I’m not usually a fan of deafult settings. I can personalize a project or a preference to be easier to use or to speed things up. In this case I want to talk about trying the default items out. I’m a big fan of some of compressor’s default settings. One in particular is the YouTube compression. This was added in Compress
or 3.5 I believe. Just go into compressor, just like you already do, and do a search for youtube in the presets. Select that option and submit away. You get a really nice image up to 720p. It’s an H264 image that is about 3.6 GB per hour. Give that a shot and see how it helps your image.
It is not the most time friendly compression so if you are simply sending a draft of something over, I would still go with the 640×360 one pass with timecode compression setting you can create yourself.