@AlisonSharpe suggestion solved my issue! It also fixed another issue I had adding an effect to a clip and the footage would shift a frame or two. Making the clip 100% speed, apply the mask / track, then change speed/duration back to desired output. Voila!

2021 and I am still having the same issue from time to time. Adobe do something, we did not pay to solve your problem for you

Premiere Pro is garbage.

Francis Crossman asked about the footage. 4k, 29.97fps. This is drone footage of a building. This is a dolly in and tilt down. I am masking on the horizon. Scene length is 24 seconds. The horizon starts at 1/3 top of frame and goes out of frame to the top at the end of 24. The horizon is fairly level as the drone camera is gimble mounted. The contrast is 3.2:1 between the sky (#c4CDD6) and the treeline (#5B6E97) within about 5 pixels. Tracking takes about 2 seconds per frame.

Same issue. Sooo disappointed.

Just spent all day trying to track a mask on a simple object: a license plate. Something moves in front of the plate briefly, so I shaped the mask path by hand, frame-by-frame. Premier will not track the shape forwards or backwards without changing my drawn path every frame (NOT "tracking" successfully), forcing me to redraw it again for every frame.

After I am done and play it through, it has reduced the path to a shape I did not draw (a triangle), covering the license plate only 50%.

I've tried to let Premier do it, and I've tried to coddle it frame-by-frame. It won't track, and it won't remember what I've drawn. I resorted to "saving" every ten frames or so. It would revert and redraw incorrectly and out-of-place over and over, regardless of how often I saved.

Premier has crashed multiple times today -almost always when deleting a path point.

I've done all the "tricks"- increased contrast so Premier can "see" it better (It's white with a black frame on dark grey to start with, FFS), cleared cache, etc. I run an i7 CPU on Windows 10 with two 1T M.2 processors, footage, cache, and proxies on separate 7200rpm Harddrives and/or the M.2's (depends on project), with an EVGA 1080 GPU.

A simple task like this should not be taking all the fun out of my day.
Frankly, Premier is so glitchy and unstable that I'm not at all sure I want to spend any more money on it, or on the apps that come with it. Even Lightroom glitches when multiple masks and corrections are applied to one photo.

Costing as much as they do, stability and reliability should be key. I'm not feeling it here right now.

I had already set my clip Speed/Duration setting to 300% and I was trying to apply Fast Blur to a license plate in the clip. I set the clip back to 100% then tried Fast Blur and that worked. Hope this helps!

I've been thinking about moving to Davinci Resolve for a couple of months. Maybe now is the time....

Same problem APP 2020 trying to blur part of a computer screen, very little movement, almost static shot. Gets about 10% through tracking and hangs up. No resolution yet Adobe?

If I mask an area that I want to track in premiere pro and render it, it’s not in the area that I was masking. I was masking a client eyes for a glow eye effect and when I rendered it the glow eye effect was on the top of his head.

Hi
In the new version of Adobe Premiere pro 2019, when I click on the tracking button it does not show the movement of the mask
I have to pause the tracking to see its changes! What can I do?

I'm having difficulty as well and it is preventing me from completing a project. My footage is 4K, 4096 x 2160, 24 fps. The object I am trying to isolate via masking is slow moving and not complicated. When I click Forward on the Mask Tracking bar, I get a tiny amount of progress and then it stalls, and for hours, I get nothing more. Nothing happens when I try to do it frame by frame.

I'm having the same problem - with very simple, slow and easily distinguishable foreground/background footage. Very frustrating - I can't finish my project

I am running into this problem right now as well. I have a 4k mp4 clip just pulled of my Sony A7S. I've added the lumetri effect and just drew a rectangle over the area I want to track. The movement is a very slow and controlled dolly move on an object. It should have no issues tracking this. After multiple attempts, the mask will not track across the footage. In fact, once the "Tracking... progress" bar shows up, it doesn't actually make any progress at all.

I've deleted the effect and reapplied. Also tried tracking in different directions, etc. Just sits there. This has worked for sure in the past, but not in this most recent version at least. Currently running 13.1.5 on an iMac Pro.

I'm having the same problem. Clear difference between subject and background.
Everything is up to date (latest version to this date).

If I press play or use the button to go frame by frame ... the mask either stays still or it flips in the weirdest way possible

Mine doesn't work at all, when you hit the play button or frame by frame button nothing happens. I would like to inform Tim Cook I won't be buying a $8000 Mac Book PC so this fancy GPU tracking effect works properly. Adboe make software that is compatible with lower grade graphic cards.

Same problem. I applied the Leave Color effect and masked a portion to be affected. Screen shot shows the progress made before the tracking stopped — for the third time.

@Francis Crossman: Using Premiere Pro 13.1.3 (Build 44) on macOS 10.14.6. My footage is from Adobe Stock: H.264, 1920 x 1080, 25 fps. Tracking should be easy because the area being masked moves only slightly during the clip. You can find the same clip on Adobe Stock by searching for 203906961.

Same Problem, just spent an hour masking a transition and the mask appears about 15 pixels after where it's suppost to be. Like if i added mask expansion but i didn't. Could you please help me i'm getting crazy.

I'm having the same issue.

Sorry to hear you are having problems with the mask tracker. Can you please provide more information about the footage you are trying to track? It's useful to know the resolution and framerate, but most importantly - what's going on in the scene. Mask tracking technology does not do well with fast-moving objects (lots of motion blur), when the object goes off screen, or when the object is occluded (some other object passes in front). Mask tracking can also be thrown off by wildly changing lighting. Do any of these situations describe the footage you are trying to track? Remember that at its core, mask tracking is trying to lock onto a pattern of pixels (usually several patterns) and find that same exact pattern from frame to frame. If the pattern is hard to find (motion blur, lighting) or disappears altogether (occlusion, goes off screen) then the tracker will likely fail.