Great, thanks for the help. I was able to reduce the noise quite a bit in Compressor by copying one of the canned settings to a new one, and editing all the controls to increase bitrate and apply a noise filter (tried with and without the filter). Yep, soft output with no noise. It's better, but not as good as it probably could be.
Then I downloaded
MainConcept (demo) and tried that. Wow, big difference! Came out looking almost identical to the source when viewed with VLC (except . Too bad watermarks aren't in vogue
So, I'll have to consider that, and I'll also look at some of the other options you mentioned here. Thanks again, it has been a big help.