I need to open and make minor tweaks to a large project that was finished in Premiere Pro CS3 on Windows nearly 10 years ago. The video files are CineForm (AspectHD) AVIs. I have since moved to a Mac environment. Ideally, I would like to work on this project on my Mac, and any advice or suggestions on this would be really appreciated:

1) Can the latest Adobe CC products open/import project files as old as CS3?
2) Could a Mac version of Premiere open/import a Windows-version project file? As old as CS3?
3) Can a Mac edit CineForm AVIs?


Thank you,

Will

Hi Will,

I've never had an issue opening older Adobe files in newer software, pretty confident that will work fine for you.

However, not a Mac user but my understanding is that Mac does not play/support .avi files at all. What does that mean for you? Perhaps convert all the source files (using a PC) to a .mov format, then re-link media after opening project in new Premiere?

Thanks

Hi Jeff,

I think if there were an easy way to batch convert the AVIs to MOVs and update the Project links to them, that might be fine. Otherwise, the number of clips is very high, and I think the process might be too time consuming to do manually. I'll do some more homework to see how feasible batch conversion is.

As a backup plan, I've considered using Parallels Desktop to run Premiere for Windows on my Mac.

-Will

I can't help but think this would be so much more simple and bulletproof if you ran it in a Windows environment

I would stick to windows too.
Might need to convert it first with CS6.
Then maybe CC17 will open project fine.
Maybe xml route.
But dont get your hopes up high.

Why not backup what you have. Then try to run in CC. Still leaves a copy if it goes wrong.

One should be able to batch-convert the video clips using Adobe Media Encoder. Assuming video clips did not come from a dozen different folders, relinking should not be an issue.

Thanks

If you have source media that takes up a lot of RAM when being loaded, make sure you have a HUGE page file set. This is what I encountered when re-linking XAVC-S files from CC 2015 to CC 2017. If you run out of page file, XAVC-S files at the time the program has run out of memory will be erroneously read by Quicktime.

You can re-wrap Cineform AVIs in FFmpeg to Cineform MOVs.