Encoding for uploading YouTube. Best settings with Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5?

[vid83]

My video camera is miniDV and I shoot widescreen. My source video is 720 x 480 miniDV.

If you have the same above specification as mine and have used Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 to encode your videos before uploading to YouTube, do you have a setting that gives good quality video?

Additional notes:
I encode my videos to wmv at a bitrate between 1000 kbps and 2000 kbps but the results are still not good.
My test videos are 5 second black video with white text followed by a 30 second video.

Here is one of my test video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whAhhmiT_A0. Notice how the grass switches back and forth between being clear and detailed to being blurry.

[filmboss80]

Compressing sharp, pretty DV video down to stream-able YouTube video will always result in loss of image detail. It is unavoidable. With that said, there isn't really any need to encode videos to wmv. I assume you edited in Premiere with the DV-AVI codec, native from your miniDV camcorder...right? (You SHOULD have.) Just export your Premiere timeline as DV avi file, then open that edited avi in software that will convert either to flv or mpeg1 (WinFF is simplest for this) or divx/xvid (VirtualDubMod with divx or xvid codec). Or, as an alternative, export the Premiere timeline as an MPEG1 file, if your version of Premiere supports it. (I forgot which export options are available with Pro 1.5.)

Bitrate settings will depend on running time of the video. YouTube does not like flv files that are bigger than 25mb. They will reencode mpeg1 video. I don't know what they'll do with divx / xvid or mg4.

If encoding straight to flv, use something like WinFF, adjusting bitrate until your final video is 25mb or less.

[vid83]

I assume you edited in Premiere with the DV-AVI codec, native from your miniDV camcorder...right? (You SHOULD have.) Just export your Premiere timeline as DV avi file . . .

So I go to File > Export > Movie?

If so I have a few questions.

Under Video, do I choose square pixels? Or do I choose square pixels when I use another software to convert to flv?

Under Video, under "Data Rate", do I leave "limit data rate to" checked or unchecked? Do I check or uncheck "recompress"?