What software options are there to produce and upload YouTube videos?

Basic video with nice transitions: Animoto.

It looks like you are searching for Animoto.com. http://animoto.com/ has the abilities you asked for, and the video is easily uploaded to YouTube.

As for metadata, if you are posting the video to YouTube, you need to think about 3 sections; the title, the tags, and the description. A possible fourth is a transcript, as that text is indexed by Google.

The title should be relevant, and have high search volume, with medium to low competition. To find the search volume, look at Google AdWords Keyword Tool. To find competition, look at SEOQuake (plugin for Firefox) for number of links to each page. I say medium to low as you are working with the domain of youtube.com, which has hundreds of thousands of links.
Next is the tags, those are again keywords that are relevant to the video, and are ordered by search volume.
Description: what is the call to action you want your viewers to see? Also if the video is seen outside of the channel, the description is not shown unless the viewer clicks the drop down arrow. You have about 25 characters to make your point. Additional details can follow.

If you are embedding the video, then MRSS is the way to go.

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