A

Anonymous

Question

Save cs5 projects as CS4 Compatible

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
April 18, 2010
5 replies
62208 views

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..

This topic has been closed for replies.

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Joe TV

Participant

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

I've just entered my feature request. I hope it actually happens.

Andrew Yoole

Inspiring

Just as an observation, this thread has had almost 6000 views - by far one of the most viewed topics within this Forum.

Which suggests it is most certainly a topic of major interest to users.

Hopefully that data will be taken on board by the AE team. :-)

A

Anonymous

Thanks Andrew, you nailed it.

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ncheels015

Participant

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!

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Rick Gerard

Community Expert

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.

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Aaron Cobb

Inspiring

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.

VodBox

Participating Frequently

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.

Mylenium

Legend

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

Todd_Kopriva

Inspiring

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.

A

Anonymous

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.

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Rick Gerard

Community Expert

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.

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