Adobe no longer offers all versions of Premiere Pro to customers

[colleenh15244572]

I was troubleshooting an external plug in in Premiere Pro 2018 and tried uninstalling Premiere Pro 2018 and reinstalling.  When I went to reinstall, I noticed adobe no longer offers Premiere Pro 2018 for me to reinstall because I am using a version that is more than a couple years old.  When I asked tech support for a download of Premiere Pro 2018, they sent me Premiere Pro 2018 version 12.0.0....I had been using version 12.1.2.  When I opened my premiere project in the 12.0.0 version it says "this project was saved in a newer version of Adobe Premiere Pro and cannot be opened in this version."  Which to me means I need version Premiere Pro 2018 12.1.2.  Tech support insists that they can not offer me this version and that 12.0.0 will work, though it does not on my computer.  I tried opening the project on my laptop (second computer) where I still have Premiere Pro 2018 12.1.2 installed and it worked fine.   I've been told many times not to update premiere mid project and I have been an editor on a feature doc for 3 years now.  Maybe I have to update, though this has never been advised to me by anyone in the film community.  Has anyone else run into this issue where Adobe is withholding the version you need to install?  Does anyone else wait to update their version of premiere until after they have completed an editing project?  I may just be in a rare boat as this is the longest I have worked on an edit and maybe Adobe isn't set up to help editors with longer ongoing projects.  

[colleenh15244572 · Accepted solution]

I was able to copy the Premiere Pro CC 2018 12.1.2 version I had on my laptop to my main computers applications section.  My project opened!  I did try opening my project file in Premiere Pro CC 2019, but it wouldn't even open in the newer version.  So glad I was able to find a fix on my own.  Though, it does bug me that I couldn't get the download I needed from Adobe tech support, which I spent a good bit of my morning working with.  So I guess if you find urself in a similar situation the answer is to find a friend who has the version you need, becaue Adobe will no longer provide it to you.  Mostly bizzare and I really hope they change their policy on this matter.  I guess that is my hope for this post for it to reach someone who could allow tech support to provide versions customers request...not simply because of customer version preference but in my case I couldn't open my project on the newer version.  This could really send someone into a panic.

[Ann Bens]

How did you manage that: copying 2018 from one computer to another.

[colleenh15244572]

It was really simple.  I am on a mac and went to my Applications folder where my adobe folder files are and I just copied the entire Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018 folder (3.68 GB) onto my hard drive.  Then went to my primary mac computer (the one I deleted Premiere Pro CC 2018 from) and placed the copied folder into my Applications folder.  When I opened my project Premiere had to re-generate some files but other than that it all seems to be working fine (fingers crossed). 

 As I said, this would have been a total disaster if I didn't find a workaround, as I could not get the project file to even open up in a newer Premiere Pro version or older Premiere pro version.  I think if they are going to stop offering the older versions, they at least need to allow our older projects to open in the newer versions.  

[Ann Bens]

Ah, did not know it was that simple on a mac.

Cannot do that on windows.

[R Neil Haugen]

I'm on a pc ... always.

Neil

[R Neil Haugen]

They aren't going to change their "N+1" policy, as they call it. Newest plus one previous major version. You can tell major versions by their numerical series numbers. "2020" is actually 14.x, and "2019" is the 13.x series, and on back.

On my current machine, I've every major version of Premiere from 2015.2 forward. I'm about to migrate to a new machine. Which means I will probably lose the ability to move those back-issues to the new beast. Not that I've used any of them except for testing comparative things for the last year or so. And I still on occasion do run up SpeedGrade.

I will be keeping the old machine around, so I will have  access to them. And yes, I once copied an old version from my old laptop to my then-new desktop successfully. That would have been like four years ago or so, haven't tried it since. May or may not work for anyone. Most likely, not.

Neil