1999 IFBB Ms Olympia WPW 397 [SLP high-quality upscale] [best yet, must see]

BondyB · May 23, 2026, 02:19:44 PM

Well, finally it's done. It took me several days but beauty has its price.

WPW made a mess of this movie. I think the first two parts and last part of the original movie have a 16:9 aspect ratio which they crammed into a 4:3 format resulting in the addition black borders on top and bottom. However they did not do this correctly because the movie looks stretched in these parts. I don't know how they dit it but I think the first part actually has a 5:4 aspect ratio. I corrected the aspect ratio and removed the black borders. The disadvantage of removing the black borders is that a bit of the sides are cut off but there is no other way. I also removed a section from the last part (final) where the girls receive their medals. I kept the posing bit.

I have upscaled this movie before with SeedVR2 but never posted it on Saradas because the quality just wasn't good enough. Now I have upscaled it with Topaz Starlight Precise (SLP) and the result is much better. I think it's my best yet considering this is a difficult movie to upscale.

I have changed the workflow I posted in this topic: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login. I first made a 4 x upscale from a 320x240 resolution, but small faces came out warped an distorted. Next I upscaled the original 640x480 resolution to 1920x1440 (3x upscale) followed by a 1 x pass with Topaz Proteus (no upscale). This produced better quality (mainly the faces) but doubled the processing time. There are still some artifacts and very small faces/figures are still a problem but overall the result is superior to upscaling from 320x240. It's really some kind of magic when you compare it to the original.

Something I really like about SLP is the fact that the output is more realistic and has more texture than Seedvr2. Especially upscaling from 640x480. I don't think I will need to add grain anymore. The file size of the final clips created with SLP is smaller than the SeedVR2 clips with grain but not much because of the extra details SLP adds to the clip.

The processing time is something to consider. Upscaling a 1 minute clip (29.97fps, 640x480) takes about 1 hour on my rtx 5090! I hope Topaz will implement some speed improvements in the near future. In the meantime I will investigate the possibility to cut/convert videos/clips in 320x240 parts (no small faces) and 640x480 parts (for small faces) to reduce processing time.

SLP is quite an aggressive upscaler. This can cause oversharpening/artifacts if a movie already has a lot of detail. It that case downscaling can be a solution. My workflow is intended for WPW videos and videos with similar quality.

My last remark about SLP is the fact that the upscale produces jittery motion. This is more clearly in static scenes. The smaller the upscale the more jitter it produces (4x is better than 2x). SeedVR2 does not have this problem if you have a GPU with a lot of Vram and chose the correct settings for batch size and disable tiling. Topaz Video does not (yet) have settings for these parameters so there is no solution for now. You can read more about this on the forum You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

Anyway, here's the movie. A classic posing video with fixed aspect ratios and great detail, especially in the individual posing scenes. As usual upscaled to 1920x1440, high quality AV1, 59.94 fps and chapters added. You just have to watch this movie to see what's possible with a top notch upscaler. Let me know what you think.

Clip (6,5 Gb)

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