, not the Super8 stuff. A few of their older videos used to be available from wpwmagazine.com, but that site actually got redesigned recently and it no longer has the old stuff either.
I purchased a few digital downloads from them. My biggest gripe is that their videos are poorly resized to 640x480 leaving interlacing artefacts all over the moving parts.
Well, none of it is filmed in HD, so can't expect much more than 480p. I've not seen any interlacing going on - looks fine to me - don't think I have any special deinterlacing going on in my player.
Well, none of it is filmed in HD, so can't expect much more than 480p. I've not seen any interlacing going on - looks fine to me - don't think I have any special deinterlacing going on in my player.
I've been doing video digitizing for over 20 years, I know my shit. Native resolution for SD video is 540i or 576i for PAL. Every capture device uses that resolution to capture video. And then if you proceed to scale the capture down to 480p without properly deinterlacing it first it will be ruined.
And they did not deinterlace them at all unfortunately. Most of the posing videos don't have so fast motion so you might not notice it when playing, but it's there. And this prevents it also to run image enhancement routines on their videos, so I can't even AI upscale their downloads.
Here is a screenshot from one of their videos, I resized it to 2x so you can better see the artefacts. All those horizontal lines are from that.
Capturing still frames makes it more obvious, yes. But this never bothered me personally while watching these.
And when it comes to AI upscaling, the technology is still in it's infancy. It has a long way to go, and in 5-10 years it will likely be leaps and bounds better than it is today. I wouldn't worry too much about converting everything right now, because those conversions will likely be obsolete in a few years anyway.
Yeah, I generally turn on the playback deinterlacing in my video player with WPW videos.
And when it comes to AI upscaling, the technology is still in it's infancy. It has a long way to go, and in 5-10 years it will likely be leaps and bounds better than it is today. I wouldn't worry too much about converting everything right now, because those conversions will likely be obsolete in a few years anyway.
Actually, no. It is quite advanced at this point, and if the input video is sharp and not ridden with compression artefacts you can get amazing results. Almost to the point where it is indistinguishable from native. Unfortunately VHS rips are the opposite of sharp, so it doesn't work that well, but it doesn't work at all if the video was processed incorrectly, like in the case of wpwmax.
Yeah, I generally turn on the playback deinterlacing in my video player with WPW videos.
But you can no longer effectively deinterlace the video if it was resized without deinterlacing, that's kind of the point, and why their downloads suck. Running deinterlacing on it might further obfuscate the artefacts, but you will never get back the two distinct images that were mashed together by the resizing.
@M76 Which upscalers are you referring to, most of what I've seen from say Topaz Labs' has been pretty flawed if you look closely, and introduces a bunch of visual artifacts that weren't present in the original, especially with unusual subjects like female bodybuilders' physiques and the way their muscles move under their skin. Tends to give their skin weird textures, flatten or misunderstand the edges of muscle shapes, etc.
There's a reason we generally toss those out or merge them into the original version when we notice something produced by them uploaded to the site.
Having done a little bit of AI upscaling I find it's really good at removing artefacts, getting rid of the blurriness which comes with a lot of old footage, and sharpening edges. Sometimes the results are startlingly good at a glance. Obviously there is a trade-off to be had though and you find that a lot of the subtler details, lighting and depth can get smoothed over. Which can be really frustrating when dealing with musculature, veins, striations, etc.
It ends up giving you the illusion you're watching an HD video but obviously none of the detail that brings you to want HD in the first place is really there.
I purchased a few digital downloads from them. My biggest gripe is that their videos are poorly resized to 640x480 leaving interlacing artefacts all over the moving parts. I wish they'd update their catalog with their older material going back to the earlier 80s and 70s even. I'd throw money at them for that, but it seems they only transferred their VHS videos to digital, not the Super8 stuff. A few of their older videos used to be available from wpwmagazine.com, but that site actually got redesigned recently and it no longer has the old stuff either.
Did you need a downloader or did they just give a link for downloading ?
@M76 Which upscalers are you referring to, most of what I've seen from say Topaz Labs' has been pretty flawed if you look closely, and introduces a bunch of visual artifacts that weren't present in the original, especially with unusual subjects like female bodybuilders' physiques and the way their muscles move under their skin. Tends to give their skin weird textures, flatten or misunderstand the edges of muscle shapes, etc.
There's a reason we generally toss those out or merge them into the original version when we notice something produced by them uploaded to the site.
As with everything it is just a tool, it is only as good as the user using it. It needs to be applied to the proper source material with the proper settings. For example you cannot use it on WPWMAX videos because the WPWMAX videos are flawed and it can do nothing but exaggerate its faults as I was explaining it. You can't blame the tool. We have a saying in tech for it: GIGO - Garbage in garbage out.
Just curious because they honestly have a huge collection and I couldn't help myself and bought a few of them recently. I just want to make sure im not the only one and its a legit website lol