If you are using powerdirector 10, use the "best" profile from MP4

Last night I tried a few experiments. All failed to produce results any better than the PD10 direct upload to YouTube.

When I saved to MP4 then the resulting files were nowhere near as good as the original AVCHD footage.

Then I saved to AVCHD format and PD10 hung when trying to view or edit the produced file and it was complete garbage in both WMP and VLC.

Not really very good at all.

Luckily for me I suppose, the video exported to YouTube isn’t that bad, so I won’t bother with this anymore, it’s just wasting my time.

looks like we are in the same boat there, the uploaded video is ok but slightly choppy in places. It also isn't necessarily choppy in the same place if I restart the youtube video ?! Have you tried different browsers ? I primarily use firefox but it seems it's better sometimes when I switch to I.E.

Have to admit that I've only tried viewing through Firefox and on the iPad.

Youtube converts your video to MP4 1080 30fps 6mbps, so if you lose some quality using mp4 instead of avchd, you're going to lose it no mater what you upload in once youtube does its thing. Since youtube's native quality is MP4, it makes sense that uploading in mp4 has the least chance of random transcoding failure.

Also, which avchd profile are you using?

I used the standard AVCHD option and also tried a custom one ramping it up to the max and selecting 50fps.

If youtube uses those settings then obviously I'm never going to get a perfect copy. Seems odd though that they recommend using 50mb/s rates for "professional" quality videos if they only support 6.

other peoples videos I watch on youtube don't seem to have this problem of choppiness so I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong, I'm starting with a camera that takes excellent video (HX100V) The youtube videos besides some minor choppiness never look as sharp when viewed at full screen as opposed to original file after it comes out of PD
I was thinking that saving it as a mp4 in PD then youtube compressing it again into it's own mp4 could be part of the problem ?

MP4 to MP4 should have the least entropy of a lossy to lossy recompression.

Post samples of what you are referring to, good and bad.
And post the exact codec properties you are using to encode.