Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I’ve spent hours trying to figure out why my beautiful sharp timelapse footage ends up horribly soft after I’d rendered it, and it turns out that switching OpenGL on was causing the problem.
I also found that turning OpenGL off allowed a transparent PSD overlay to render correctly, with OpenGL I just had a big black rectangle.
Adobe make a point of selling OpenGL rendering as a feature but its totally useless for output. Lead me right down the garden path.