[HELP] Does resizing a cropped resolution to a higher one cause video quality degradation?

[i4004]

Does resizing "up" from 700x472 to 704x480 technically degrade the video quality?

yes it does, and even more than you would imagine.
if you had "inprinted" subtitles (like the ones i'm about to upload in another thread about vhs) in your video you would see this easily.

number of pixels doesn't even matter much, 1 pixel resize already makes a big differnece, especially in vertical direction, ie 480 lines in your case.
it's the skeleton of the picture that shouldn't be touched.
you can play with horizontal pixel count, though. usually a lot.

same thing on playback on modern screens: it's better to watch in 1:1 pixel mapping, ie 1080 looks best on 1080 screen, not on 4k screen which needs upscaling.
in that case avisynth/vapour will usually beat tv's resizer/deinterlacer.

offcourse, these days you can probably do qtgmc for sd content in realtime, ie connect pc to tv.