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Thank you optodata! That explanation makes sense and explains what I was seeing. The mask tool will give me the good looking results I expected. 
Tony, to answer your question, when you did this "I left then at full screen height to make any flaws more clear." you actually eliminated the problem. It is somewhat counterintuitive, but the smaller the video clips are the worse the impact is.
I will say, using the mask tool is more cumbersome (at least for my application) because the PIP designer still works with the dimensions of the unmasked video. This means that if I get a bunch of different videos that need different amounts of cropping I need to do some subtraction and scaling math for the PIP settings to compensate for the masking to get all the videos the same size and in line. I could eyeball it, but that's not my style. With CZP, the dimensions in PIP designer are those of the cropped video clip, so it is trivial to make a bunch of cropped videos all the same size and all aligned.
It seems to me that ideally the CZP tool would, at least when rendered, resample from the original source file and avoid this potential degredation. I am going to submit this as a suggestion and maybe someday it will get picked up.
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I finally had time to get around to putting together a small demo. The zip file below has the project and the single video file.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J3O1YKcN95eKcsmJlg7_NHz0jbRY1Ugq/view?usp=sharing
Yes, the video is mirrored. I don't know why my phone decided to do that, but I left it that way just to keep things as simple as possible. If you are looking for the artifacts in the output, I woud suggest rendering at 4K. They are present at 2K, but not terribly pronounced.
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Thanks!
I'll trim down one of the bad video clips and put it in a project by itself so that everything is nice and compact before posting. It will probably be a few days before I get around to this. I'm going to complete my current video first via the quadrant method I know works so that I don't have to worry about trying to troubleshoot to a deadline.
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FIrst things first, I am now running version 19.0.2222.0. I started a fresh project and was still able to duplicate the issue. No suprises there, but one can hope.
I have noticed that the effect is most prominent when the videos are reduced to only take up a small portion of the screen. Unfortunitely, I'm making a virtual band video with 45 videos on screen at once, so that's my end game. For context here is my last video: https://youtu.be/gN0AH0PJcFQ?t=102
The quality difference based on size is notable. Here is a side by side cropped and uncropped with each video roughly as tall as the canvas. I can see a tiny bit of degredation, but it isn't bad.
Here is the same videos but reduced to about 20% of canvas height. The difference is substancial.
I also confirmed it only happens with some videos. I wasn't able to replicate it with the sample videos that ship with PD. I looked at the video properties, but I don't see anything that seems to predict what videos will show the issue. I also tried transcoding this video from H264 to MPEG4 and H265 with handbrake and it still did the same thing.
I have built up all my past vidos as four quadrant videos that I render separately and stich togather into a 4K master. I had to do this previously because I didn't have enough RAM to load all the videos without crashing. I now have more RAM at my disposal and decided to do all the layout at once. In doing so I made all the vidoes half their former size, and thus I believe I exacerbated this issue. I may have to go back to my old method as a fallback.
Thanks again for any suggestions.
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I am wondering if anyone know why the Crop / Zoom / Pan tool seems to reduce the video quality of the input video and what I can do to stop that.
First, let me say that I am well acquaintedwith the topics of resolution, compression, etc. The video used below looks great in its raw form. For demonstration, I dragged two copies of this video onto the timeline and set them side by side. On the right I just resized the video, but otherwise left it alone. On the left, I used the Crop / Zoom / Pan tool to crop out a portion of the video. I resized these in the preview window to be about the same size for comparison.
This is the end result in the rendered video, there is much more artifacting on the cropped video than on the raw video. This is best seen on the baton and the shirt lettering. Certain videos seem to be worse than others and this example is far from the worst I have seen. I suspect it might be due to source format, but I have yet to find a way to completely eliminate the issue other than to avoid cropping videos.
I have tried turning on and off every acceleration option I can find. The artifacting is present in the preview and in H264, H265, and XAVC outputs. Any fixes or ideas would be much appreciated.
Background Info: I'm running PD 365 V 19.0.2108.0 (64-bit)
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