What format is best fro video quality?

Standard definition video is defined, by standard, as having 480 horizontal lines. Many times a camera will overscan to 520 or 540 lines to accommodate certain video monitor translation issues. High definition video is defined, by standard, as having more horizontal lines than standard definition - generally 720 or 1080 horizontal lines. Your questions does not make sense to me. MPEG-4 is a standard video (and audio) compression method. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpeg4 h.264 is also a standard video (and audio) compression method - but it works in the MPEG-4 framework. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264 "HD 1080" if a define this from you correctly - is merely 1080 horizontal lines of video making it a high definition video format - which has nothing to do with compression, but us a video format that can be store as a h.264 encoded file in an MPEG-4 format data file. Personally, I prefer to capture video as h.264 - this is the video format used by low compression HDV camcorders. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV After the video is imported to a computer for editing, the editing is complete and it is time to render, output of 720p, 1080i (deinterlaced) or 1080p to an MPEG-4 file into a MP4, MOV or AVI data file wrapper is fine for uploading to video sharing sites.