Indeed I would say you are lucky although clearly there are problem during the "upgrade" which are not obvious. If I think back to project upgrades in Visual Studio they at least told you about incompatibilities. I'm guessing you had no information that text areas would not work the same after the upgrade. It is entirely possible the use of certain "elements" causes the problem of upgrading and saving a project. With no information about what those elements may be then you take your hard earned time into your own hands. I notice there are other threads about this issue. So there are more than a few having such problems. If anyone reads this, having the same issue and your product is in support then please raise it to Adobe. As I said unless things like this get raised Adobe are unlikely to do anything about it now and in the future. ... View more

I'm sorry you too have lost your work. I've moved over to Corel VideoStudio (well I'm trialing it). It's a new learning curve but once I considered this problem has been around for a long time with no resolution from Adobe, seemingly no desire to correct this shortcoming then I felt I had little choice. Without a guarantee that the next version would be able to open the current versions project files then carrying on would be pointless. I'm not prepared to keep 2, 3 or 10 versions of this product polluting my laptop just because they cannot be bothered to make projects backwards compatible, or at least provide an upgrade path. I guess when customers excuse this as "just something the company does not support" then there is no hope of changing this situation. ... View more

I wasn't going to reply to this forum since the answer here seems to be final however it seems there is no way to contact Adobe for this product, I get redirected here each time. Adobe is now becoming my least customer focused company. To answer the question about going back to v7 and running alongside v13, erm no. Talk about polluting hard disks. Also to import the output doesn't help with removing or changing transitions and other now "burned" in elements. So for what it's worth it's rant time here. We as paying customers should not excuse a company as big as this for providing no project migration options from one product version to the next or even further back. I have v13. I have no idea if my projects will work in v14, v15 or vxx. On this basis why should I part with more money. Adobe in this instance is willing to take money and provide no upgrade option. Ridiculous. OK so some of my projects are from v7, a big jump. But again if I compare to Visual Studio Express/Community editions, which are free, I have had no problem in migrating old projects. My own company allows migration while jumping several versions. Adobe should know the spec's of their products to be able to solve this particular issue. I don't know if this problem in endemic in this type of product but it's time to look at the competition. If I really think about it, yes Premiere Elements is feature rich but as an amateur creator I don't use maybe 80% of those features. Since I have no confidence projects will be supported from one version to the next it is pointless even carrying on with this. The fact that they make it so difficult to contact them, as I said, just demonstrates what they think of us. Rant over with. Off to look at the competition now ... View more

Again thank you. I guess it's big company syndrome, we take your money then you're on your own. Funny though Microsoft would never do this with Visual Studio projects and they support loads of different types. Either there's backwards compatibility or they report what couldn't be migrated. Even my company goes through the pain of migrating from one version to another. I'll have to balance the product features against future upgrades if projects from one version to another are not going to be supported. Really poor show. But thanks for the prompt response, Steve ... View more

Steve,     Thanks for the reply and a real shame. What's interesting though is that the project was opened first time OK in PE13. It's the save that then corrupts the project, and this is saving in PE13 of course. I am guessing therefore that saving in PE13 saves something that corrupts the project, a leftover from earlier versions. Do we know what those corrupting elements are or do we just accept this situation as is? If I know what the corrupting elements are I can remove them from the project when it first opens so that they are not then saved. Regards, Craig ... View more