Transform effect + shutter angle is messing up clip position

"It's not a bug in the software; it is a feature of the way the Transform tool works. Recently, I was working on a 1080p timeline and added an 8K clip. I wanted to zoom in and out on a specific part and also add motion blur. When I added keyframes for scale, everything looked fine. However, when I added a shutter angle, the clip's position got messed up.

The reason is the anchor point. The anchor point is the center of the clip, and different resolutions have different anchor points. You just need to set the anchor point of your clip to match the anchor point of your timeline. For example, the anchor point of an 8K clip is (3840, 2160), and for a 1080p timeline, it is (960, 540). Replace the anchor point numbers of your clip with the anchor point numbers of your timeline.

Then, change the position of the clip to center it, but do not change the position using the same Transform effect. Instead, change the position value from the Motion tab at the top of the Effect Controls panel. You can also add another Transform effect, but make sure to place this new Transform effect before the main Transform effect where you changed the anchor point."

And we're all forgetting that using the transform effect to acheive motion blur is a workaround in itself. Motion blur should be a native option in the "Motion" section like it was in Final Cut 7 15 years ago!

It's year 2024, Adobe.

Just to get this out of the way: You can also add the Transform effect to an adjustment layer in Pr or Ae, avoiding nesting/pre-comping if you want.

But I thought a summary of my meandering problem solving might help others avoid it. TL;DR: I did all my blurring in Ae with the effect CC Force Motion Blur added to an adjustment layer above every layer I wanted to blur. This way, I could keyframe the blur’s duration and strength in the effect controls. The effect Pixel Motion Blur was just as good but caused more lagging for me. In addition, using a camera tied to a null in Ae to do the scaling and position moves retained my resolution even at extreme scaling, something the Transform effect has an issue with in either app.

I'm doing 2D animation and, as in this case, want blur on some layers and not others, often in the same frame at the same time. From one large comp (roughly 5000 x 2500) constructed in Ae, I wanted a shot that starts extremely zoomed in to follow a vehicle driving through a valley with a pan across the comp, then does a swish pan to other vehicles on the other side of comp, and seconds later a quick zoom-out. The vehicles are PNG sequences with wheels animated frame-by-frame that I didn't want motion blur on, but their motion paths are also animated--via Ae. I wanted blur only on the camera moves, the pans and the zoom-out (scale and position). 

-- I first decided to render it out as a clip in its full size from Ae to Pr and try applying these camera moves with the Transform effect in Pr. This led to the issue of the randomly shifting frame position.

-- Still in Pr, applying the Transform effect after Nesting the clip or to an adjustment layer above the clip led to the issue of badly decreased resolution when scaling. Compensating for that issue by first scaling up the clip with its own Motion settings eliminated the ability to pan and zoom in the adjustment layer beyond the bounds of the adjustment layer’s frame.

-- Since this clip was constructed in Ae, I returned to that and first attempted Ae’s version of the Transform effect added to an adjustment layer. It did not throw my frame positioning off as in Pr but did lower the resolution, though not as badly as in Pr. [If you're not scaling as much as I am, this solution might work for you.]

-- I then created a camera and parented it to a null object that I used to set my zooms and pans--this retained my full resolution when I scaled. [I don’t know why; I'm not paid by Adobe to care about why.] Next, the blur; I could not simply turn motion blur on for all layers, because the resulting blur for to the vehicles’ motion path animations would smear out the clarity of their frame-by-frame animation for the entire duration. To be able to keyframe the blur’s duration and strength, I added Pixel Motion Blur to an adjustment layer above everything. I compared it with CC Force Motion Blur, which proved a little less laggy on my previews (both cause mega-slow rendering).

If you made it through all of that, I told you it was meandering. I was more intimidated learning Pr than Ae, so I’m sure you can learn at least the steps above in Ae to give you the best blur controls, even if it’s for a single layer. It’s also a very dramatic thing to see precise blur on one layer with no blur on the layer behind it in the same shot. I suggest the tutorial on CC Force Motion Blur by Jake In Motion on YT.

Greetings! I'm having the same issue now (position changes if I apply a simple -100 width transform effect to invert the direction of a clip). It started about a month ago, updated to Premiere Pro 2024 and it's still happening with video clips and if I try this transform effect on any Character Animator layer, it disappears completely (but appears on a still frame). The nesting solution is a good work-around and fixes the issue with video clips (thank you so much SK Mobariz30379441ymqj!), and for Character Animator layers the solution seems to be to transform within CA (which can be a pain because this needs to be factored in for eye movements and draggers) and then export it as a media file, then import. But these kinds of work-arounds add up and end up taking a lot of time and it's quite unacceptable given how much the monthly subscription fee costs. Adobe--please fix this soon! Thank you!

I had that same problem. What you can do is to nest that particular layer and then apply transform effect on that nested sequence. don't open the nested sequence and apply transform effect op the layer or it will repeat the same problem.

Somehow premiere pro gives more priority to nested sequences, that's why when there is a rendering problem due to a lot effects over there, i just nest those layers and then render it.

In this case, you just have to nest that one layer and then apply transform effect upon that nested sequence. I hope it helps.

I was also experiencing this issue. Read thru the thread and didn't see much help. I went back to work and may have just found a fix for this.

I have a 4k clip in a 1080 sequence at 100%. I dropped the transform effect and set the shutter angle first. Then set my scale + position keyframes. This just worked for me. No weird offset, no nesting, and motion blur is great.

This has not yet been fixed in 22.6, i just discovered it.  Changing shutter angle in Transform effect changes clip position.

Same case here.

The shutter angle messes up the position of a clip. The only workaround working for me is to nest it and use the transform on the nested clip.

I've tried the Scale to Frame size approach without success.

I'd be grateful if a fix for this year-old issue is provided.