I have to side with Adobe on this one. Certain bug fixes, feature changes/additions, and changes to underlying foundational code, simply must sacrifice backwards compatibility. You CAN work hard to maintain it, but then your code gets even more complicated, and therefore buggier. You've got all this obsolete legacy nonsense that you have to support for no reason... It can be done, but especially with all the normal bugs that adobe still has to deal with, I woudln't want to add this onto the pile of things making it more difficult for them. My solution is to always have the most recent version of Premiere on my laptop. Then I can at least open the project and see what's inside, and I can export a cineform clip of the whole timeline if need be. Our main desktops have the most recent STABLE version of premiere. (Currently 2017.1.2 is the most recently stable, but we are unfortunately on 12.0.1.) One thing you can try is to export to XML. Then import that XML into your older version of Premiere. Mooooost things should remain the same in the project. Some stuff could be missing completely, though. I think I've had trouble with clip speed not being retained, for example. If worst comes to worst, you can always export a whole sequence with certain layers made to be invisible, and then do another export where other layers are visible/invisible... And then recombine them into a new .prproj. More on-the-mark than your suggestion, would be this one: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/33843463-slower-release-schedule-with-more-stable-software Not great, but we're working with what we have, not with what we wish we have.
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