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.
- Update to Premiere Beta version 25.6 build 48 or later.”
- 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… - Open or create any project
- 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
- 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.
- Make sure you have enabled New Masking (see above).
- Select a clip on the timeline.
- Find the new Mask Tool group in the toolbar. Long-press to see all the masking options. Choose the Object Mask tool.
Tools
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Congratulations, you just used Object Mask to blur an object!
- 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.
2 Correct answers
@FlyingFourFun Thanks for your detailed feedback.
I will reach out to you over direct message regarding how to share the videos you were referring to.
We have a helpx page that might help with some of the questions you have raised.
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/object-masking.html
Blend mode of mask can be used to combine the masks together. You can use "Add", "Subtract" or "Intersect" to combine masks. Any number of Object Masks and Vector Masks can be combined to create complex mas
Make sure to right click on the tracked mask in the Effect Controls and select Change to Opacity Mask. Duplicate your video and remove the tracked opacity mask and placed that on V1 and your masked layer on V3 or above. Place your graphics on V2 and it should show up.
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Replies
@BrianLevin You can turn off the overlay by setting it to None . This will let you see the outline only without any fill.
Thanks for the feedback! 🙂
In the meantime you can use the new Mask Overlay picker in the program monitor and set it to None to see only the paths with no overlay.
This is a huge upgrade for masking in Premiere, and that the tracking data is separate from the transform and path data is very nice, really didnt expect to see this in Premiere. 😄
And the blend modes for the masks are something that will make alot of simple masking jobs so so much easier... still dont understand why this was overlooked with the old masking implementation.
There are a couple of smaller UX/UI issues i think should be adressed.
I really like that you made the same method as in Resolve to make it very easy to adjust the path/transform of a mask per clip (so it autoadjust all keyframes already on a clip, like the überkey in Mocha), or per frame, like how it always have worked in Adobe apps.
But there needs to be a very UI distinction when you are in either mode. Maybe its best to do as in Resolve where an element of the mask is red when in Frame mode so its easy to see you will set keyframes when manipulating the path or transform of a mask in the viewer. It could be the Feather piont was red in this mode, and each vertex became red when adusted as long as Frame mode is active. When showing the Transfom Box it could also be red instead of blue when in Frame mode.
Holding down shift should restrict movement in X/Y axis both for moving vertices and transforming via the Transform Box.
Holding down shift while rotating the Transform Box now just explodes the rotation values, and you turn up with flickering shape and a value in +15x rotation 😄
I cant figure out a way to get the Transform Box to show up only for selected vertices? if its not supported it should be, maybe doubleclicking one of the selected vertices should bring it up. This will ofcourse only adjust the Path data.
When showing the Black & White mode of displaying the mask, the outline should not be shown, as its distracts showing the mask properly. At least there should be a way to disable the outline, maybe as a separate checkbox in the dropdown menu?
Wish thath the outline was drawn a bit thinner, right now it looks like a 2px or 3px line and it looks kinda chunky.
There is some bugs with manipulating vertex points and their handles.
Normally in Adobe apps you can hold Ctrl+Alt (windows) and click a vertex point to toggle the vertex handles to be set at zero (a liniear vertex point) and the default calculated handle length and direction. Currently with the Pen Tool this just deletes the vertex.
If you break a handle (alt+drag a handle, should be ctrl+drag to be consistent with AE) and then drag the handle back towards the 180° points to the opposite handle, the handles snap back into be linked again, very weird behavior.
Actually all mask manipulation and their shortcuts should work exactly the same as in AE, otherwise its just going to be more frustrating to use when Premiere behaves all different for something that is so hard endgrained in a users workflow.
...
a few things that could be nice to have at some point:
A way to link tracks from one shape to another, so you only need to track one if you have multiply simple masks that build up a more complex shape.
That we got the RotoBezier toggle from AE for a mask path. These are so much easier and faster to work with when you need a kinda loose shape for an area. Takes all the complexities of the bezier handles away from the user and works really good for diffuse color correction shapes.
a few more notes on the masking in Premiere.
The Feather extend preview lines are as in the old masks still way off what the extension of the feather really is. See screenshot below.
And there is something really weird going on with the feather profile outside the masks, where it goes to zero then back up again before returning to zero. It looks like it might use the really bad "gaussian blur" code that Premiere uses with a VERY agressive "sharpening" profile built in.
Look at the screenshot below on the Lumetri Scope.
I have logged a bug against this "gaussian blur" bug/feature on the AE side, but maybe it should also be adressed directly to the Premiere team?
gamma boosted screenshot
.... and if no one has noticed the bad Gaussian Blur code being used in Premiere, here is a very simple example showing what a it does. A blur should not ruin the values like this with some going into negative numbers, and as far as i know there is no native blur effect anymore in Premiere that can produce a smooth blur. At least in AE we can avoid the terrible Gaussian Blur and use other smooth blurs.
in a similar topic is the way too aggressive default resampler in Premiere, that will produce ALOT of ringing artifacts and negative values when doing something as simple as scaling a 4K video to 1080p... wish we had an option to use a more basic bilinear or bicubic scalers as in AE instead of the aggressive Lanczos that cant be toggle off anymore (we used to be able to overrule the Lanczos when going to software mode)
sorry for going a bit off-topic... love the new masking... hate the blur and scaling in Premiere 😉
the easiest way is just to have the Opacity propery selected in the Effect Control panel, then draw a rectangle mask with the Rectangle Mask Tool
If you draw it without having the Opacity selected first the mask will be added to the "Unassigned Masks" group in the Effect Controls panel, but you can then just drag it onto the opacity property manually.
Its a bit of a new workflow, but so so much improved, you just need to adapt a small bit first 🙂
Hi @Studio Mockingbird
You can use rectangle and lasso tools and +/- modes to add and subtract from masks to tweak them for correction. You can also use these tools to create new masks as well. Pls let us know if they are not working as per expectation.
Hi Arghya,
Yes those tools work, but they appear to be frame specific touch ups. So, yes you can do touch ups, but you (also/sometimes) want your touch ups to be picked up on following frames.
Like for instance you're trying to mask a person and you want to perfect the hand. You kinda have to go to each frame and lasso the inside of her hand.
Hi everyone! I've just tried out the tool for the first time and I have to say that it went smoothly. I found the selection and tracking completely intuitive, which gives good results. I will continue to follow the development of the tool. Thanks and best regards,
Piotr
I'm having no luck with this. I'm using h.264 test footage, and every time I try with the Object tool it tells me "Object Not Found." With the rectangle mask, nothing happens, but when I click the status button (bottom left) it tells me I have 3 masks in place.
25.6.0 Build 56. Windows 11. nVidia 5080.
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