Premiere Pro 2025 is a buggy mess

[Giddy_Gazelle5528]

Creating a video to advertise a car for sale. Stupidly forgot to obscure the licence plate whilst taking the footage.

But figured it was easy enough (in previous versions) to add a gaussian blur and crop or opacity effect to mask the required area. That bit was easy problem came when I tried to track the mask forward keyframes - it would silently fail everytime with the annoying exclamation mark.

ChatGPT gave me numerous methods to fix this but nothing worked.

So for my final fix I reversed the sequence and tried tracking the mask backwards and it worked everytime.

So I don't know if this is a bug or the new Premiere philosophy;

Broken when stepping forward

Stable when stepping backward

But in all seriousness 2025 is the worst version I've ever used, frequent crashes, hangs, unexpected behaviour, keyboard commands not working, effects not working - it's been genuinely horrible to use.

As soon as this project is finished I will downgrade to 24 and see if thats better!

[R Neil Haugen]

As with most bad behavior, this is probably dependent on a mix of hardware effects and media in use.

So to make a practical addition to the knowledge base please give:

OS/CPU/RAM/GPU and driver/media in use/ effects used, as a starting point.

Most of us aren't having issues as per normal, but some, like you,  are. Nailing down why is important.

[jamieclarke]

Hi @Giddy_Gazelle5528 - 
Thanks for submitting your bug report. We need a few more details to try to help with the issue.

What are your system specs? 

Can you send the project file to jamiec@adobe.com so that we can investigate your mask tracking issue.

I’m really sorry to hear that your experience with version 2025 has been so frustrating. That’s definitely not the experience we want you to have.

To help us investigate, could you let us know if you’re receiving any crash dialog boxes when it crashes? It would also be helpful if you could share a bit more detail about the hangs, broken effects, or any keyboard shortcuts that aren’t working as expected.

We really appreciate you taking the time to report this and we want to help get things running more smoothly for you.

[Giddy_Gazelle5528]

Win 11 Pro, 9800X3D, 64GB, 4080, Latest studio drivers. 2 x 990 Pro NVME's

No hardware activity spikes or heat throttling - idle 40's - peak high 60's.

No crash dialogue boxes at all. And keyframe forward for example doesn't create an undo event, just instantly shows exclamation mark and doesnt't happen.

Pretty basic 4K 30FPS clip, no audio yet, with guassian blur and opacity effects. Thats it - hadn't even got to transitions etc.

Workaround required reversing clip and then tracking backwards.

Also for example some keyboard functions work once then stop e.g. right, left arrow keys in the timeline.

Sure I will email the project file, but for now I've found a dirty solution to get it finished - will do so then downgrade.

[Giddy_Gazelle5528]

If i get some time tomorrow I will go through all the convo logs with the AI and list all additional issues. ChatGPT claims that some of the issues were certainly bugs but maybe she just doesn't like adobe 🙂