1080 as 720 vs. 1080 resized to 720

[Joseph M. c iii]

so not really satisfied with the answers here i wanted to know for sure what was better from the perspective of a YouTube viewing a video at 720p

First thing, i haven’t uploaded any of this to YouTube yet because i wanted to look at the raw images first.

For all my test i simply went to a webpage and put the browser itself in full screen mode so that no taskbar on the bottom or address bar at the top was taking up screen space. I choose a site with a lot of text on it because i figured small text would be where the quality would be most obvious for this kind of question.

1)Monitor set to 1080 and recorded at 1080 with high quality bitrate. Then i switched my monitor to 720 and disabled scaling, so that there were black bars all around my screen. Viewing the video in full screen at 1080 the text looked crisp, but viewing at 720 it looked noticeably worse. conclusion is, people watching 1080 content at 720p are seeing a quality loss

2)Monitor set to 1080 and recorded at 1080, later rendered down to 720 with everything else set otherwise high quality. Viewing at 1080 the text was fuzzy, as to be expected. Viewing at 720, it still looked bad…which i wasn’t expecting but only because i wasn’t thinking about it. your still squishing a larger viewing pane into a smaller space without cropping any of it out. so the conclusion is, rending to a lower resolution is bad for both 1080 and 720 viewers in terms of quality.

3)Monitor set to 1080, and video recorder set to record at 720. same result as test #2. conclusion, just play, record, and render at native resolution because YouTube will do it’s worst anyway.

4)Monitor set to 720, and recorded at 720. Viewing at 1080 the text was still fuzzy but was indeed better quality than viewing a video down-scaled to 720. Viewing at 720, was well…the same because it was played and recorded at 720.

Conclusion: If you care more about the people viewing your video a lower than you do about people viewing your video at your native resolution, then change your OS’s or Game’s resolution to 720 and then play, record, and render at that. People with higher resolution monitors will suffer a little, but you must pick who you want to favor more. If you don’t care that those with a resolution less than your native resolution have a quality hit that is noticeable even before uploading to YouTube; then just play, record, and render at your native resolution.

Note: This is advice for recording things that are on a monitor or tv, recording things in real life not directly from a monitor of some sort it is probably a different story and i have no expertise or clue on.