We need a way to stop metastrips from cropping large footage

Imagine you've rendered something bigger than the video output dimensions and it must scale up and down, ellipsing the edges of the frame and comped when in VSE. You soon learn it's difficult working around how Metastrips automatically crop held footage without control to override the behavior. You'll get cropped anywhere the image falls outside the res gate in the metastrip, unless you're working inside of the strip. But you may need to translate a heavy stack of layers, so you need additional resolution.

What's the smallest change we could make to the existing functionality to fix this workflow issue?

We need to tweak the range of values and the function of the 'Crop' properties in the MetaStrip properties; Allow negative values to control how far outside of the frame to include additional image data.