I had a Premiere question yesterday when I was onsite at the BBC that reminded me how many undocumented Premiere tricks I have in my head which might be useful to you.
This one is a useful get out of jail hack in the transition period between CC 2017 and 2018.
As usual at this point, lots of facilities are still using 2017 but get external editors and assistants providing 2018 projects, which sometimes forces them to upgrade before they’re ready to do that in a planned/tested way – this can be a massive pain.
There is a secret version number in the XML of Premiere project files in the fourth line, which lets you open a newer project in an older version: 2018 is version 34; 2017.1 is version 33 and so on.
Make a copy of the project file, open it in TextWrangler (which reads the compression) and just change this number and save. Some words of caution: this is a hack, and there’s some risk here with a few things which will not translate from the newer versions – e.g. new features – but most of the rest of it is the same and works fine.
After you’ve done it, it’s worth importing your project into a new project to ‘clean’ it. The less gangstery way to do this is to use FCP XML or AAF export/import, but these can give other problems with more advanced edits/fx.
Joe, who’s new to our team, has just built an Applescript to automate this process. Let us know if you’d like a copy.
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