There was an episode a while back where Dave outlined his choice of video compression options when posting to Youtube. Can anyone remember what episode this was?
Recently, for shorter videos I've been rendering direct using the Sony AVC codec at 30fps (from 25fps recorded) 16Mbps, and I that has worked quite well and is quite quick, but not as quick as the direct output & Handbrake combo. But the file sizes are pretty big. I do detect a slight increase in image quality using the Sony AVC codec, but I'm not sure if that's just my imagination...
Youtube re-encodes to 30fps anyway, so I figured I might as well do it locally, and it seems to process faster now.