sorry for the late reply.

Your last clip was the best looking of the bunch. It still had some noise, but it was very minimal and nothing that stood out like before (no invisible worms). Raising the noise filter higher might start taking away detail. The level you have it now set to looks fine.

If you added no noise filter and just re-did the brightness and contrast on your original HD clip, then going to the avchd route was actually adding in more artifacts than before.

Either way, best clip yet--proceed forward