Yeah, well I used to export videos at what I pretty much recorded in which was between 15-20mbps. They would range between 1.3-2.5gb at times, so it could take me up to 5hrs or more to upload 1 video. I noticed that after uploading the quality changed for the worse and found out that YouTube auto compresses 1080p down to 8mbps, I was furious at first. So I now record at around 10-12mbps reduced exports to 8mbps and now some of my videos average between 300mb-1gb. This means I can upload in bigger batches now as opposed to 1 video per night but I still only get around 3-4 videos per night. I end up waking up before the 4th or 5th finishes xD. For 720P I just do 5mbps as again YouTube auto compresses it down to that bitrate. Now with my exporting, (currently in GTA IV) I went from exporting at around 40mins-1hr down to around 10-15mins in 8mbps. This is because I reduce the amount of text I used, remove the "render at max bit depth" option, set it to CBR, allowed it to use previews and I pre-render any effects which only takes about 2-5mins. So all up I've pretty much halved export times, allowing me more time to work on videos. I also cut out any really silent parts unless there's really good gameplay and I cut out any useless unentertaining parts. This helps a lot. Although I'm trying my hardest to keep the videos under 10mins. I want them to be 5mins if possible but some videos are hitting the 15min mark for those.
Sadly I've run out of content for next week though so the frequency may drop unless I start releasing my GTA series early which I wanted to do 1 ep per week. >.> But that's 1 of the things I like about YouTube and video editing, I actually want to learn stuff. I've never felt so motivated to learn new things like this before.