Originally published on hexisteme notes.
A pipeline I run turns geographic data into short map-explainer videos — 1080×1920, portrait, rendered with matplotlib. I had just applied a canvas-layout revision (v1.7) across 15 episodes and sat down to measure frames and confirm it had worked. Instead I found the actual cause of something I'd been treating as a composition-budget problem for weeks. A related note covered a case where a correct config value was being ignored. This one is a cousin of that failure: here the config was followed exactly, into a branch whose geometry nobody had checked.
The measurement
The check was simple. From each re-rendered episode I pulled the frame at t=12s and measured the share of bright, land-colored pixels inside the map band — the frame minus a 280px strip reserved at the top for hook text and a 520px strip reserved at the bottom for captions.
episode
