DP Video Effect Receiver

This is the second half of a two-node round trip. DP Video Effect Sender pulls a small window of frames out of a longer clip so you can run an expensive effect on just that slice instead of the whole thing - DP Video Effect Receiver is what puts the slice back. Feed it the processed frames, the original full clip, and the map that says where the slice came from, and it hands you back one continuous clip with the effect only where you wanted it.

It's part of the animation set in DesertPixelAi's Desert Pixel pack, and on its own it doesn't do much - it's built to pair with the Sender, not stand alone.

How it works

Three inputs, all required: all_frames (IMAGE) - the full original clip, typically the same all_frames the Sender passed through when it split things apart. processed_frames (IMAGE) - whatever came back out of your effect chain, the slice the Sender isolated, now effected. And frames_index (STRING) - the positional map the Sender generated, marking exactly which frames in the original batch that slice corresponds to.

The node uses frames_index to place processed_frames back into all_frames at the right spots and returns the merged result. Nothing here is guessed - the index string is doing all the alignment work, which is why it has to be the exact one the matching Sender call produced.

Three outputs come back: the merged IMAGE (the reassembled clip, ready for a video-combine node), process_info (STRING, a plain-text summary of what got merged where - worth reading before assuming a bad-looking merge is a bug), and a passthrough all_frames (useful if you need to chain a second Sender/Receiver pair downstream without rewiring back to the original source).

The inputs and outputs that matter

All three inputs are required and load-bearing - there's no meaningful partial use of this node. frames_index is the one to be careful with: it needs to travel straight from the matching Sender's frames_index output to this node's frames_index input, unmodified. all_frames should likewise be the same clip the Sender saw, not a different or re-edited version.

How to install it

ComfyUI Manager: search Desert Pixel, install, restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/DesertPixelAi/ComfyUI-Desert-Pixel-Nodes

Restart ComfyUI. No downloads. Under the DP category.

Common issues & troubleshooting

The processed frames land in the wrong spot, or the merged clip looks glitchy. This almost always means frames_index and processed_frames aren't from the same Sender run - one got swapped, reordered, or you re-ran the Sender upstream (which regenerates the index) without re-running the effect chain on the new slice. Keep the two paired end to end.

This node alone isn't doing anything useful. That's expected - it only reassembles a clip that was actually split by DP Video Effect Sender first, with something processing effect_frames in between. Wired up with only a full clip and no real split/process step behind it, there's nothing coherent to merge.

process_info says something I didn't expect. Read it before assuming the merge failed - it's the node's own audit trail of what it actually did with the inputs it got, which is the fastest way to tell "the merge is wrong" apart from "the merge did exactly what the index told it to, and the index was wrong."

This whole pair feels like overkill for what I need. It probably is, if you just want an effect applied to an entire clip - skip the Sender/Receiver pair and run the effect on the full frame batch directly. This system only earns its complexity when the effect is expensive and you're deliberately isolating a short segment of a longer video.