The purpose of this wiki is to demonstrate how to edit the version information of your Adobe Premiere Pro (*.prproj) project file so that it may be backwards compatible with older versions of the Adobe Premiere Pro CC software.  Some may refer to this process as "hacking" your file.


Attempting to open a premiere project from a newer version in an older version, you will get this error.

This is typically done to prevent project errors from new features that have been added between versions.

If you haven't used any special effects or tools that were recently introduced, you should be fine, but proceed
with the understanding that your project may not work entirely as you expect.

Navigate to your premiere project and make a copy of it (so you have a backup just in case)

Right click on one of the files and select rename


In the field, change ".prproj" to ".gz"

You will get prompted to make sure you want to change the file extension, click "Use .gz"

Launch spotlight (either CMD + Spacebar or the spyglass icon on the top right of your screen) and search for
terminal, then launch it

In the terminal window, type "cd" and then press space

In the finder window where you have your premiere projects, click on the folder icon at the top and drag it into
the terminal window. Release once the plus sign appears on the folder.

The path to the folder will be pasted into
the terminal

Afterwards, press enter

You are now in the folder with your project

Type 'gzip -d projectname.gz' (projectname being your projects file name)

You can type the first few letters and then press the tab key to auto complete the name up
to the extension, then add ".gz"

#Note: If you have a space in the filename, you will need to add a "\" (backslash) before the space, like this
"test\ copy.gz"

Once done, press enter

In the finder window, you will notice now that the ".gz" has been removed from the file.

Now right click on it and select Open With > TextEdit

A window will open with a bunch of text

Count down to the 4th line

It'll look something like this
(<Project ObjectID="1" ClassID="62ad66dd-0dcd-42da-a660-6d8fbde94876" Version="39">)


Change the number after "Version" to 1 so that line looks something like this now
(<Project ObjectID="1" ClassID="62ad66dd-0dcd-42da-a660-6d8fbde94876" Version="1">)

Afterwards, press CMD + S or go to file > save

Return to the terminal window and type 'gzip filename' (filename being your filename #WITHOUT AN EXTENSION#)

Then press enter

You should now see the '.gz' extension again

Repeat the above steps to rename it from '.gz' to '.prproj'


Once you have renamed the file back to .prproj, open the project in premiere.
You should get prompted to upgrade the project, stating it was created in an older version of premiere

Update the name / location as you see fit and press Ok.

The project should now open and you can verify that everything seems to be as you had it on the other version of premiere


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