P: Max Render Quality - not functioning

I'm sure Wes will get to the bottom of this. But here's my thinking around this. Some of it may be obvious to some of you, but not to everyone. 

1.  Maximum Render Quality (MRQ) does nothing when the timeline does not have a red render bar. When it's red, it might, but you can't be sure until you know what effects are used.
2.  MRQ only works when a frame is rendered on the CPU (which will happen if you're suing a non-GPU-accelerated effect, even though GPU acceleration is on). 
3.  MRQ in the timeline has no influence on the export, only on the preview.
4.  To get MRQ on the export, it needs to be ticked in Export Settings
5.  As is the case in the timeline, it will do nothing for frames rendered on the GPU in your export either
6.  High Quality Playback in the Program Monitor will get you the closest to what the output will be
7.  Every timeline in Premiere Pro has an "output". So putting an UHD clip or sequence in an HD sequence will output HD, not UHD resolution, no matter what you do. This has not changed since Premiere Pro CS 5.5, AFAIK. 
8.  There's no equivalent to Collapse Tranformation from After Effects (same button as Continuously Rasterize) in Premiere Pro
9.  When you're scaling clips or sequences, some sort of re-sampling and anti-aliasing will have to be done
10.  Scaling more than once will introduce more re-sampling and more anti-aliasing
11.  H.264 will soften edges a bit more than ProRes will

For troubleshooting purposes, I'd love to see a high-res screen recording of the whole process, with different versions of Premiere Pro and the same sources. A sample export file from those different versions that shows the difference would also be great. 

Hey @Wes Howell,

I have done a test here, along with test files:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-bugs/max-render-quality-not-functioning/idc-p/13985699#M12889

I've added 2024-05-08_Prem_MaxQ_Bug.zip, which includes project files for Premiere 22 and 24(latest update).

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/11u2D_6vp5KQ44dUDoGU8m5ZfiMXT6JTR

Export settings were always "Match Source High Bitrate" with only changing Resolution to 1080p and toggling Max Render Quality depending on the test.

Note that in Premiere, the image is always sharp - differences can only be observed in the final file.

The only export that was sharp was the export from Premiere 22 with Maximum Render Quality enabled.

Thanks a lot for looking into this!

I could probably track down an older version 🙂

Do you have a sample project that shows clear results that you can share?  I will send you a PM

@Wes Howell I would love to but the last un-affected version of Premiere/Media Encoder was the 22 release, which is no longer availble for download and I don't have a copy of on any of our edit machines. As an Adobe Employee do you have access to a working older release?

I'm very keen to get this fixed and happy to help any way I can.

From an engineering perspective, the most useful thing would be a small test project that reproduces the failure along with info on what prior release produced superior results.  Exports showing the difference between releases would be great.  Often times, the devil can be in the details so getting to a clarified simple repro case would be the clearest way to get any potential bug logged and prioritized.

Bumping, as it's still a big issue in our workflow.

And here's the source (left) and render (right) of a HD clip on a UHD timline.

Yep.

Are you setting both the Sequence Preview setting MaxR and export MaxR?

None to my knowlege. The work around I was using (rendering through a backdated copy of Media Encoder) is no longer working.

I've taken to exporting everything at UHD (our default sequence size) with bitrate dropped to VBR target 5 max 15. It's poor but better than HD with the potato scaling.