filtering with Vdub and maintaining quality

[GGuyZ]

Hi everyone.

First some background: I'm Capturing using canopus advc110 to PAL DV(4:2:0). Then my original intention was to use Vdubmod's noise reduction filter called NeatVideo. The last step was frameserving into CCE and encode to MPEG2(I want the result to be on DVD of course).

But I'm afraid that since this filter works extremely slowly(2-4 frames/sec depends on source). It will take days for my PC to complete each movie - which is too long I'm afraid.

The reason things take too long is because I use 3-pass-vbr for the encoding process. so all the filtering has to be done 3 times as well - and with a speed of 2-4frames/sec it takes days.

I was wondering what would be the best way for me to speed things up and maintain quality?
I was told that after filtering I can save the video with HuffYUV, and then encode in CCE the filtered HuffYUV file.

But I have two problems with this - the first one is the disk space. Having a 50gb DV file on my hard disk and then having another 100gb file is too much.
The second one is quality - I'm going through all those color conversations and encoding. Frankly, I can't say I know how each one effects my footage so I'm a bit afraid of quality loss.

I hope you guys have some ideas for me? Maybe I should go the Huffyuv road, but is there a way to make the file somewhat smaller without visibly hurting quality? maybe around 40-50GB(for 2 hours of video).

I would appreciate your thoughts in this matter.
With regards,
Guy.

[neuron2]

If NeatVideo is too slow, then don't use it. If you need noise filtering, use a fast Avisynth filter.

[GGuyZ]

It's very slow indeed, but it produces much better results than any other filter I tried(and I have tried many of them).

I have other faster avisynth filters ready, which will be used too. But for most of my movies, where I want get the best quality possible - I wish to use neat video.

I would appreciate if any of you guys could share some tips to making things faster?

So far this is what I came up with as best solutions - saving the filtered video as lossless(or almost lossless?), and then converting it to MPEG2 with how many passes I want filter free. However there seems to be to many colorspace conversions so I'd appreciate if you could point me to an improved method:

1. HuffYUV, convert to YUY2 checked: Analog--> interlaced PAL DV(4:2:0 YUV)-->RGB(Vdub)-->HuffYUV - 4:2:2(YUY2)-->MPEG2(4:2:0 YUV).

2. Lagarith: Analog--> interlaced PAL DV(4:2:0 YUV)-->RGB(Vdub)-->Still RGB(I think?) in Lagarith --> MPEG2(4:2:0 YUV).

As you guys can see in both cases there are many colorspace conversions. If I don't check convert to YUY2 in HuffYUV then the file size is really too big(100GB).

Lagarith does a better job in compression while maintaining the file in RGB. But I heard it isn't suited for interlaced media - am I right?

I would appreciate it if you guys have other ideas because the ones I pointed are far from being optimal. If you have improvements to the ones above - I'd be happy to hear them too.

With Regards,
Guy.