I have to make a small mask in premiere pro and I can't move it

[LetsAllLoveLain]

I have to work with small masks and every time I try to in premiere pro, it doesnt give me the little open hand symbol to let me move it around, even if I zoom in to like 400%. I press the shortcut "v" to get to the normal mouse, and go try and move the mask and the only two options it gives me is to move one of the points with the little "o" sybol next to the pointer or it gives me the option to make a new point with the pen. It gets real annoying when I have to open After Effects and link a file when premiere pro is supposed to be a profesional editing program. Either tell me how the hell to move tiny masks or FIX THIS

[R Neil Haugen]

Simple solution.

Drag a bounding box over the whole mask, selecting all points.

Click on any one point and move and it now moves the whole mask.

Neil

[theoceanfrog]

This literally doesn't work. I select all points, they are ALL solid. I click and drag and ONLY the one point I clicked on moves and the others just sit there. SO frustrating. Am I doing something wrong???

[Sami Succar]

Is this not the behaviour you're getting?

[Kevin-Monahan]

Make sure also that you are meeting system requirements. I find that in my tired old Mac system, masks are no longer updating (2013 Mac Book Pro). You actually need to render to see what's going on.

Kevin

[167945]

I stumbled across this and haven't seen a solution mentioned yet. Since you can't use the cursor to move your mask,  you gotta use the arrow keys. Select the whole mask with a bounding box and use the arrow keys to move it around.

I hope this helps. It works for me.

[Ann Bens]

@167945  As for 2021 the arrow keys don't work with masks (still needs to be fixed).

I intermittent miss the hand icon.

[167945]

Ooohh right. I currently only use the 2019 version since newer versions keep crashing on my laptop.

[Markerbox Man · Accepted solution]

I work with tiny masks of sometimes only a few pixels and I know the problem.

It's rather easy to understand: Around every point there is a slightly larger area you can click (target area), so that you don't need to hit the point exactly. If the mask gets really tiny these target areas overlap, leaving no space in between them and, thus, no center area you could click on to drag the mask. Zooming in doesn't help because the size of the target areas also gets bigger.

So it's a "bug by design" and not an issue with a specific Premiere version. Moving the mask with the arrow keys doesn't work for me (they trigger the timeline) and selecting all the points still doesn't let you drag the entire mask (only works on larger masks). The only solution I found was to make the mask larger, move it, and reduce the size again 😞

Adobe could fix this by simply not enlarging the target areas when you zoom in. The current behavior doesn't make any sense.

[martint43104650]

Hey dude. Thanks for writing informative posts! Do you know if Adobe ever tried to fix this problem? I don't have an efficient solution still and it is 2022 but maybe I'm missing something?

[dimitryp20708918]

If you do NOT have the answer to the problem, do not keep repeating your no answer. That's not helpful. Especially when you write three paragraphs with a NO ANSWER. That actually clutters the responses with useless data and people waste time reading your long and utterly unhelpful response. 

[martint43104650]

Then why did you write this?

Martin Sebelius Ståhl

Producer & Senior Editor

[Najaknew]

I found that if you select the program panel, you can indeed use arrow to move your small mask. Try it out! 

[Kevin-Monahan]

Yes! That was not working for a version or two but now the function is back and is a godsend, I think.

Cheers,
Kevin

[Jacob_DMU]

This is not working for me, I select the entire(small) mask with a bounding box, have the program panel as active (blue outline), and the arrow keys control playback and do not move the mask.  

The oversized target areas should either not enlarge when you zoom in or be a user-set preference.  Adobe, please do something to fix this!

[martint43104650]

I can confirm that this DOES NOT work. The only (horribly unofficient) solution is to scale up the whole mask and then move it and then scale it down. Can we unmark this problem as solved please?

[martint43104650]

This is not solved. Why is it marked as solved?

[Ann Bens]

Maybe not solved for you but solved for OP.

[martint43104650]

NO it is not! Read the post that is marked as a "solution". It is CLEARLY not a plausible solution for anyone and this fact is emphasized by the sad smiley. The quality of this forum is too low to be much help for professionals. The answer is a cumbersome and sometimes very time consuming work-around at best.

[Ann Bens]

Post your issue in a new thread.

[LetsAllLoveLain]

Bro its not marked as a solution its marked as an answer. The dude answered the question in a nice way basically saying that adobe needed to fix it. This was two years ago maybe its fixed by now idk. But yeah make a new thread if you need to.

[martint43104650]

Well it still isn't still solved after two years. I'm marking you as answer though. 

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Martin,

Sorry. Select the Mask Path in the Effect Controls panel and Select the Program Monitor. Arrow keys should move the mask. It is working OK over here.

Thanks,
Kevin