Premiere Pro version 2017

Computers are so useful except when it's such a pain.

Yea, there's things about this whole computer-based life that suck. The old programs I've got disks of in drawers ... dBase for example ... fill a drawer. None work on any workable computer, though someone somewhere probably has a dinosaur they would work on. None of the data from them was portable to something else normally within a couple years of their (at times) sudden demise.

Sometimes we were able to port our business data from one system to another. We've had a couple moves where that wasn't ... very maddeningly ... an option. There wasn't any way "forward" that didn't involve either simply printing paper reports to keep or hand-entering years of data.

I would personally prefer that the old CC apps at least were still available. I intellectually understand why they aren't. I don't emotionally approve or like their absence.

Now ... another personal pref ... hey, I remember 2017, I've got it here on  the machine I'm sitting at. I had it open for a bit a couple weeks ago. Yea, there's quite a number of reasons I don't pull that out and use it for even any of the projects I started in that version.

But everyone's mileage always varies.

Neil

Do you work with Quikbooks? If so, what earlier versions do they allow you to download and install?

How many versions of Resolve can you have installed at any one time? Oh ... that would be, one. You have to uninstall the currently installed version to install and work with another, and with their database setup, that can be a lot more painful than it seems at first. Unless you know how to work their database system to move between versions, you can sort of mangle a current version process.

It's pretty common across apps that only certain versions of the app are available, Adobe is certainly not the only company setting this limitation.

Part of this is licensing ... any complex/deep app like this has a lot of code that is licensed from another entity. Those entities can and will change the terms of that license from time to time. Or simply require that their old code be discontinued. Adobe has no choice but to comply. And yes, that happened very directly. Legally, Adobe had to remove older versions of Premiere from public availability.

Part of this is supporting ancient code ... making a version available that is problematic with newer gear will have user-filed support issues that Adobe could only fix by updating the code in the old version. Which is expensive and sidelines part of their engineering team to work on old stuff used by only a few users.

Yea, I personally still have everything from 2014 through the current public beta on my old machine. I've got a new one I'll migrate to this week, and probably only have 2019 and 2020 on that one.

But I've been able to bring all my old projects that I needed to work with into newer versions without too much problem. And then had access to the newer tools, such as in Lumetri, that are vastly improved over the earlier versions.

The one HUGE issue for me where an earlier version was vastly superior ... was when back in 2014 and through 2015.3, you could direct-link to SpeedGrade for color correction/grading. That allowed a far more vigorous color process than Lumetri is capable of. Ah well.

Neil

No, there isn't. You can work with old version files in new versions, though there were differences in the way color changes were handled between 2017 and 2018 as I recall, and those can be a bit of a pain to remedy. But possible.

Still do NOT simply "open" the old project in the new version. Create a NEW project in the new version, then use the MediaBrowser panel to navigate to and select the old project file in the panel. Then right-click that file, "Import" the contents to the new project file.

This is a much more stable process.

Neil

The direct download links at Pro Design go to Adobe's file server... and they only work until Adobe gets around to removing the old files

So, for anyone else reading this... if you have a download of an old version on your hard drive... copy it to at least one external device so you will have it in case of a hard drive crash

Only some apps are available here:

https://prodesigntools.com/adobe-cc-2017-direct-download-links.html