Best PE7.0 export settings for Youtube HD, Vimeo or Smugmug?

Question

Hi all,
I'm really new to video editing and I can't find any recommendations on the best Premiere Elements 7 export settings for Youtube HD, Vimeo or Smugmug. It seems like most of them want you to upload in 1280x720.
My original source is 1920x1080 30p AVCHD from a Canon HF100. Obviously, I would like to keep it at the same frame rate. There doesn't appear to be a preset in PE7 (or a way at all) to output 1280x720 30 into an MPEG container with H.264 encoding. When I go into the advanced properties of a preset like "H.264 1920x1080i 30" or "MPEG2 1920x1080i 30" and choose 1280x720, I no longer have an option for 29.97 fps - the only options are 23.976 or 24 fps. It seems bad to change this, right?
I see the preset for "HD 720p 30" which appears to be MPEG encoding of the video stream instead of H.264. This seemed to work OK, but I wasn't sure about it, because when I choose it I see in the description a line that says TV Standard: NTSC. A number of web sites indicate that H.264 is preferred, but I don't really understand why.
I also found a way to do H.264 in a Quicktime container. This seemed a little suboptimal because you can't do variable bitrate. When I unselected the "select bitrate" checkbox, it seemed like a quality of 50 yielded a .mov file with a bit rate of 2.87Mb/s, and a quality of 100 yielded a .mov file with a bit rate of 26Mb/s. It is confusing to me how the quality setting affects the bitrate on the quicktime containers.
I'm leaning towards using the "HD 720p 30" preset and working with the bit rate choices, but am open to comments. What do others think?
And on a related question - assuming we choose the "HD 720p 30" preset as a starting point, given the 1GB file restriction at Youtube, it seems to make sense to choose a bitrate that allows both good quality and reasonable file size. I don't know much about whether VBR 1 pass, 2 pass or CBR would be best for this kind of online HD video. Google is a little unhelpful here: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=132461
This page (http://webvideotechniques.com/123/bigger-and-better-encoding-for-youtube-hd) seems to indicate aiming for a bitrate of 8Mbps with a minimum of 4Mbps, including 2 pass VBR.
So, basically, I'm confused and a little overwhelmed. I think I have solutions that work, but it's hard to tell. What does the greater community think? Thanks.

Answer 1

Thanks very much E Mann, that was a very helpful thread. I think it actually would apply for youtube as well. For other users, here's a direct link to the settings for Premiere Elements:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/12/08/exporting-with-adobe-premiere-in-720p/
Roughly, the answer is:
Quicktime container
Video codec: H.264
Quality: 80 (I used 100 and it just takes longer to encode)
Frame Rate: 29.97 (I guess if you are shooting in 24p, this might be different)
Bitrate: 5000 (I might try 8000)
Audio codec: AAC
Output channels: Stereo
Frequency: 48kHz
Now, my own personal changes to this recipe are:
Quality: 100 - takes longer to encode, no file size difference
Bitrate: 8000
Frequency: 44kHz (recommended by youtube)
One final note is that for Vimeo it appears you may have to try encoding in 29.97 or 23.97 and test to see which you like better. Apparently Vimeo caps fps at 24.
The nice thing about this is that you can get a quality video directly out of Premiere Elements and you don't have to pipe it through another program.