Converting a Adobe Premiere CS6 project to a CS5 one

Question

I run the old CS 5 version of Adobe Premiere but my friend just got the newer CS 6 version.

Now she's handing over a project on to me. So I have to turn her project files into files I can continue working in.

The problem is that Premiere's own built-in conversion process did not quite do it. I ended up with a faulty project where the project window is actually blank, even though the files are clearly there (they show up in the timeline). Also, it is still possible to play back the timeline - it's just that I can't actually do much editing with the project window being as it is.

This leads me to my question: Is there a better and simpler way to do the conversion from a CS 6 file to a CS 5 one yet? Are there any good workarounds I have not thought of (that aren't "render every single track individually and go from there") or anything else I can do?

Answer 1

It seems that I have solved my problem.

All I had to do was to import the CS6 project file into a brand new CS5 project. That did it for me.

Answer 2

Since PrPro project file is an XML document, you can open it up in any script editor (e.g. in Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit) or just text editor, find Version="25" in the fourth row and replace it with Version="24":

<Project ObjectRef="1"/>

<Project ObjectID="1" ClassID="62ad66dd-0dcd-42da-a660-6d8fbde94876" Version="24">

Although in most cases this works just fine and much better than exporting to FCP XML or whatever, bear in mind: no warranty, everything is at your own peril.