Fix the TRACK MATTE effect with a "Motion Settings Affect Matte" Checkbox!
The Track Matte effect in Premiere Pro almost never works the way we editors need it to, and it's high time this essential effect gets fixed!
When creating a Track Matte, changing the Motion parameters of the clip the effect is applied to also changes the resulting matte. For example, if I zoom my clip to 120%, the clip zooms 120% but so does the matte. This makes it impossible to move a clip within a matte's 'window' without nesting.
The current way to get around this is to nest the clip, apply the Track Matte effect to the nest rather than the clip itself, and then edit the clip's Motion settings/keyframes within the nest. Unfortunately this is a HORRIBLE workflow, since it forces editors to edit their clip's motion settings and keyframes out of context of the master sequence. It also involves the extra steps of nesting.
After Effects handles masking the way it should work: making any changes to a clip doesn't affect the resulting matted effect. This is the way it should also work in Premiere Pro!!!!!!!!!!
A simple way to fix this problem, that would serve the needs of everyone, would be to simply add a "Motion Settings Affect Matte" checkbox to the Track Matte effect, and leave it unchecked by default. This way, the 0.0001% of users who want track mattes to work the way they currently work in Premiere could continue with the current workflow, just by clicking the checkbox, and the 99.9999% of users who want PP's matting to work the way it does in AE could finally have AE's far superior matting workflow inside Premiere!
The AE team gets it. Why can't the PP team understand how track matting should work???
Adobe, Track Matte is one of those effects that pro editors use all of the time! We would really, truly, greatly appreciate it if you could finally make time in your busy schedule to fix this essential tool before resuming attention to other features that are used by far fewer people.
Thank you!!!!!


-
Michelle Bates commented
I spent hours trying to figure out how to animate my video and matte independently from each other. It seemed like that would be an automatic option. I finally found the "nesting trick" after watching quite of few track matte videos on Youtube. That STILL didn't work until I came across a post where a user mentioned you had to open the nested clip in the source monitor.
-
Andy Lundquist commented
If you search around, you'll find that people have been confused and frustrated by Premiere's "Make Track Mattes Useless" feature for over a decade. Has anyone discovered a 3rd-party solution?
-
Anshul Joshi commented
Track Mattes worked the way they are supposed to in FCP - they were called Travel mattes and I'm talking about 2005! And they still don't work correctly in Premiere 2020! I literally did a search on "Track Mattes in Premiere Pro suck" and found this thread. You should be able to move / scale the video clip independently of the matte... Otherwise whats the point of a matte as opposed to using the cropping pen tool and creating a circle with that?
-
Wil commented
Wow, couldnt work out what was happening to my clip. Thanks for explaining this! Surely this would be an easy fix for adobe!
-
Pierre Louis Beranek commented
Yup, this is as clear evidence as any that the voting system does not work! If Adobe were to only focus on votes, they'd be busy porting all of Premiere Pro's bugs and broken tools over to Linux instead of fixing them for it's current users first. There's no other way to say it: Track matting in After Effects is great but in Premiere it sucks. When will Adobe finally show us users some respect by fixing long overdue problems like this one?
-
James Curtis commented
I can't believe this request only has three votes.
-
TaranVH commented
This seems to be the same request as https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/35708812-fix-the-track-matte-effect-with-a-motion-settings , but that one has more votes.
-
R. Neil Haugen commented
I would love this myself, and the option box seems an elegant solution to everyone's wants & needs.