Saving from video editors, the options/formats maze...

[Artie J]

I'm capturing with a Sanyo camcorder that saves to mp4 files at 1280 X 720
at 30 frames per second.
I then import the files into a project into a video editor (actually have tried two editors, Cyberlink Powerdirector and Corel Videostudio Pro X2).
Add some captions, transitions, whatever, and then go to save the file.

The saving the file part is where I'm having trouble. There's so many formats,
with so many freaking options and compression methods. When I try to Google and research, I only get
more confused. (does this term mean the same as that term, etc.)
Anyway, I try several different formats and methods, but usually something isn't right. The quality sucks, it's choppy or the file winds up being huge like 80 times the size of all the source files combined (only about 50 MB).
I want to upload to youtube at 1280 X 720 at 30 FPS, keeping under their 1 Gigabyte limit.

I'm willing to do some research time, but I'm just looking for some general guidelines, settings that have worked well for you,
various gotchas the newbie may be ignorant of, etc. Thanks for any info.

[Baldrick]

Try choose h264/avc/x264 as the video compression codec and adjust the bitrate to get the desired file size(you can use a bitrate calculator or in some tools can you set the output file size directly).

[Artie J]

Thanks for the response. I will try your suggestions.