LTX Director Crop Guides

LTX Director Crop Guides is the boring node in the WhatDreamsCost Director family, and that's exactly why it matters. When you load a Director workflow from the repo, this is the small box sitting between LTX Director Guide and the sampler, and it looks like it does nothing - three inputs in, three outputs out, no widgets, no drama. It's doing the cleanup that keeps your generations from coming out one or two frames too long, and it's worth sixty seconds of your time to understand it.

Why it exists

Here's the problem it solves. When LTX Director prepares guide images for IC-LoRA work, or when the guide node tiled-encodes or snaps latents to a grid, the latent can end up carrying extra trailing frames - padding that was needed for the encode to work but that you don't want in the final generation. LTX 2.3 is picky about its latent math (frame counts have to line up with its VAE's temporal compression), so that leftover slop becomes a visible glitch, or just makes your clip longer than your timeline said.

Director's way of handling this is to tag the conditioning with an internal value - nghtdrp_guide_crop_latent_frames in the source - that records how many frames need to be trimmed. Crop Guides reads that tag, slices those trailing frames off both the latent and its noise mask, and then clears the tag and the now-stale keyframe metadata from the conditioning. Net effect: the latent matches your timeline, the conditioning is clean, and the sampler sees exactly what you asked for.

What it takes and gives

Three inputs, all pass-throughs: positive (CONDITIONING), negative (CONDITIONING), and latent (LATENT). Three outputs, the same three types. If the crop tag isn't present (say you're using it outside a Director workflow), it just passes everything through untouched - which is why it's safe to leave in the graph even when it's not doing work.

Where it goes

Wire it directly after LTX Director Guide, feeding the sampler's conditioning and latent inputs. That's the whole job. It doesn't need the model, the VAE, or anything else.

Install

Same as every node in this pack:

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

Or search WhatDreamsCost in ComfyUI Manager, install, restart. No dependencies beyond ComfyUI itself.

Gotchas

If your Director outputs are coming out a frame or two longer than the timeline promised, the first thing to check is whether this node is actually in the path - it's easy to lose in a big graph, and the padding quietly rides through to the sampler. Conversely, if you're not running a Director workflow and something else left that crop tag on your conditioning, this node is the reset button. Otherwise it's one of those rare nodes that just works and never needs to be touched again.