Keeping IT Simple

For all of my video editing needs I use Adobe's Premiere Elements, and for the most part it works without any issues.  A few months ago I decided to upgrade to version 7 from version 2.  Things were going fine, but when I recently tried opening a project file I had worked on in version 2 I got an error.

It showed the following unhelpful message:

Sorry, a serious error has occurred that requires Adobe Premiere Elements to shut down. We will attempt to save your current project.

It shouldn't have been too difficult for Premiere Elements' design team to include a bit more information to assist users in understanding why the program crashed, but they hadn't and I was left to try to figure out things for myself.  I still had version 2 installed, so I tried opening it in there and it worked.  So that ruled out a corrupt file, which was often stated as a possible source of problems when I searched on Adobe's user forums.  I continued to search the forums and contacted Adobe Support, and not much help there.

I tried deleting parts of the timeline and re-saving in version 2, but I still couldn't open in the newer version.  I finally removed the DVD menus, and to my surprise it now opened.  I investigated further, and it appears that since version 3 the DVD menus are named with _pal_ whereas in version 2 there were ntsc and pal versions of each menu (I've been using ntsc).  Also, I opened up the .prel project in notepad, and came across the DVDLayoutTree node and its version attribute is "3" for v2 file and "4" for v7 file.  I modified the attribute to "4", and was able to open the project in version 7 however it did not show any DVD menus.  I suspect I should also have renamed the _ntsc_ file references to _pal_.  In any event the project did load, and it's a simple matter to reset the DVD menus.  This hacking should probably be a last resort as it's probably safer to remove the DVD menus in the older Premiere Elements and then open it in the newer version.

When researching this issue in the forums, some suggested I only work with my version 2 project in the older software and start a new project in version 7.  The project was actually finished in version 2, but I wanted to open it in the new version to use as a reference for a project I was starting.  I don't want (and shouldn't) have to keep all previous versions of the software installed on my system so that I may be able to open project files. Most software programs I work with are backwards compatible or provide some means of upgrading files to newer format.  Can you imagine how things would be if Word Doc format became unusable with each MS Word release?

In this particular case, the software shouldn't be crashing like it is.  Ideally, it should recognize a previous version project file and either update it automatically or drop features no longer supported (with some message to the user or log file generated).  The error message is ambiguous at best and pretty useless as it didn't really help in identifying the root cause of the problem.  This is likely the result of some uncaught exception when the program parses the .prel project file and finds an element attribute it doesn't expect (version "3" instead of "4").

Anyway, just a tip for others if they run into this problem. Much easier than re-installing the software or junking the project file and starting from scratch if you don't need to. Has anyone else encountered odd behavior with this software? If so, drop us a line and let us know how you made out. Until next time, keep it simple!