Fix Premiere's Adjustment Layer Render Pipeline!

FIXED YOUR RENDER PIPELINE YET? Adjustment Layers are STILL destroying 4K footage on 1080p timelines!

How is it 2026 and Premiere Pro still can't handle basic render order logic?

I’m working with 4K footage in a 1080p timeline. Standard stuff, right? The second you place an Adjustment Layer over a clip and use the Transform effect to scale or push in, Premiere completely throws away the source resolution.

Instead of scaling from the raw 4K pixels like it should, the engine downsamples the clip to 1080p FIRST, and then the Adjustment Layer aggressively upscales that flattened 1080p canvas. The result? A blurry, pixelated, utterly ruined mess.

If I scale the clip directly on the Motion tab, it uses the 4K source. The moment it hits an Adjustment Layer, the pipeline collapses.

Why do we pay a monthly subscription for software where an Adjustment Layer acts like a blind screen-grab instead of a non-destructive pass-through? We shouldn't have to bloat project files with constant nesting or jump through ridiculous workarounds just to get basic image quality on a simple push-in.

Fix your render stack order. Stop adding half-baked features nobody asked for and fix the core architecture. This is basic video engineering