Ok i am a newbie here and love the HFS20 i just picked up 2 weeks ago, i went to B&H looking to get the HF S21 but they had none in stock so i took the S20, no biggie, my question is i am using a MAC BOOK PRO and i am working with IMOVIE 08, after doing my movie and editing them i export them to my desktop as a quicktime movie, i feel that after i upload the movies to YOUTUBE, they look crappy, what i mean by that is they don't look HD to me, am i doing something wrong? love this forum by the way, tons of knowledge here, i am recording in PF30 mode if that helps anyone, i will have FCP in a few weeks but don't mind messing with IMOVIE for now, as i said above i am a newbie to the HD DV world, have done Digital Photography for the last 10 years or so. Again thank you kindly.

Without any details regarding your QuickTime export, it is very difficult to figure out what's wrong. Since I have HF100 and often use iMovie to export for YouTube, I'll tell you what I do.

First, when transferring the video, I choose full HD (1080) resolution. It will take tons of space (about 80GB for 1hr of video), but that will keep the quality. After editing, I export to QuickTime. I choose MPEG-4 as format. File format is MP4, video format H.264, image size 1920x1080, data rate about 20Mbps (20,000kbps), under video options, I choose 'Best (multi-pass) encoding. For audio, I go for 256kbps and best encoding.

The file size of such video will be under the YouTube maximum (for up to 10 minutes). It might take a while to upload it (unless you have some 15Mbps fibre optic link), but the result should be as close to your raw Canon material as YouTube can get.

Thank you so much PREDRAG, i thought this site was dying out, you have helped me out a ton, i will now post a question for a good water proofed/housing for it as i am into a project and want to protect my lovely cam, again thanks a million times over.