Save cs5 projects as CS4 Compatible

Report · Apr 18, 2010

I have plans to acquire AE CS5, but need to know about the projects I made in AE CS5 on my home PC, can be saved so they can be opened in AE CS4 on my work ?

And the same questions about Premiere CS4 and CS5..

Report · Apr 18, 2010

No, projects created in After Effects CS5 can't be opened in After Effects CS4. The same is true for Premiere Pro.

If this is an important feature for you, then enter a feature request. The number of requests that we get for a feature does influence the likelihood of that feature being included.

Report · Nov 04, 2010

I realize you want to drive sales of CS5, but this is bordering on silly. Many of us paid a fair amount of money for CS4, and now we can't open files sent to us by colleagues who have cs5. This is not a feature request honestly... it's common sense and the only possible reason to not make project files backwards compatible is becasue you want to force people to upgrade. I feel like I have a gun to my head. For example, I have a tight deadline for a project due tomorrow, and my colleague in Italy sent me a project file in CS5, and I can't open it. So now I either have to shell out the $$ for cs5 or miss my deadline. It doesn't make your company look good. I've been an adobe user for almost 20 years and I am not impressed with this at all. it's silly and ill conceived.

Report · Nov 04, 2010

Toonces the Cat wrote:
... the only possible reason to not make project files backwards compatible is becasue you want to force people to upgrade.

Not exactly correct. New features, new and improved ways of handling the mixing of pixel values mean that new code is required. For example, in CS5 we got the much requested feature of separate dimensions for X, Y, and Z. There's no way to bring a layer using this option into a CS4 project. When you add in changes in plug-ins, even as simple as 64bit processing, improvements in scripting and expression language, changes in the way lights and shadows are calculated it makes perfect sense that a CS5 project may not work in CS4.

Report · Nov 04, 2010

Not sure how long you have been using AE. But for the entire 15 year history of Adobe owning After Effects, it has never ever been backwards compatible with previous versions. Even minor updates are incompatible -- 4.0 could not open 4.1 files. And no version can or could ever save to an earlier version.

It's just the way After Effects has always been. You've gotta learn to live with it.

Report · Nov 04, 2010

This is a feature that we're interested in doing, but doing it right is hard, for reasons similar to those mentioned by Rick. Time spent on developing this feature would detract from time spent on other features.

If you want this feature, please submit a feature request that tells us how you want it to work. E.g., what are you OK with us not converting, how far back do you need it to go, and what do you want done with things that can't be converted (ignored or rasterized)?

Report · Feb 01, 2011

nn

Report · Aug 13, 2011

I'll tell you what makes this an unfortunate thing: I bought the CS5 master collection with the 64-bit version of AE, and was surprised and pleased that Adobe sent along the CS4 version for my 32-bit laptop. This gives the IMPRESSION that it's helpful to the consumer, but then I discover this incompatibility issue.

This isn't a grumpy complaint for the developers. It's aimed squarely at the marketing department. Why would you provide a 'bonus' product that isn't really very useful when used in conjunction with the main product?

As for the developers: I'd be totally pleased if there was a way to open CS5 in CS4 with a big "We're sorry but a number of features have been disabled" type of message upon opening. I'd rather begrudgingly re-do work than not have the option to do the work at all. Feature request entered.

Report · Aug 13, 2011

Beginning with After Effects CS5.5, you can save a copy of a project back to an earlier version.

Report · Aug 22, 2011

Of course Adobe makes us pay for something in a questional 'update' that should have been a software update to CS5.

Report · Aug 24, 2011

does really not solve anything -

I googled Adobe cs5 - and got thousands of thousands of Adobe hate now results - read some, decided NOT to upgrade or buy any new version.

It get's worse with every upgrade.

I used to love Adobe - well, the company did a good job in reversing my love to hat: for all those hours recovering from crashes, loosing, having to find solutions on my own, for software that Adobe shoved on the market unbaked, expecting the consumer to take care of themselves - yet Adobe laughs all the way to the bank and snickers along the way, how gullable consumers are: give them a piece of crap new software, give it a fancy new "upgrade" intro - and bingo: the BUY NOW buttons on Adobe's mother site are all that one sees dominantly.

"Macromedia" was thousand times better with their software, their upgrades and foremost their customer support. But then again, they employed developers and programmers that had something in their heads - where else Adobe seems to hire - at least for flash - nothing but pompous developers, that will never be pro developers.

Thank God - I checked around - and saved myself a ton of money by not buying 5.5.

Report · Jan 05, 2012

Just to let you guys know, OpenSesame has been released!

http://aescripts.com/pt_opensesame/

OpenSesame brings backwards compatibility to After Effects, exporting projects that can be opened in any version from CS3 or later. Projects are exported as human readable text files that can also be edited in a text editor or spreadsheet in various ways, such as changing text layers, colors, footage and file paths.

Report · Feb 02, 2012

Paul, that is a huge accomplishment. On behalf of the After Effects community, I thank you.

Personally, I don't care much about the ability to open a project in an older version---though I know that other people want and need that.

What I am very impressed by is the way that one can use this script to save a text representation of a project that can then be modified by anything that can modify a text file. This is huge for automation and other workflows, as I'm sure that you know.

Report · Feb 06, 2012

Paul, this is a fantastic tool. So many people have been asking for this. Were I wearing a hat, I would take it off to you.

I'd suggest making a seperate forum post to annouce it. This is big news!

Report · Aug 22, 2011

standard-design.com> They included AE and PPRO CS4 for the folks buying creative suit 5 that don't yet have a 64-bit machine. For those of us on the 64bit train already you could think of it as a bonus. But for those still in 32-bit land it's really just a fall-back.

Report · Jan 23, 2011

Well I know this is possible with Flash projects, so shouldn't it be possible with After Effects. Maybe you could use Flashes backwards compatibility code as a starting point and modify i to work with After Effects. This should at least give some extra help to the development team.

Report · Jan 24, 2011

Unfortunately it's not that easy, but you can rest assured that the developers know about this much-requested feature and may have a plan... whether or not this will happen for CS6, CS7 or whatever is however written in teh stars. And you should not expect them to ever touch CS4 or before - at best, you may hope to save a CS6 project back to CS5...

Mylenium

Report · Feb 01, 2011

This "Feature" will never happen. Adobe wants to force you to buy a new version of the software. Your excuses about new features in cs5 that are not possible in cs4 is a load of something that stinks. What is your excuse for 4.1 not going back to 4.0? its not that difficult, stop being a bunch of greedy sobs!

Report · Feb 01, 2011

It's no load of something that stinks. . .

New render engines, different ways of dealing with keyframes, different plug-ins and plug-in architecture, new features. You can't change the basic way things operate and have them still work on an old system.

In the Adobe line Illustrator is a good example. Save a project with multiple artboards CS5 and open that file in CS3 and you are missing a bunch of the illustration. You can save to a legacy format, but many features from CS5 won't be available.

I'm a big Blender fan. Save a file in Blender 2.5 and it won't open in earlier versions because the basic way the data is handled has changed. Personally, for me, the feature upgrades have always been well worth the upgrade price. If you're just using AE as a hobby tool, then cost is an issue, but if you're making your living with the software a few hours saved with the new features will easily pay for the upgrade.

Report · Feb 01, 2011

I know it has become conventional wisdom that downsaving in AE would be unreasonably difficult to implement, but I'm not convinced. Yes, new features have been added with each version, but has the basic functionality of AE really changed that much since, say CS3? I currently have three versions of After Effects installed on my workstation (CS3, CS4, CS5) and I use all three pretty much daily, because I can't move projects to the newer versions until I know for sure that my clients are at version parity, and, quite frankly, different things are broken in each new version. Just yesterday I was handed a project created in CS3. Do I go ahead and move it to CS5? The client isn't using CS5 yet, so anything I do can't be handed back to them. Also, multiprocessing simply doesn't work in my copy of CS5, so some projects render a LOT slower. If AE featured backward compatibility, I could work in CS5, then downsave to CS3 if the client needs to work with it (it was designed in CS3, so doesn't use any of the newer features), or if CS5's bugs become unbearable. Instead, I'm stuck constantly juggling these three applications (and constantly having to deal with AE's ever-shifting keyboard shortcuts) because moving the projects is a one-way street. If Photoshop lacked this ability, it would be an absolute nightmare for anyone who works with clients or partners, and it seems to me Photoshop adds a lot more new features with each version than does AE.

Report · Feb 01, 2011

We actually tried this in a recent version, and we got part of the way toward implementing this feature, and that's when we realized just how much work there was to do it right. So we asked a lot of people how important it was to them compared to other things that we were trying to accomplish that version---asking them to let us know which other moderate-sized feature in development they'd give up. They chose to give up this one, saving back to the previous version.

Regarding the comparison to Photoshop: Photoshop saves individual documents. After Effects saves entire projects. There's a lot of difference there. Also, the Photoshop team may have gotten different feedback from their customers about the relative importance.

So, again, I urge everyone to submit feature requests. The number of requests for a given feature matters. This is not an impossible feature, but it's not a trivial one, either. If we get a sense that it's more important than other things, then we may do it.

Report · Feb 02, 2011

I'd be curious to know what features were weighed against this one, because I see questions about backward compatibility around here quite frequently. I also hope the number of feature requests isn't so often a deciding factor in what gets implemented. The best idea isn't necessarily the most obvious one.

Edit: And I realize that is not exactly what you are saying with respect to feature requests, Todd. I do understand that strong demand increases the chances of a new feature seeing the light of day. I just hope there is a chance for novel ideas to gain some traction, too.

Report · Feb 02, 2011

Full blown 64bit support
Rotobrush
Proper Handling of ProRes Color Spaces.

These are just a few things I'm willing to bet people wanted to see before backward compatibility. Especially since Adobe threw in the CS4 versions of After Effects and Premiere Pro into the CS5 Suite at no additional charge. So Even if you were jumping into CS5 for the first time you still have the prior versions in the event that either your system isn't 64-bit ready or you have plugins, customers, etc. that aren't ready for CS5 yet.

No it's not as good as AE CS5 saving AE CS4 projects. But I don't see where they've stopped anyone who's purchased CS5 from working with folks still on CS4. If your clients use AE CS4... Use AE CS4. It came with your CS5 purchase.

Report · Feb 02, 2011

I'd be pretty surprised if it came down to downsaving vs. 64-bit support. Down saving might not be trivial, but it won't require a complete rewrite of AE. And the problem isn't not having the older versions to work with. The problem is that even though you still have the older version, once any work on a project is done in the latest version, there is no going back, whether you used new features or not. I effectively skipped CS4 because of incompatibilities between it and my employer's SAN, despite having it installed on my workstation the whole time and despite liking a lot of it's new features. I simply couldn't afford to do any work in it that might bump up against those incompatibilities, so most projects stayed in CS3, at least until clients started handing me projects that were created in CS4. And as of now, our engineers have to support three installs of AE on many of our machines, including all the attendant plugins. It's not as simple as "just use the older version".

Report · Feb 02, 2011

So, again, I urge everyone to submit feature requests. The number of requests for a given feature matters. This is not an impossible feature, but it's not a trivial one, either. If we get a sense that it's more important than other things, then we may do it.

So, I'm a Adobe Prodcts User (especially After Effects for 10 Years now) and I cannot count it anymore how often I have heard that advise.

I stuffed a lot of money into Adobe Products and I contributed with feature requests since year 2000 ... but I'm not geting into this discussion anymore.

Finally for me, all this "feature request" topic it's pure baloney, because i cannot trust you guys anymore.

If we get a sense that it's more important than other things, then we may do it.

I've been reading the same sentence from several different people at Adobe who are responsible for their Application.

Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom ... you name it.

The truth is that there are several people out there in the world who have no relation to Adobe Engineering and might get the job done.

One of them is Paul Tuersley who is contributing at aescripts.com.

Lloyd Alvarez provided some news on upcoming Scripts and Plugins, one of the scripts are "OpenSesame" which allows you finally downgrading projects. Of course some limitations will apply, but downgrading a simple project that has the same basic attributes as any other project version has, will work. Evidence is proof. Check aescripts.com or aeplugins.com on a regular basis for news and other VERY helpful scripts and plugs that might save your sanity.

So, now i'm curious what someone at Adobe has to say to this.