Now in Premiere Pro Beta: New Masking Tools

[Francis-Crossman]

We’re excited to push an early development preview of new masking workflows to Premiere Pro (beta).  Whether you are color grading, applying effects, or cutting objects out from the background, these new masking tools are built to help editors work faster, smarter, and more creatively without needing to go to After Effects for simple tasks.

Note: This beta is an early look at upcoming Premiere Pro workflows and is not intended to reflect general availability performance or polish. Please contact us with bugs, feedback, and feature requests to improve these features.

• Object Mask – Automatically identify objects and people in your footage using AI and isolate them with a single click. Plus mask refinement tools and fast tracking throughout clips.
• Redesigned Shape Masks – the traditional shape mask tools (ellipse, rectangle, pen) have been rebuilt from the ground up with many performance and UI improvements.
• Faster Shape Mask Tracking – the tracking algorithm has been completely rebuilt too.  It’s significantly faster than before, more accurate, and offers more precise control for correction.
• Compositing tools – blend any combination of Object and Shape Masks to create complex masks with new blend modes: add, subtract, intersect

To get started

New masking workflows are only functional in beta projects that support an upcoming major release of Premiere Pro. This means your beta projects will not open in Premiere Pro 25 or earlier. We're excited to give you early access with these steps. 

1. Update to Premiere Beta version 25.6 build 48 or later.”
2. If you see this dialog, choose “Enable new masking”
   Launch dialog
   – OR – if you do not see the dialog at launch, or you skipped it, do the following…
3. Open or create any project
4. Enable “New Masking” via the beta menu in the OS menu bar at the top of the screen. Premiere Pro (Beta) will need to relaunch.
   Beta menu
5. From now on, Premiere Pro (Beta) will create projects in version 26.0 format. 

WARNING: these projects are NOT compatible with the current shipping version of Premiere Pro and will not open.

Quick Start guide

Follow these steps to get started with New Masking.

1. Make sure you have enabled New Masking (see above).
2. Select a clip on the timeline.
3. Find the new Mask Tool group in the toolbar. Long-press to see all the masking options. Choose the Object Mask tool.
   Tools
4. Hover the mouse over the program monitor, watch as objects are identified, and click. This will draw a static mask around the object or person.
5. Track the motion. Find the new “Object Mask” in the “Unassigned Masks” section of the Effect Controls Panel. Click on the forward and back button.
   
   Tip: the Effects panel is a different panel from the Effect Controls Panel. Find it in the Window menu.

6. Add an effect. Find the Gaussian blur effect in the Effect Panel. Drop it on the clip in the timeline. The mask will automatically be applied to the effect.

7. Congratulations, you just used Object Mask to blur an object!
8. Now, try to use the other tools in the group in a similar manner.
   

Visit here for the complete documentation. https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/object-masking.html

We want to know what you think.  Join the conversation below.

[MisterAdvent]

I had some success in getting it to mask something the other day.  I think I'm still not understanding the interface, and haven't had time to play with it.

[MazStudios]

Dear Adobe.

THIS is way better than any AI extending / creating you have tried to spoon fed us lately (I guess to be able to double the renting prices for the apps?). So far, I have yet to come across any pro level editor raving about the AI your shareholders seem to love.

All the things you have added to the beta lately, is light years ahead in value to me. Improving the GUI, adding nifty features to scale down time for me. I.e I dont want the Ai to create all my stuff so I can do the dishes, it's supposed to be the other way around.

When I teach Premiere, I never talk about what you seem to love, AI. I allways focus on the real improvements like this. And dont get me wrong, I know its driven by Ai, but it's not taking any decisions for me (creating), it just helps me to get to rendering faster.

Everytime people talk about "but have you seen the new Ai "whatever". Yes I have, and so does every other youtuber out there and are probably paid to talk about it and adding the "shocking, gasping mouth wide open, hands pulling the hair-thumbnail". I tell them to ignore the noise, ignore the path Adobe is forced to blindly walk because of that monday-meeting when corporate sent the email stating "Ai is so cool, lets get down with the kids"

I will continue to be outspoken about Adobe and Ai, telling people to ignore it, look at what really creates a good NLE. Because it sure as h*ll isnt AI int he way Adobe thinks about it.

THIS is the way... 😉

Keep this up, and I might just stay with Premiere.

[novian]

can we get tracking position from this masking tool?

[Arnold Nitin]

@novian 
Can you please elaborate on what you are referring to here? Any specifics will help us address the issue. 

[Shebbe]

I believe novian's idea is that a center point positional data of the resulting tracked mask track can be extracted and used to be applied to other effects' positional data. This would be incredibly useful for 'sticking' graphics to someone's head for example which you'd otherwise have to resort to AE for.

[RobertKjettrup]

Some notes on the speed of tracking after some testing with various clips.

Its fast, very fast. Like Resolve fast for 1080 and 4K clips.
but tracking on a Nikon N-RAW 6k clip made it very slow, as slow as the old tracker on a 1080 clip, still a huge improvement but it seems like tracking on raw clips (only tested N-Raw right now) the speed drops.
Converting the N-Raw 6k clip to a Prores 6k clip, and the tracking speed was much faster again.

tracking the same clip in Resolve and there was no difference if it was a raw or a prores clip in 6k (in a 6k timeline so Resolve didnt have its normal benefit of tracking a lower timeline resolution that it normally has)

Some work to still to do on raw clip processing in Premiere. Maybe for tracking it doesnt need to process the raw at full res? At least not before we get more edge refine tools for the masking the full res should be needed for movement track.

[Arghya Sur]

Hi Thanks for the feedback. We are actively working on improving speed of tracking for different formats. You should receive updates soon in future beta versions. 

[Arnold Nitin]

@RobertKjettrup Please try your RAW clicps in the latest build the tracking speed will be better that what you saw earlier. 

[RobertKjettrup]

@Arnold Nitin its much faster on those 6k nikon raw files i tested before. The tracking speed is exactly the same as Prores files of the same clips (not measured but felt exactly the same speed)

Very nice. 

Not as fast as the ML masking in Resolve, but that is maybe also unfair as Premiere always tracks in the source clips resolution (am i correct?) and Resolve always tracks in the timeline resolution, and that will so often make you loose any ML masks if you dont know how to handle this or get misaligned ML masks on export if you render in different res than you work. Here Premiere actually does the right thing and hopefully it will be more reliable than Resolves ML masking 😁

[Hugo32271336oxsc]

This function seems awesome but since last update, premiere pro beta not working, 

software not opening, it is loading and nothing...

[Arnold Nitin]

@Hugo32271336oxsc Can you share the build number and the device spec you are using. 

[Hugo32271336oxsc]

Thanks for your quick reply,

I actually just figure out how to solve it, 
I uninstall the Insta360 plugin and now it is working, 

So I guess there is a compatibility issue between this beta version and the Insta360 plugin.

[danielcart]

This is awesome news! The new Object Mask and faster tracking sound like real time-savers, especially for quick blurs and color work without jumping into After Effects. Excited to test this in the beta and see how it fits into my editing workflow. Great job team!

[Gabby16bit]

Please, don't remove the shortcut mask symbol near each effect in effect control, it was so quick to access to the mask tool for each effect, now it goes into unassign mask and i have to relocate it, and it's clunky sometimes don't work correctly, like i used opacity to crop out fast things i don't need, now it feels i need to do more steps for the same result 

[Ron Rigler]

If you select an effect, Opacity as an example, when you create the mask it will be applied directly to the effect as it did before. You can also either drag the mask from Unaassigned to the effect or use the right+click contextul menu to move the mask[s] to Opacity. I hope this helps!

[Kes33081653x90t]

And you can assign a keyboard shortcut to Change Unassigned Mask to Opacity Mask in the keyboard shortcuts editor

[Gabby16bit]

that's cool thanks, i still think that have the symbols is superior also less clicks, but i can understand that is less "clean". I hope i can get used to that.

[Jonathan Santhus]

I can apply an opacity mask to any effect applied this way, but how do I create path interpolation keyframes?

In the old version, I simply went to a new time in the timeline, modified the path, and a keyframe was automatically created.

Today, I still can't change the path.

[RobertKjettrup]

@Jonathan Santhus

That also took me a while to figurer out why premiere didnt add frames automaticly as usual when going to a new frame. But its quite simple, and very nice new improvement.

See the toggle button in the viewer that says Clip/Frame? press the Frame toggle and it works as before, any change will be recorded as a keyframe (just even better as tracking, path and transform are all separate parameters). Toggle the Clip button and now you can move the mask around and no keyframe are set so it makes it super easy to make global adjustments to a mask, something that was impossible before.

It works almost exactly as Resolve and when you get your head around how simple it works you will never want to go back to the old masking method 😁

[Jonathan Santhus]

@RobertKjettrup , @Ron Rigler 

Thank you so much, my dears.

You can't imagine how many times I've activated and deactivated the "New Mask" feature, recreating projects in the previous version over the past two or three days.

I believe this should be a necessary explanation when discussing the new feature.

This morning, after the second Premiere Pro Beta update and new attempts to recreate projects to identify what I'd missed, I came back here to see if anyone had mentioned anything.

Thank you very much again.

[Matt Young]

"See the toggle button in the viewer that says Clip/Frame?"

Where do I find this toggle button?  I don't see one anywhere, and I don't seem to have anything called a "viewer" that you mention. 

The official help guide is absolutely no help either.  It says "Ensure you are in clip mode" and "Ensure you are in frame mode" but doesn't say how to toggle between the two. 

Can anyone explain what I'm obviously blindly missing?

[Ron Rigler]

The Clip/Frame options are available in the Program Monitor.
Clip mode will make global adjustments that will offset the entire track. 
Frame Mode will apply the change to a single frame, and the tracking will animate between Transform keyframes. 
I hope this helps!

 

[Ron Rigler]

If you want to manually track, with the playhead at the poition you want to start tracking, select the Frame option. This will place Path and Transorm keyframes for the mask. Now move forward and adjust the mask. it should interpolate between the first keyframe location to the next. Please let us know if this works for your workflow.

[Matt Young]

I don't see the clip and frame options you mention.  This is what my program window looks like.

[RobertKjettrup]

@Matt Young you will only see the clip/frame option for regular masks that you can manually keyframe, you have set up a ML Object Mask.