transform effect animated position causes stutters

[kjricker]

Windows 11

Nvidia GPU (studio driver driver 546.01)

Premiere (using any release from the last 2 years)

When using the transform effect and animating the position value, the result is a stuttering movement. This does not happen if animating the clip with the motion position value. I've been having this issue for quite some time, over many Premiere releases. I am just now taking the time to post it.

[kjricker]

No dev response at all?

[koljae4216091]

I have the same issue in Premiere 24.6.8 on my Mac Studio M1 Ultra.

[Ann Bens]

Try updating tot 25.5 

AFAIK Transform effect has been fixed.

[koljae4216091]

Thank you for your response. I tried it, but the bug still occurs.

[PaulMurphy]

Are you using a custom shutter angle? 

[koljae4216091]

The option "use shutter angle of comp" is activated. The value is zero with "bilinear" selected.

[koljae4216091]

I just discovered that pushing the motion blur to the max (360) helps a lot.

[koljae4216091]

Correction: even a value of 1 increases the quality a lot.

[caroline_edits]

Hey Koljae – just checking in! Is this something that still needs investigating, or did changing the motion blur parameter improve the experience?

Let us know,

Caroline

[koljae4216091]

Hi Caroline, thank you for asking.
Changing the motion blur parameter did infact improve the experience - but as this is not the usual work-around, there should be a better solution for it. I myself had to deal with this issue quite a while until I changed the paramter - so I would have been happy if there had been a solution for it earlier.

[Rabih_Sleiman8490]

you’re describing a very specific Premiere Pro behavior:

Transform effect → animating position → stutters / jitter

Motion property → animating position → smooth

Windows 11, Nvidia GPU, latest Studio drivers

Has persisted across multiple Premiere versions (so not a one-off bug).

This is actually a known quirk with the Transform effect renderer vs. native Motion renderer. A few points to help you:

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Why it happens

1. Different render pipelines

The Motion controls are GPU-accelerated and tied directly to Premiere’s internal renderer.

The Transform effect often forces frames into the effects pipeline, which can introduce rounding errors or uneven frame sampling, especially at non-integer pixel values.

2. Frame sampling / sub-pixel rendering

Transform doesn’t interpolate sub-pixels the same way as Motion.

This can cause a visible "stepping" effect at certain playback speeds.

3. Shutter Angle setting

If Use Composition’s Shutter Angle is enabled (or Shutter Angle ≠ 0), Premiere tries to create motion blur. That changes how frames are blended, and can look like stuttering.

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 Things to Try

Set Shutter Angle to 0 in the Transform effect (removes motion blur sampling that can cause stutter).

Enable High Quality Playback (wrench menu in the Program Monitor).

Render & Replace (timeline preview can sometimes be jerky even if the final export is smooth).

Check scaling/resolution mismatches (footage resolution vs. sequence). Transform is more sensitive than Motion in these cases.

Switch to Motion whenever possible if you don’t specifically need Transform’s extra options (e.g. for motion blur).

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If you really need Transform (for motion blur etc.)

Nest the clip first → then apply Transform on the nested sequence. This sometimes smooths out the interpolation.

Try using After Effects via Dynamic Link if you need buttery-smooth sub-pixel transforms with motion blur.