I'm trying to find the "best" method for cleaning up very old VHS video for eventual burning to DVD. These old home movies look their age, and the best way to describe the noise is that it looks like the static, but some also appears to be a grain similar to whats seen when taking still digital photos in low light.

(One exception: I have one VHS tape that was originally created from old reel to reel home movies (the footage is from the early 1970's) - that particular tape is beyond reasonable help.)

So far, the "cleanest" results I've had have been using the TMPGEnc noise filter with default settings. Here are other things I've tried, and my results (compared to TMPGEnc's noise filter):

CCE's built in noise filter: depending on the level settings, it either doesn't clean up nearly as well, or makes a blurry mess of everything.

Adobe Premiere's median filter: same seeming results as CCE's filter

Vixen plugin: I'm most likely not using this thing properly (anyone have a "vixen for dummies" guide?) Anyway, I've not yet been able to achieve results as nice as TMPGEnc's

I wouldn't mind using TMPGEnc for the filtering all the time, but I'm wondering if there isn't something better... or anything faster. With the noise filter on, encoding CQ (which is much faster than VBR2), it's taking about 6 hours to encode 1 hour of AVI to mpeg-2. CCE can encode the same 1 hour video in about 30-45 minutes (but the noise filter sucks.)

Any help/suggestions would be welcome. If your suggestions involve the vixen plugin, please note that I'm using the demo version, so it'll be expiring real soon now...

Thanks
Gary