Crop and active image area

In the document Comp workspace, add a Crop node immediately after Media Input when source pixels contain letterbox, pillarbox, or previously rendered borders. Crop is non-destructive: Top, Bottom, Left, and Right are stored as source-pixel insets and can be edited or reset at any time.

Auto Detect Black Bars samples five representative frames when the source supports random access. Near-black, slightly noisy compressed borders are accepted only when the same edge is present in a majority of those frames. The result only populates the four crop fields; it never modifies source media.

The processing order is:

SOURCE → CROP → TRANSFORM / SCALE / POSITION → EFFECTS / PROCESSING → OUTPUT

Crop changes the image bounds and normalizes the new origin. It does not scale, stretch, or otherwise resample pixels. The viewer's yellow ACTIVE boundary shows the cropped graph raster, dims the area outside it, and provides four edge handles for direct adjustment. Fit uses that active raster. The inspector reports source dimensions, all four insets, and active dimensions.

For delivery, choose Use Cropped Dimensions (the graph-following raster mode). A 3840×2160 source cropped by 276 pixels at both top and bottom therefore produces a 3840×1608 encoded raster, rather than a 3840×2160 raster with borders added back.

FrameFix ordering

FrameFix analysis cannot yet consume a frozen rendered Crop from upstream. Until that analysis path is available, use:

SOURCE -> FRAMEFIX -> CROP -> TRANSFORM / PROCESSING -> OUTPUT

An enabled Crop upstream of FrameFix is rejected in both document and Edit-clip graphs. Validation and the Analyze action explain how to correct the route. Moving Crop after FrameFix preserves the repaired image while still removing the borders from the final encoded raster.