Transferring Production to new version of Premiere Unsuccessfully

[amillerCN]

My team has been working out of a Production workflow with a large number of organized and individual projects in it.  We have been working inside of v15.xx and we decided to update to v22.0 when that released to be able to use some of the new features.  When trying to open any project in the production in the new version of premiere we get this message:

"The projects in this production were saved from a previous version of Premiere and must be converted. A Copy of the production will be created for the conversions. The original production will not be modified."

When we choose to convert a window with "preparing for upgrade" appears with a bar and we have yet to have anything successfully happen (Premiere hangs and crashes quickly here) and a very small fraction of the projects are converted and there is no new production for the new version of Premiere to open..

Has there been issues with converting productions to the new version or is there a workaround possibly?

Thank you

[R Neil Haugen]

I migrated by creating a new Production in it's new folder. Then I copied my entrire projects folder structure from the previous year's Production over into the new Productions folder.

Then I've been able to open projects within that Production without issue.

Note, the media is not stored within that same project folder structure, as per their recommendations.

Neil

[amillerCN]

Thank you for the quick response.

Unfortunately that was something we tried in one of our attempts of doing something different to see what would happen. New production created in v22.0, full AP folder structure copied over (all other assets are in other folders), and while the projects appear in the new Production tab, an "opening project" window pops up briefly, then no project is opened. Same for every project opened either in the regular folder structure outside of Premiere and also inside the production panel inside of Premiere. No dice there unless there was something I've missed or misunderstood in that transfer process.

[R Neil Haugen]

Wow ... mine just ... worked. That would be a massive logjam.

@Kevin-Monahan  ... got any ideas for this user?

Neil

[Kevin-Monahan]

Dear amillerCN,

Sorry about the issue. Have you consulted the supplementary Productions PDF? It's additional documentation from engineers on the topic that I find super valuable. Here is a link.

Updating a Production is listed as a straightforward task. I've done it on my own and didn't have any trouble, to be fair. You can find info on how to update a Production in the doc's index at the back. I would say the only thing that can go wrong is if editors sharing the files have a project file open. Make sure all projects are closed. All editors should choose File > Close All Projects. Make sure everyone is also on the same version of the software, as well.

Thanks,
Kevin

[amillerCN]

Kevin,

I figured it SHOULD be a straightforward task, so I'm definitely tryint to gather as much information as possible to figure it out. Worst case I can take the time to create a new production entirely and import and convert a few hundred projects individually. I have the time to do it, but of course would rather not.

Consulted the supplementary PDF also, thank you for the link.  Had everyone close out of premiere and all projects. I went through the production tab and made sure that ALL projects were closed out of and also found a handful of prlock files still around from projects that weren't open and haven't been touched. Got rid of all of those.  Attempted again as the only editor to have premiere open on the team's network and had the same crash happen and had only a portion of the projects placed into a new folder.

Did more digging and found that one of our editors didn't follow directions we set early on and was placing video and other assets in folders inside the AP folder structure and not outside that folder structure in asset folders we set up. Could that be where it's hanging up during conversion??

THANK YOU for the help guys, I really appreciate the attention to this.

[brians69296344 · Accepted solution]

I've never been able to successfully update a production. I've tried it in multiple facilities on both Mac and PC. I've tried it over the course of years with multiple different versions of Premiere without success. Importing the projects individually into a new production doesn't work either because everything just matches back to the old production. This is extremely frustrating and we need a solution to this. I'm currently dead in the water on a huge project.

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

Wow, this is a mess for your team! Yowza ... 

I've used Productions for my one-person shop. All my projects are in that Production, organized by type of job, client etc within the folder structure used in Productions. And I make a new one every year that is built with the new major release cycle, but is based from the previous one. And never had an issue, but then my yearly work might easily be a smaller total asset list than your project here.

I also have a production with a partner via LucidLink, that we've had no trouble updating.

So I can't replicate that hot mess you've got, and am wondering what the ... hay.

One thing I do follow ... the documentation says to not put your assets in the same folders as your Production is built in. That a parallel folder structure is safer somehow. And so I do that mostly ... on the same drive, I have my Production, and I can see the organizational folder structure of it in the file manager app of Windows.

I have a second folder structure, with the same folder categorization, where the media live.

Is that what you are doing? Just out of curiousity.

[awakemanphoto · Accepted solution]

I know this is super old, but I thought I would post it in case anyone has issues migrating from v23 to v24. After troubleshooting for hours I figured out that I had to open each project in the previous version v23 and then perform the migration. Hope this helps!