As the hardware encoding is just one pass or pseudo two pass, I do record it with around 50 mbit/s.

After the cut, I do recompress it with a real two pass encoder (x264) down to around 15 mbit/s. Thats still looking nice and saves alot upload time.

But yes. Youtube will recompress it again for all quality setting. So scenes with much action will get artifacts. But slow scenes are looking really nice. For example you can take a look into my video of the last event we had.