Should you use 'Render at Maximum Quality' for 4k youtube video's?

[amkrisis]

As said in the title:

Should I enable Render at Maximum Quality for uploading to youtube in 4k? (h264)
I read it's mostly usefull when scalling down video?

How about scaling up? (upscaling from HD or zooming in)

It raised the encoding time, but will it provide a better result? Or perhaps worse due to compression?

[jasontcox · Accepted solution]

If you're original source media was 1080 and you're exporting to 4K, then checking Render at Maximum Quality uses a better, but slower algorithm to create the scaled pixels. Any time you're scaling pixels up, you're technically losing quality, but this check mark box is supposed to help mitigate that a bit. But only export at 4K if your sequence was 4K and the majority of your footage was 4K. If all your clips are normal 1080p HD clips, theres no benefit to exporting at 4K, with or without that check mark box.