is there no simple crop in After Effects?

[John Cuevas]

Select your layer and double click the rectangle mask tool. Now just drag around both left side vertices to select them and drag them to right to crop. You could also use the Effect > Transition > Linear Wipe to crop one side of a video.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[Curt Needs]

It’s one of those days where everything I want to do in After Effects just doesn’t have a simple solution. And here’s another. In FCP 7 I can just use a slider to literally crop the left, right, top, and bottom of an image, video, graphic, whatever. But here in After Effects, those sliders don’t exist under the Transform option within the layer. And that just seems like having them there would be a no-brainer. I know masking things is how a lot of stuff is done in After Effects, but cropping an image shouldn’t be so hard in a program that should be able to do something like that faster than FCP 7.

[Michael Szalapski]

Effect>Transitions>Linear Wipe

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Olivié Charbonneau]

Hello,
search for “Crop Edges” in the Effects & Presets panel : it will apply a preset of 4 Linear Wipe effects on the layer, and an optinal master controler for these 4 effects.
Not the most integrated feature indeed…

[Martin Reigel]

If you apply crop edges, then go through and delete all the pre loaded expressions you get independent control over the top, bottom, left, and right crops.
(Alt click the stop watches with the red value on mac)