I updated to PP 2026 and upgraded my previous 2025 project to the new year version. Now PP is basically unusable it's awful. Constant rainbow wheel and frozen every other click.

First, total sympathy as a user. Most of the time migrating projects forward works but sometimes there are spectacular fails. Been there done that. It’s nearly always fixable and that pretty quickly once you know the drill but it’s a pain to need to do.

Second ... so you think it’s easier to migrate projects in Resolve’s database system? O contraire ... I hate that process. But ah well, I do need to also work in Resolve. “It’s just a Thing, it’s a ten minute process every year or so when you change versions, so get over it” say my Resolve loving buds.

I work nearly totally in a Production in Premiere ... I test things in stand-alone projects, but no actual working stuff in stand-alones any more.

So the last couple years, I’ve simply migrated the Production to the new version. But this year, there’s enough “base” changes to Premiere, that a dev advised me to create a new Production in 26.x, then duplicate the folder structure from my 23/24/25 Production, then duplicate the Projects of that Production, and then add those to the 26.x production.

Yea, that’s been a process and I should finish today or tomorrow. But it was interesting to be told that one would probably be better off creating a new Production, when in the past, migrating worked find. So there may well be enough ‘base’ changes that simple migration can fritz.

If so, in 26.x, in the MediaBrowser,  navigate back to the unchanged 25.x project, right-click, and import the assets of the project. That nearly always works.