Zome

[Fletch]

Any tips out there on how to get the best quality YouTube video?

Here's a tip or trick that appears to work. (what do you think?)

YouTube appears to resize an uploaded video to be half the resolution it was given. So, exploiting this knowledge...

Original animation video was rendered at 800x600.
Scaled video at 2x original resolution using Virtual Dub.
Compressed with h.264 codec at singlepass bitrate based somewhere from 2400-to-1200 quality. This results in a relatively small file size for a decent quality video.
Uploaded video to YouTube.
Watch at 720 on Youtube.

Here's the HD result which looks better than before. But watch the 720 video on YouTube and it looks fairly crisp with little quality loss compared to the original video file linked above.