It’s well worth playing around and finding render settings that work well on your system and also work well for the task. I recently did a few batches remixing replaced stock music for a TV series so I was working with stems for everything except new music. Since that was the case I didn’t worry about sync at all as far as lip-sync goes, and it was rare I moved audio and had to worry about picture cuts. For that job I picked DNxHD (Windows) 8-bit, 720p, and a pretty low bitrate. There were so many episodes I needed to get through that I didn’t want a huge amount of video data on my video drive for no good reason.
But for stuff where I need lip-synch clearly visible I do no less than HD of course, and with a fairly hefty bitrate.
I have to say that on my modest ‘recent’ system playback of DNxHD in Windows in Nuendo is smooth as butter. I love it. The system I use in a couple of studios where I work running Macs and PT just blows in comparison.
Anyway, experiment 