
I don't like how Adobe Premiere Pro's export to H264 only allows you to export at a particular bitrate, as it means that extra space is wasted during sections of the video where little is going on (not sure if it's similar to Vegas). More importantly is the Constant Rate Factor (CRF) which is a setting for overall quality. As for editing and preparing it to upload, I tend to use the x264 codec in a mp4 container. That's just part of using lossless codecs. That being said, raw footage is going to be large no matter what.

Only the engineers behind the search algorithms in YouTube could answer your last few questions about rankings and I'm not one of them.

Your mileage may vary, but I don't think it's essential to upload in 60 FPS.
