Many hosts attempt to minimise the areas that they render by using regions of interest and regions of definition, while some of the simpler hosts do not attempt to do so. In general the order of actions, per frame rendered, is something along the lines of....

A host can ask an effect to render an arbitrary window of pixels, generally these should be clipped to an effect's region of definition, however, depending on the host, they may not be. The actual region to render is indicated by the kOfxImageEffectPropRenderWindow render action argument. If an effect is asked to render outside of its region of definition, it should fill those pixels in with black transparent pixels.

Note thate OfxImageEffectSuiteV1::clipGetImage function takes an optional region parameter. This is a region, in Canonical coordinates, that the effect would like on that input clip. If not used in a render action, then the image returned should be based on the previous get region of interest action. If used, then the image returned will be based on this (usually be clipped to the input's region of definition). Generally a plugin should not use the region parameter in the render action, but should leave it to the 'default' region.