Can't Open CC project file in CS6

No.

Very few Premiere Pro projects can be opened in earlier versions of the software.

They have built that ability into some of the Adobe apps, but not Premiere Pro.

I suggest you dance with the one who brought you.

You can try exporting your sequence to FCP XML and opening that up in CS6.

At most you lose one week of work, but get out now of CC, because the longer you remain, the bigger your losses.

There is (intentionally) no backward compatibility so either you continue paying rent, as Adobe wants, or you get smart now and revert to CS6 with limited damage.

Hi cc_merchant,

Please be helpful in providing solutions to problems, according to our guidelines. Rants are not permitted in our forums. If you want to go off topic, then head to the Video Lounge.

Please review our community guidelines: http://www.adobe.com/communities/guidelines/

Thanks,

Kevin

I think the important part of his "rant" is an answer to the question - can CC files be opened in CS6? Did his rant answer the question, or didn't it? Because at this point I'm not sure. It would have been more productive for you to actually answer the question asked than to chide cc_merchant on forum rules.

The question has been put to me - if we get ONE CC subscription, can we share the files among the rest of the team (who are all on CS6) or would be we obliged to upgrade everything to CC to maintain file compatibility across all users. It's an important question.

This would be for all apps in the Creative Suite - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere. etc.

Scroll down to

Perhaps I am missing something. Has it ever been possible to easily share files among people using different versions of Premiere Pro? Ever?

Is this only coming up because in the past you might have been too cheap to upgrade, that made it your own fault. However, now that people are quite understandably against the subscription requirement, does it now make sense to them that Adobe should make it possible for them to not upgrade and still get some of the benefits?

CC users can easily have CS6 on their computer. I do. So can you. So can melpgkl (the OP). If you want to share files, download CS6 from the Creative Cloud and edit in CS6. Don't expect to share files between versions now when it wasn't possible before. Yes, I know, if you didn't use any of the new features it was sometimes possible to open some files in earlier versions, but quite often the file format changed and made it impossible.

I am not saying it would be a bad idea to add the functionality if they didn't use a programmer that was supposed to be working on something I personally consider more important.

Patient:  Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I go like this!

Doctor:  Don't go like that!

XML export? AAF? That'll only get you the sequences, but you could lay everything down to rushes sequences too and rebuild that way. Should only take 10 minutes. But yeah, totally agree with everything Steve Gotz said above. When has it ever been possible?

I used to open up CS6 projects in CS5.5 by opening the .prproj file in a text editor and changing ther version number at the top of the file from, I think "25" to "24" and then it would open just fine.

Is this no longer possible going from CC to CS6?

I tried changing 26 to 25 and it was insufficient. It went from telling me that the file was saved in a later version to telling me that the file was damaged or contained outdated elements.

I have posted two files. One is from a CC project where I changed the extension to .gz and the unzipped it to see the XML. The other is pretty much the same file from CS6. Not identical but close enough.

You can download them from here:

Right Click and save here for the CS6 file

Right Click and save here for the CC file

Kevin,  It is frustrating that rather than provide an informative response to the OP (which mirrors the question that brought me here), you scolded him for what is - as far as I'm concerned - a pretty rational response to a very irrational file incompatibility protocol. Further, his suggestion was simply that the original poster use a different version of Adobe software to save him from a frustration that Adobe itself has created for many end users.

I own a video production company and also teach cinematography at a technical school. The technical school provides CS 6 on my laptop, but I have moved forward with the Creative Cloud on my home computer with my educational discount as a means to trying out the software before I make a recommendation to the entire school district as to whether it is an appropriate and worthwhile upgrade (the entire educational service district uses FCP still). I have a project that has been created on my home computer which I would like to use in teaching my students, but alas I cannot demonstrate the file - which I spent many hours creating - with my school issued laptop. My version of Photoshop works fine, my other pieces of software work without a hitch, but my most important piece of productivity software is incompatible with the immediate predecessor that is still the defacto industry standard for small production houses. This makes me feel very uncomfortable moving forward with the Creative Cloud, as it seems to defy rational development process. In fact, Premiere is the only software that I have ever used that is completely incompatible with previous versions (save for my Logic 7 files years ago after the jump to Intel hardware from PowerPC on a Mac - understandable given the change  in the actual architecture of the hardware that drives the software).

In an age when social media and word of mouth makes or breaks companies, it would be wise for Adobe to be a little more thoughtful of their professional users and give them the attention and respect they deserve when bringing a very worthwhile topic to a forum such as this.

_endrant

Brian

Kevin was not responding to the O.P .

He was politely maintaining forum guidelines in regard to a troll post from a repeat offender.

I understand, my frustration was not in the maintenence of forum standards as much as in the fact that he took time to respond to a troll (whose comment I didn't personally find to be out of line), but did not offer a glimpse into A) The reasoning behind a seamingly illogical developmental protocol to not offer backwards compatibility for professional users and/or B) a potential solution to a legitimate and frustrating problem for a supposedly professional and expensive media software tool

Premiere has never been backwards compatible.

As in some cases people have been able to make it backwards compatible, is another matter.

Please file a feature request, you are not alone in this:

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

As I said before, I am not against adding the feature. That said, it could be a bit of a technical problem.

Just to get an idea of what people want, how would you suggest dealing with the incompatibilities? The way Adobe seems to work, is that if a whole bunch of people submit feature requests, and there seems to be a clear cut path for Engineering to follow, things seem to get done. Not always, but often. And as has been pointed out, there are precedents for this activity based on the fact that After Effects and other applications have a "Save A Copy As CS6" function.

What do they do with effects that are not in CS6? Take the Lumetri Looks for example.

It seems to be that they could just warn you that they are not available and leave them out, and with something obvious like a "Look" that might be fine. Same with closed captioning. It just disappears.

But what about some of the other features?

What happens if the codec was not supported in CS6? I would think that one could cause some serious frustration. Do they just take the media offline?

I am not at all certain how they might handle "Through Edits". That could get sticky. Would they no longer be joined or could they figure out how to keep them together?

"Multiple stereo assignments for tracks to multichannel masters" could be cause for a discussion on how the material will show up in CS6. What happens to the new Audio Plugin support? Do you just lose those features? Perhaps just eliminate certain audio tracks if they have used a plugin?

As far as I can tell, and admittedly I may have missed something, most of the rest of the features are part of the GUI. They changed how you interact with the media, not how it ends up. So timeline interface changes are probably not relevant to the discussion (as I originally thought they might be). Neither are the changes to the audio mixer or the addition of the control surface support.

I personally would not want to give up features that I have been using for a while now, but if it is imperative that people share with others who have not upgraded, and for some reason they do not use their own copy of CS6 available from the Creative Cloud (the best of the current options), then those who want the capability need to band together and tell Adobe not only that they want the feature, but how it should work.

I believe that to be the only chance of it ever happening.

Hi BigFishMedia_WA,

Welcome to the Premiere Pro forum. Sorry, this is a user to user forum that sometimes needs moderation. That's my job, and Indeed, that is what I was doing. If you are not familiar with our guidelines about rants, not being helpful, etc., please check out this article: http://www.adobe.com/communities/guidelines/

The other users answered the question in that there is no backward compatibility for Premiere Pro. A staff member in post 2 provided the best possible solution as it stands. I hope you saw that and try it out. I apologize that you cannot save a CC project as CS6, but you can certainly make a feature request for backward compatibility here: http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

Unfortunately, I can't really speak to why the team has not yet included a feature like this. It is certainly not a trivial task as I know of no other NLE in the current market that saves project files in a previous version. Again, I ask you to make your request known to the team so that it be considered.

Thanks,

Kevin

MarketingDen wrote:

 

I think the important part of his "rant" is an answer to the question - can CC files be opened in CS6? Did his rant answer the question, or didn't it?

Hi MarketingDen,

No. The best answer was from our staff in post #2. Please check that out. As other users have stated, there is no official backward compatibility with CS6. If you want backward compatibility with Premiere Pro CS6 in Premiere Pro CC, you can make a feature request. Here is the link: http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

Thanks,
Kevin

Thank you Kevin, though I'm not new to Premiere, I am indeed new to the forum and wasn't aware it was user to user. I appreciate your prompt and thoughtful responses and I will certainly use the Wish feature to request it.

Best,
Brian

I tried changing 26 to 25 and it was insufficient. It went from telling me that the file was saved in a later version to telling me that the file was damaged or contained outdated elements.

Just for the record: I was able to successfully open up both projects in CS5.5

Just for the record: I was able to successfully open up both projects in CS5.5

Just to expand on the record...

I have opened the "from-CC.prproj" in both CS5 and CS6:

CS5.0.3:

CS6.0.5:

Aside from the missing "Video-Frame-White-Test.jpg", all is well.

Opening is not enough you need all the assets, effects, titles etc. intackt.

¯\(°_o)/¯

I realize there might be incompatible effects/assets in a complete Project,

but I don't know what was in his original CC7* Project (link in post 10).

Maybe Steven can confirm?

At very least it looks as if a simple, cut and dissolve only Project

created in CC7* can possibly be opened in earlier versions.

Maybe Steven can work his 'rename to .gz / unzip / XML' magic

with a basic cut / dissolve / Motion Effect CC7* Project and zip it up

with the associated media and post it for download and testing?

* Premiere Pro CC (7.0.1)

If you quit CC and have to go back to an old project, you can always just pay for a month of PPCC. $20 is not to bad. You should be able to open an older version in a newer app.

There isn't much to the file.

The JPG is just a JPG. Nothing interesting. It was just something I had sitting in a folder from another project. Replace it with any 1920X1080 image. Then I put in a white matte. Nothing to it.

So how did you open it?

I wonder if the issue might be that I have CC and you don't? So yours opens without complaint amd my installation of CC stops it from opening in CS6? Odd, but possible, I suppose.

So how did you open it?

I downloaded your file: "from-CC.prproj" (link in post 10).

I duplicated the Project and renamed it: "from-CC_Version23_CS5".

I opened the file in Dreamweaver, and changed '26' to '23', then saved:

I opened the altered file "from-CC_Version23_CS5" in CS5.0.3.

On opening in CS5.0.3, I got this error message:

I clicked "OK".

The Project opens asking for location of "Video-Frame-White-Test.jpg".

I clicked "Offline".

The Project opened, and Sequence Properties are 1920x1080@29.97:

I replaced your .jpg with a stock clip:

I saved the file in CS5.0.3, then exited.

Then I opened and renamed the saved file in CS6.0.5:

.

note:

I was unable to alter the 'Version Number" to from '26' to '25'

and open the Project directly into CS6.0.5:

Interesting to say the least. I never had versions 4 through 5.5 so I can't recreate your efforts, but I am willing to bet that there are people who will be very interested in your results.

Nice work.

What happens if you replace "26" with "23" (or "24") and then try to open that project file right in CS6?

What happens if you replace "26" with "23" (or "24") and then try to open that project file right in CS6?

No workie... I had to go through CS5.0.3 first.

Editing to: Version="23" will not open directly in CS6.0.5.

Editing to: Version="24" will not open directly in CS6.0.5.

This error message with both tests:

What happens if you replace "26" with "23" (or "24") and then try to open that project file right in CS6?

I had already tried it with 23, but I just tried 24 hoping it might work. No luck.

If I open it in Pr CC it tells me that it was saved in an older version and offers to save it to a new name. No problem there.

I then tried 22 just to see. No luck opening it in CS6 either.

My guess is that Pr 5.5 is more lenient than CS6 in some way?

But that means that someone who has CS5.5 can help people with CS6 if need be. It is still a good thing to know.

I used CS5.0.3.

I don't have CS5.5.

I used CS5.0.3.

I don't have CS5.5.

Then that might be the secret ingredient. Either way, perhaps you could hang a shingle "Premiere Pro conversions done cheap". There could be a little side business there. Seriously, I doubt there is much money in it, but you could be a hero to quite a few folks I imagine.

Take a look at this:

CC7* Project for download:

Editing video in Premiere Pro for the first time? This project is for you.

http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/learn/start/premiere.html

CC7* File: "Eagles_Doc_Final.prproj" opened in CS6.0.5:

.

* Premiere Pro CC (7.0.1)

Keep crashing on CS5.5

CS5.0.3 was a bit wonky when I first opened the Project there.

I skipped relinking media, and didn't do anything but re-save then exit.

CS5.0.3:

.

After save / exit in CS5.0.3,

I opened it n CS6.0.5 and re-linked the media there.

note:

The CC7* Project is saved with all bins in "Icon View".

That may be why the Project Panel is blacked out in CS5.0.3.

Here is what it looks like on initial opening in CS6.0.5:

.

* Premiere Pro CC (7.0.1)

OK. I was crashing immediately after clicking either 'Skip All' or 'Make All Offline'. Nevertheless, with good old trick of importing a project into a project I won

Here is the Sequence "04 Completed' from the CC7* Project:

"Eagles_Doc_Final.prproj" (link in post 34) exported out of CS6.0.5:

.

* Premiere Pro CC (7.0.1)

Kevin Monahan wrote:

 

Unfortunately, I can't really speak to why the team has not yet included a feature like this. It is certainly not a trivial task as I know of no other NLE in the current market that saves project files in a previous version. Again, I ask you to make your request known to the team so that it be considered.

 

Thanks,

Kevin

What the heck are you talking about?  You can open any AVID Media Composer project in any AVID Version from 2+   I've openned Media Composer Projects from Version 7 on legacy 5.0 machines.  And their USB dongle is backwards compatabile too.

Sounds like you guys don't know what your talking about. 

I've already lost faith in Adobe.  I just wish I could get some legit answers and changes from the forum for once.

Well, i just came here for this exact question. I've been trying PP CC and gave it a good try - did a 6 hour project in it.

And i've got trouble with AME, so i thought i'd just go back to CS6 to finish it off.

And WTF?!?!?! I cant use cs6?

We've only got CS6 - so "you've never been able to..." (said in a whiny voice) is news to us, and damn annoying. What software doesnt warn you of this limitation up front??? None thats what!

So, CC is more buggy than cs6, and a one way ticket.

no thanks!

Oh, a big thank you to all the people trying to find workarounds to getting cc project back into cs6. I'll add my tupence when i've succeeded