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Participant
September 11, 2024
Open for Voting

Premiere desperately needs better masking tools

  • September 11, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 176 views

It's 2024, Ae has the blueprints for everything you could possibly want when it comes to the ability to create and animate masks, why are Premiere's tools still so primitive?

 

I understand that you can just work between the two but that's not always ideal especially if you just need to mask one thing quickly. It doesn't make sense to have to use two different apps when the tools should exist in both.

 

There needs to be a better way to control the size, shape, and animation of a mask. For example, when creating a rectangular mask why can't I just scale the entire thing up to fit the size of my frame instead of having to position each point individually? Having to move each point on its own means doing a lot of guessing as to where exactly they need to be especially since there is no real snapping in Premiere.

 

Also, in the year of our Lord 2024, why can I still not adjust what kind of keyframes a mask uses? I'm stuck with only linear keyframes? Just because? So I'm stuck manually adding additional keyframes to make the mask follow the animation in my footage. Not ideal.

 

Again, After Effects has none of these issues, and while I am aware I could just work between Premere and Ae, that's not an ideal solution for me and it severely gunks up my workflow. Having just a few simple features added to the masking capabilities of Premiere (scaling, bezier keyframes, etc) would be so incredibly useful and would save so much time and frustration.

 

Honestly, it would be a dream if one day Adobe released something similar to Davinci Resolve. An all-in-one editing program where you could do both non-linear editing and motion graphics work without ever having to leave the one platform. But I understand that would be an incredible amount of work and why waste that time and money when people are happy enough using the two separate suites? But one can dream.

1 reply

R Neil Haugen
Legend
September 11, 2024

Um ... I've used keyboard modifiers to enlarge or shrink a mask in Premiere for years. You don't?

 

And I've been using several different types of keyframes for years also ... I don't understand the problem there ... select keyframes, right-click, select behavior ... so I'm a bit puzzled by your post.

 

As to the mangling of Fusion to get it inside Resolve ... that's not an easy fit, realistically. As someone coming from the more colorist side of Resolve, the color workflows do not match easily, the keyboard shorts are nearly entirely different for the same thing ... it's ... odd.

 

But then, they're trying to use a stand-alone app as a page within Resolve. And there's already a user-base of Fusion that needs to have the keyboard shorts and other things be the same. There's a ton of griping I'm around about how to make that actually mostly work all the time.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...