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. 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. 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). MRQ in the timeline has no influence on the export, only on the preview. To get MRQ on the export, it needs to be ticked in Export Settings As is the case in the timeline, it will do nothing for frames rendered on the GPU in your export either High Quality Playback in the Program Monitor will get you the closest to what the output will be 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. There's no equivalent to Collapse Tranformation from After Effects (same button as Continuously Rasterize) in Premiere Pro When you're scaling clips or sequences, some sort of re-sampling and anti-aliasing will have to be done Scaling more than once will introduce more re-sampling and more anti-aliasing 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.
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