I do alot of work on AE because I love all of its capabilities. At the moment i am using it to take 40 min - 1 hr footage (of lectures) and adding lower thirds and other things to improve the video and then uploading them to youtube. I am still fairly new with it since i have about a year using it, but i still know my way around it; one thing i have never been too sure of is which type of settings I should use for each project type I may be working on. For instance, sometimes i may be working on a 30 second promo and finished it and just need to render it, I would have to render it several times in order to get a descent video. On some rendered videos some parts may be laggy, on others it may be glitchy (some what) and other different things. When i would then upload that video to youtube, the same problems would persist even though some issues would seem to be ram problems, thats one issue ive had in the past. But back to my main question, I really dont care about the rendering time because i am used to waiting 3-5 hours to finalize a video. But now I am so unsure i even want to wait that long while rendering out of AE because the end result majority of the time isnt even good. Video loses too much quality and becomes very faulty.
What i do while editting is use Sony Vegas to combine the video footage (several files - 2+) with seperate audio and then render the video. I really like the rendering options from Vegas because its so straight forward and works REALLY good. (I take it into Vegas because my Sony camcorder creates the files as .MTS (AVCHD) and AE wont accept them even though i have a clean version and did everything people recommended here, so i just gave up on that.) But then after those 3-5 hours of rendering i take it into AE to get into details with the effects; I add a lower thirds bar with all appropiate info, add a curves to fix any light issues, add a fade in and fade out effect in the beginning and ending and then render out. The settings i choose to render out is...
Output Mode: Format -Quicktime Format Options -H.264 Basic Settings - Quality 100
Audio Output -48.000KHz 16 Bit Stereo
Under "Render Settings" I dont really touch anything (quality -Best/Resolution -Full etc.)
Hope this is enough information, sorry if i lose you while reading this. In advance, thanks for your help!