dvcpro hd to youtube

Good afternoon, I recently had my fancy "all the bells and whistles" computer stolen out of my car in the city of angels. Now I'm working with a windows 8.1 pro equipped acer aspire v with 4 gigs ram and very little bells and whistles. I'm working on a 15-20 minute project which consists of panasonic p2 or  more specifically dvcprohd 720p 60. I normally export videos of the sort as .mp4 -> h.264 with a medium or high bit rate. Took a long time to export on my old computer. and now I have to export it on my new, less equipped computer. I've exported videos in the 2 minute range before and it took upwards of 5-15 minutes. This brings me to a few questions.

1. what would you suggest i do? I can't really transcode that much because that brings me back to spending a lot more time than i should be. 

2.  I've been doing research on codecs and what not. I already know .mp4 is the greatest of all time format for youtube but in doing research i think a different format would help speed up exporting. What format / codec could that be for my specific situation?

3. what export settings should i use for this file format / codec?

4. should i stick out .mp4 / h.264 and change some export settings and / or sequence settings?