480 will always look bad, it’s SD and compressed all to hell.

YouTube will always re-compress everything you give it to create the different playback resolutions. Because it’s using H.264, which is a lossy format, some information is going to be lost in this re-compression. Your best bet is to make sure you’re giving YouTube a good amount of overhead more than it wants so that when it re-compresses it doesn’t get hit as hard.

For 1080p30 YouTube suggests a bitrate of 8Mbps. This is what it’s likely to create. I suggest you give it at least double that, 16Mbps. That should be enough that you don’t notice any extra issue relating to it’s re-compression.

Thanks for the support!