John K!
You were the nice man who chatted with me outside the Iron Monkey and introduced me to Ms. Klausner!
And now you're the nice man helping my videos look better. Thank you.
Anyhoo, here's what it looks like now:
[youtube=320,260]etsgrLONZOA[/youtube]
Per your suggestion, I exported at 680x340, increasing the contrast and saturation while I was there.
You're right. That previous draft wasn't 65MB. It was late and I quoted the statistic from another project I was working on. That draft was 10MB.
When I encoded, I used the highest possible bitrate to fit in under 100MB.
At a bitrate of 4500, the file ended up at 98.1MB. It looks okay at every size except full-screen, but I think I hit the ceiling in terms of the resolution I could expect at that size. The haze, the soft-focus (d'oh!), and the limitations of my camera hopefully account for that ugliness, because I don't know how to improve it any more outside of shooting it better next time.
So unless you (or yous, Mel and Kibblesmith) have anything to add, I'm happy with it and will use this workflow for youtube.
Bless you all.
