How to swap a VST plug-in, retaining settings

[distriller]

I worked on a large project, making lots of audio effect automation in my .prproj. After some Premiere update or some other reason the VST plug-in stopped working. It just crashes Premiere. I tried reinstalling everything many times, doesn't help. But I noticed that VST2 version works fine instead of the VST3 version. And there is no visible difference between those versions. But if the VST2 version is loaded and the VST3 is not, Premiere thinks it's another plugin and shows jist "filter offline ()". So I lost all the automation. I can't even load the VST2 version and then copy the automation from the broken effect because the automation doesn't show up.

Is it possible to force Premiere to load another version of a plugin before the project is loaded? Because after that the project has already lost the automation. Or how to retain the saved automation even if the plug-in is not working?

[yenaphe]

Hi,

my best guess would be to reinstall the Premiere Pro version in which your project and the vst plugin was working properly. You cane asily do that with the Adobe CC App. Click the arrow next to the Open button, and select "older versions".

Other than that, I don't think there is a way to replace/update an effect while keeping it's parameter. Maybe try to alt-drag the effect from the effect list onto the effect in the effects controls panel, and see if it does the trick.

Hope this helps,

Seb

[distriller]

Yes, I have now Premiere CC 2015, 2017 and 2018 installed. The audio plugin (VST3 version) works on CC 2015 just fine. But it crashes in 2017 and 2018. The VST2 version of the same plugin does work in 2017 and 2018. I need to use 2017 or 2018 for other reasons.

The alt+drag trick didn't make a difference (crashes).

I haven't found any way to get my automation track to Premiere 2017 or 2018. In fact, it seems it's not possible to copy-paste an automation track even inside 2015 to 2015's same plugin but different parameter. So copy-paste only works inside the exact same parameter in the exact same version of the plugin.

Is there some solution? For example a way to modify the clipboard so that the target would accept the clipboard content? It is possible to copy a clip from 2015 -> 2018 so maybe it's possible to somehow copy also the automation track?

[distriller]

By the way I already figured out that a .prproj file is actually a .gz package and behind that it is a human-readeable .xml file. And I already figured out that in the .xml ObjectID seems to mark the instance number and ClassID seems to be some general effect ID, not plugin specific. I couldn't figure out what to edit in order to change what exact plugin is defined directly in the .xml file.

[distriller]

Now I was able to figure out that on the uncompressed .xml, changing FilterMatchName (content) from one plugin's name to another (find and replace all instances in the .xml), Premiere will load up the replaced one. However, for some reason the automation Keyframes do not show up in the project even the plugin itself now does. The <Keyframes> are there and can be found by searching for the name of the parameter. But for some reason it doesn't show up in the project.

An edited .xml can be just loaded without compressing as if it was .prproj after renaming.