Please stop making it so difficult to work with different Premiere-versions!

Backwards compatibility is always a good thing. Far too rare, unfortunately.

@1049674 Rubin
Below is a link to direct downloads for Adobe CC 2015. In the sidebar you can find direct download links from 2018 all the way back to CS6. I had the same issue years ago and Adobe's own Dave Helmly linked to the website--I bookmarked it and have had to go back to it several times for previous versions. Hope this helps.

https://prodesigntools.com/adobe-cc-2015-direct-download-links.html

I appreciate that we can download previous version of Premiere Pro in attempts to resolve these issues. What I don't appreciate is what a tease that function is because many of us need older versions that aren't listed as available for download. Case in point, I need the 2015 version and I spent hours of my day on the phone and typing online with Adobe technical support only to be ultimately sent to this board and nothing else. It seems for years many of us can't open our older files because Adobe has decided to only make certain previous versions available for download. I take some responsibility for stupidly ignoring the advice of friends who told me not to update my Adobe Premiere Pro. Also this notion presented above by the admin of keeping an older version on 1 of 2 editing computer is laughable. My laptop is my second editing computer - IN AN EMERGENCY. Even then I doubt I could edit much on it. I wonder how much money people have lost from Adobe's seemingly short-sighted thinking when it comes to their updates. People use this editing software for their jobs - their livelihoods. Surprised there hasn't been a class action lawsuit yet.

In an ideal world we could just update to the latest release and let the project update. But we've experienced so many old bugs being reintroduced and new bugs to features already working in previous version that we systematically have to hold on new releases. A postproduction facility like ours cannot spare to find out the problems as we go and debug all day. This is a plague almost every Premiere release as been affected for years and if it's not taken care of by the team very soon, we'll have to look at other solutions for the perennity of our business.

Adobe is full of it! here is absolutely NO programmatic reason that Adobe projects must be locked to specific versions except for Adobe wanting to keep people locked into cloud subscriptions. An Adobe Project file is little more than an XML file. There is no functional reason that the XML data could not be parseable by any version of the AdobeCC apps while ignoring the upgraded or deprecated features. Media Composer has done this for years with graceful feature elimination between different versions. No one said it would be easy, but it would be considerably easier to program than the marginally useful bells and whistles that Adobe keeps foisting upon users to rationalize the continued subscription model.

@PatRick Palmer

Is it actually the case that this is a critical and large change though? It's trivially easy to make a project backwards compatible by a very slight edit to the .prproj file (Premiere basically checks the version number of the .prproj, which can be changed using a text editor), and the only problem with this method is that newer effects and tools obviously aren't recognised.

Wouldn't it be a reasonably straightforward coding job to instead make Premiere throw up a warning if the version check is failed, stating that it was created in a newer version of Premiere and hence some effects etc might be missing, and that it may be unstable? Rather than refusing to open it at all?

Hi Taran,

that you have to make a big brake,
can be ok.

But then you have to do it clearly
and do not play around in a running version.

In addition, it should then,
apart from effects, etc. be possible the pure cut
from an existing version to a new version
and to be able to transport back.

Autodesk has at the change, a render engine, once over several versions
the possibility had to be new or old.

But what happened in the current CC2018 version,
is the culmination of bad software management.

In the ADOBE forum is to be read, which Apple announced in 2013,
Quicktime 7 will disappear.
And then suddenly you have to work on it in panic?

Why then you do not have the versions CC2017 and CC2018
of the software options just kept the same
with 2x different render machines?
And that also communicated to the tenants.
It's just silly that you always have to deliver new feature,
so that the tenants continue to rent.
Stability, structure and performance can also be part of long term rental clients.
But that's not what ADOBE managers think.

It's especially frustrating when you get pulled up into a new version for whatever reason (external projects started in the new version, etc), and it happens to be a version you have been trying to avoid.

We had to move up to 12.1, despite the myriad issues that it has because we kept getting projects in that were started in it. Now, we're all struggling with the 12.1 (and 12.1.1) problems, and there was pretty much no way of avoiding it.

This is indicative of why, after over TWENTY YEARS we're abandoning Premiere and Adobe. iterations come too fast and one can't simply "not upgrade" so new bugs and problems are introduced constantly and WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR IT. So HELLO Avid and Resolve and goodbye Premiere...you were kinda good for a little while at least.

I've had to 'downgrade' projects in the past - and have done so by opening the project in a text editor and adjusting the 'version number'. Caveat emptor - I'm sure there's something it will break - but it hasn't been a problem for me.