I have just finished my project on Final Cut and I was wondering what was the best compression setting for outputting it to a 100mb max Ifilm/youtube place with the best quality...thank you.
YouTube (and the other clones) all use flash video to display the content. Regardless of how you compress your footage, when you upload it they're going to recompress it anyway - and let's just say the results are not going to be optimal as far as quality is concerned. The best bet to preserve as much of your original picture as possible is to render your file with web-sized dimensions (in other words, small width and height values - I think YouTube displays content at 500px wide) and save the extra data overhead for quality. This way the YouTube program does less resizing on its own (which is good because FCP's resampling is probably much superior to whatever YouTube is doing) and you can maximize the bitrate for quality in your original version. But honestly, any average to good quality settings are going to work fine since the YouTube version is going to look worse after the fact. If FCP has a setting that will allow you to specify a target filesize (ie, 100MB) and maximize the quality to achieve that target, that would be the way to go. But I wouldn't worry too much... it's all going to come out looking near the same.
