Premiere opacity changes causes permanent invisibility, playback oddities.

Both Ann and Neil did above. But thank you too!

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Ann+Bens  wrote There are many ways to make a blurred vignette. ... The most simple way to make a vignette is to use the one from Lumetri. A link to the tutorial would be nice.

https://forums.adobe.com/people/R+Neil+Haugen  wrote ... The Lumetri vignette is pretty decent, but with the caveat that it only works as a centered one. You can't move the center at all. Using various types of masks of course allows one to put it anywhere. Neil

https://forums.adobe.com/people/R+Neil+Haugen  wrote I'm puzzled looking at this. It appears from your first image that the vignette is applied to the "Inner Sequence" ... and that image is what we see in the program monitor in all but the last. So I have no clue what you're doing with the other layers ... and also, what seems the base of the image (Inner Sequence on V3) becomes "Blank jpeg" in V3 in your second pic. So ... I've no clue what you're doing here, or really, what you're trying to achieve. Neil

Hi Neil, I am not following your confusion fully but let's start with you're not understanding what I'm doing...

I'm following a  Lynda.com tutorial for applying a blurred vignette. You create a solid layer and use a mask for the basic vignette, then you use an adjustment layer above with gaussian blur that itself has a mask that allows one to blur the outer edges of the vignette. It works fine until I mess with opacity on the outer sequence... the one which does *not* have all that stuff I just described.

So first, is there a better way to do the same thing? Maybe that will allow me to move forward. I was successfully using AE for a photo montage but went to Premiere given it's supposed to be simpler but the first vignette tutorial I found mentioned the described method so I went with it... I could give up on it but it seems it works at first and it itself is not breaking... Premiere seems to break after I mess with a difference sequences opacity.

In my screenshots above, I'm showing the inner layer several times, each time selecting a different layer so you can see the effects controls... maybe that wasn't clear. Not sure what yyou mean by "becomes "Blank jpeg" in V3 in your second pic." ... Blank.jpeg is always blank.jpeg which is a white jpeg with blank text saying "Blank" ... that is fine and doesn't change or "become" ... so I'm confused there.

Thanks for any thoughts!