Uploading to Youtube in HD

I've recently started to use 1280x720 (720p) encoding for my videos, thus I get a .avi file larger than most modern games which must be encoded to something else. On my last video, I used Any Video Converter to encode to about 10 or 12 mbps using the x264 codec. Unfortunately, the results are still rather low quality. I do have Super C but I haven't used it as much since I prefer Any Video Converter's interface.

So goes my question. What do you all think would be the best way to encode to HD with minimal quality loss? What audio bitrates does everyone use? etc.

Compress it to MPEG4 with Virtualdub or Avidemux. I have had good results with these.