Rendering question about down-scaling.

If i render an animation to PNG at 2560x1440 resolution. And then use those PNG to render to H.264 video at 1920x1080. Will it downscale the images resulting in improved quality, relative to rendering the PNGs at 1920x1080 and the video at 1920x1080?

You’ll get a small supersampling effect, which can help smooth edges. Especially in bright areas if those are clamped down prior to scaling. Since it’s only 33% larger you may get a tiny bit of extra softness while downscaling compared to a UHD (3840x2160) render, since the pixels don’t line up between the two sizes. Depends on the downscaler. Also it takes longer to render the original frames, of course.

It will probably all be very subtle though. You’d probably need to A/B between downscaled 1080p and native 1080p to tell the difference on most frames.