Flicker problems with track matte Premiere CS6

[eschelar]

I have a "dream sequence". It lasts around 30 seconds. It consists of 4 clips slowed down 80%, color corrected and nested. The nested sequence has a fast blur.

This dream sequence is a bookend, shown first in heavy blur, shown later without blur. I'm using a color wash (color matte with color burn mode, opacity 6%) to create a visual theme. On top of that, I'm also applying a white color matte in screen mode at opacity 23%.

Above this, I have text. I am using a gentle drift left via Motion, as well as a track matte above this to do a left-to-right reveal. I use a white track matte and use the track matte effect. I have used a dissolve transition to fade out the text.

I have another bit of text that comes on just as the first is fading out.

At various points in the sequence, the brightness of the final render flickers dark and light. It does not coincide directly with any of the cuts or fades. It appears to be applying to the clips within the sequence below.

When the clip is pre-rendered in the project, it shows this flicker, although oddly if it is not pre-rendered and I just play (playback meter showing red), it does not. If I remove the text, there is no flicker.

I often have problems with Premiere getting confused when using layer modes. Is it worth trying to continue working with Adobe on this software?

[eschelar · Accepted solution]

I resolved this issue.

The problem was that the title objects above the blur were moved using the Motion. Each title object was a duplicate of the previous and I used Motion to set its position down 100 pixels. So the title object itself has edges even though they are technically transparent. What was happening was a glitch involving the top edge of transparent pixels against no pixels - some kind of "carry the 0" type error.

The solution was to edit the title object and move it up 100 pixels, then set the motion back to static. The bizarre thing is that I've also got left-right movement in the Motion effect and it doesn't cause a glitch. Some sketchy math going on here. While Adobe doesn't feel they need to fix bugs in software they sold before, I'd be very surprised if this bug has been detected and fixed in current versions, so I'll leave this post here for whatever good it might do.

EDIT: CORRECTION - after closing and re-opening the project file, THE PROBLEM HAS RETURNED.

Dangit. I resolved this by rendering out the nested sequence by itself with all the warp stabilizer applied and replacing the nested sequence. Yeah, there's some loss of quality, but it's covered by blur, so it's alright. Annoying though.