YouTube HiDef format
 

I have some footage I want to post on YouTube in HiDef...footage is 30p. To what do I render to accomplish this?

Depending on the length and motion of the clip:
720p, 1280x720, MP4/AAC, 6Mbps.

I don't recall off the top of my head if I used Mainconcept, Sony, or QT MP4.

Thanks Seth.

actually, for the last month or so Youtube will now accept 1080p HD footage.
It looks really good too.

Very interesting. Not sure if this new feature helps or hurts - maybe neither. Probably offered so that people with AVCHD clips out of consumer camcorders can move their footage directly to youtube?

But, I think the max display resolution for ytHD is still 1280x720. If we size to that we get some small measure of control, and can optimize for size or quality, within yt's upload limits.

This discussion is codec-neutral. AVC is MP4 is h.264, all variations on the MPEG-4 Part 10 spec, as such, the best picture-quality for size and bitrate so far.

******edit*****
Just did some math - if everything we suppose above is true, yt will be throwing away 56% of the picture info as it resizes from 1920x1080 to 1280x720. So, there's the question of whether yt does a better job at this rescaling than we can with vegas (or other tools, like virtual dub), and, we could deliver twice the bitrate at 720p, which usually means better transcode quality to the delivery format. Now, a lot of this is speculative, as yt is always quite opaque about what it does to your footage...

BTW, Jan Ozer did some analysis of yt's playback modes for the current issue of EventDV magazine. Now, this material is at least a month old, so, it's already dated. The immediately interesting info is a chart showing 5 playback modes, their bitrates, their codecs (a mix of h.264 and VP6).

You know the thing that bums me out about YT these days, it's the audio. I know there was an uproar about this about a year ago, and supposedly it was "fixed," but as someone who records/mixes/masters a lot of music, YT is without a doubt still applying some sort of compression -- and I'm not talking about bit rates here, they are applying compression to the dynamic range or some sort of AGC that raises the volume of the clips. And I know for a fact where my levels and peaks are, so the only way possible to do that is to mush my audio, something I prefer to have total control over. It's one of the only things holding me back from using YT more. It's so stupid, they should give power users the ability to bypass that crap.

That's good to know about the 1080p...I'll probably try it.