I'm just going to move this to the newbs forum, seems to fit here. The effect on x264 will be small, but if you want to see it, just make 3-5 similar avisynth scripts from your source, and encode them all with x264 --crf 21. You'll see a size difference in each, the blurrier ones are smaller, the sharper ones are larger. If you encode to a constant size, the blurrier ones are smoother, and the sharper ones have more noise and blocking. You get the most detail with lanczos or spline, when downsizing, but you have to pay a size or noise penalty.