Best setting for Vegas -> Youtube
 

What would be my best render format to go from Sony Vegas to Youtube? My camera is an XH A1

I just tried one upload and it's giving the option for 1080p but it's not filling up the total viable area, just a smaller box inside. I rendered it to .wmv on the highest setting for video. What do I need to render to get the most out of youtube.

This is a sample:

YouTube - Dustin and Brooke's Wedding #1

Sorry if this question has been asked 1000 times, but I did search first and didn't find the answer I was looking for.

Never mind, after about 1hr Youtube made it fit the full screen. I guess it just wasn't finished yet???

I've been using Divx for encoding and then uploading to YouTube. In my opinion the quality is good, the file size is small and it renders faster. YouTube - DStoney's Channel

Just a couple points on the YouTube uploads. As I mentioned before, YouTube seems to perform an sRGB->cRGB conversion all the time. So for best colour representation, you should encode sRGB.

Also, I've found some indications that uploading 720 is best, and only real option. This video here...

YouTube - Render Stress Test 1080p

...suggests that 1080 is a very bad idea. Seems they just drop the lower field before doing their format conversion, so ALL the various sizes get messed up. There is a link to the original mp4 for comparison in the description. Basically, the right hand side is supposed to be alternating black and white horizontal lines, similar to the vertical lines at the top. The top right corner should be single white pixels one pixel apart. Uploading 720 only, although it means that's your highest rez, the 720 and all lower rezes seem to contain all the field information, as shown here:

YouTube - Testing YouTube 16:9 Aspect at 1280x720

AGrandt (the person doing this testing and uploaded these two files) seems to be uploading this test regularly, the 1080 one linked to was a month ago.

By all accounts, Vimeo seems to be the far better choice for quality, although it's hard to be YouTube's visibility.