Video Crop + Rotate + Pad → Frame 🆎

The image transform node in this pack - Image Crop + Rotate + Pad 🆎 - is one thing people reach for constantly. Video Crop + Rotate + Pad → Frame 🆎 is the same transform with a video player bolted on front, and the critical thing to understand up front is what it is not: it is not a video trimmer. It picks one frame out of a video and applies the rotate/crop/pad transform to that frame. The output is a single image. The full-screen editor's long timeline, playback, and exact frame stepping exist to find the frame, not to cut a range.

That's the honest use case, and it's a good one: you want a poster frame, a reference still, or a clean single frame from a specific moment - pre-cropped, pre-rotated, pre-padded - without loading the whole clip into your workflow.

Finding the frame

Two seek_modes cover how you think about time: frame index (zero-based target frame) or time seconds (target time). The editor gives you first/last, ±1, ±25, ±50, ±100 steps, playback, and timeline scrubbing, so you can land exactly where you want and let the widgets record it.

There's also source_mode: input folder (pick from ComfyUI's input folder) or local path for an absolute path - the mode to use for very large videos you don't want to copy. One gotcha lives here: queued runs always read local paths, but the editor's live preview of paths outside ComfyUI's own folders is opt-in. Start ComfyUI with AUSBOSS_TRANSFORM_LOCAL_PREVIEW=1 to enable it. The env var exists on purpose - it keeps the preview routes from exposing arbitrary files to anything that can reach your server, which matters if you run on --listen.

The transform

Exactly the image node's controls: rotation_degrees (clockwise, applied before crop and padding), crop_aspect_ratio (free or locked ratios from 1:1 to 21:9), crop_x/y/width/height, pad_left/top/right/bottom, feather, canvas_multiple, and fill_color (rotation voids and padding). Operation order is always rotate → crop → pad, and the outputs are image (the transformed frame) plus mask - a BHW generated-area mask covering rotation corners and padding. That mask is the key to feeding the result into an inpainter or outpaint rig and telling it what's "new."

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ausboss/ComfyUI-AusBoss.git

Restart ComfyUI and search for AusBoss (Manager: ComfyUI-AusBoss). No extra Python dependencies; PyAV (bundled with ComfyUI) handles the video decode. Minimum ComfyUI 0.27.1; if a frontend update changes custom-widget behavior, the README asks for your ComfyUI and frontend versions in the issue. Hard-refresh the browser with Ctrl+Shift+R after updating frontend files.

Troubleshooting

Forget AUSBOSS_TRANSFORM_LOCAL_PREVIEW=1 and the local-path preview will be blank even though queued runs work - that's expected, not a bug. If the frame you find in the editor doesn't match the output, check whether you're in time seconds mode (frame-accurate stepping is the frame-index mode's job). And remember it's one frame out: if you need a clip back, this is the wrong node - Load Video 🆎 is the loader that keeps the whole batch.