Split Latents 🎥🅥🅗🅢

Split Latents cuts a batch of latents into two groups at an index you pick. The first split_index latents go out one socket, everything after goes out the other. If your latent stack is a video's worth of frames, this is how you carve it into "the first half" and "the rest" - or any two chunks you want to process differently.

It's the counterpart to Merge Batch: split apart, do something to one piece, glue back together. Together they let you treat a frame sequence as something you can slice and reassemble instead of an all-or-nothing blob.

Why you'd reach for it

The everyday use is processing part of a clip differently from the rest - run a different denoise on the opening frames, hold out a section, or peel off a leading frame to reuse as a reference. It's also the workhorse behind manual chunking: split off a fixed-size group, process it, split the next group off the remainder, and so on, when you want tighter control than an automatic batching system gives you.

How it works

split_index is the boundary. It's the index of the first latent that lands in group B, so with split_index = 8, latents 0–7 go to A (eight of them) and 8-onward go to B. The node also tells you how big each group came out, which matters for the edge case below.

The one behavior to burn into memory: if you give it fewer latents than split_index, it doesn't error - it puts everything into A and leaves B empty. So A_count won't always equal split_index; it equals split_index unless the input was shorter, in which case it equals the input length. That's why the count outputs exist.

Inputs and outputs

• latents (LATENT) - the batch to split.
• split_index (INT, default 0) - the boundary; the first index that goes to B.

Outputs:

• LATENT_A - the first group.
• A_count (INT) - how many landed in A (see the edge case above).
• LATENT_B - the remainder.
• B_count (INT) - how many landed in B.

The count outputs aren't decoration - wire them into your logic when you're chunking, because they're how you detect "ran out of frames."

Installing it

comfy.icu bundles VideoHelperSuite already, so there's nothing to do.

Locally: ComfyUI Manager → search ComfyUI-VideoHelperSuite → install → restart. Or:

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

then restart ComfyUI. Kosinkadink's suite, standard equipment for video work.

Common issues

The classic surprise is an empty B. You set split_index = 16, fed in a 12-frame batch, and B came out with nothing - that's the documented behavior, not a bug: too-short input dumps everything into A. Check B_count; if it's 0 when you expected frames, your input was shorter than your split.

The default split_index is 0, which puts everything into B and nothing into A - also a valid but easy-to-miss state. Set the index to what you actually want.

If the node's absent from the menu, that's the pack failing to import (usually ffmpeg or a NumPy version clash). The ComfyUI startup log names the cause; reinstall through Manager.