I revived an old Adobe Premiere project in a 'Turtlesque' fashion
Years ago I shared a flat with 3 others, we were a mix of students and young professionals working individuals.
One of my housemates shot a music video for his band using stop motion, and edited it on my PC using Adobe Premiere. For whatever reason, when exporting the file it crashed about 1 minute from the end of the video. We tried multiple times and couldn't get it to export the full video, he was furious and I felt pretty bad for him.
The Files
Fast-forward almost 20 years later and I'm clearing out old hard drives to build an Unraid server when I come across the backup of the source files I'd made.
At some point I had figured I would try and fix whatever problem we had and export it in full at some point in the future, so I'd backed up everything I could think of.
This included:
- the folder in which all of the stop motion frames were organized, in their original format
- the Adobe Premiere project file (prproj)
I also found my copy of Adobe CS4, which means I can stop paying for Adobe CC or whatever it's called now.
Opening it up
So I installed CS4 and, despite some warnings about some unsupported 'things' in Windows 11, it worked fine.
I opened the largest project file I had (I'd backed up a few, but one was considerably larger and I assumed this to be the final edit) which was dated 20/06/2011. This file is from almost 15 years ago now, I would've been about 23 at this time. I get the feeling this file would actually have been older than that, but maybe I'm wrong - I moved into that house when I was 21, my housemate moved in about 6 months later....maybe it does add up.
Anyway, the gist of it is that I opened the file and none of the sequences worked. I'd opened the project before at some point and had the same issue - the sequences were all there in the project but all of the file paths had changed so Premiere couldn't render anything. Also I should note that it actually asks you to find each missing file and link them again when you open the project, but as this was a stop motion project with lots of images, and for whatever reason a lot of these sequences had images that shared filenames with other sequences, it was an absolute nightmare.
What I did differently this time however, after a little digging, was open the prproj file in a text editor.
After opening it in a text editor and searching for some filepaths, I noticed all of the filepaths for each sequence was stored in the prproj file. Because of this, and because I had a backup of the source folder with all the sequences in their original structure, I could simply use sed to to do a simple find and replace of all of the file paths and get this thing working again.
I did this and it worked, and for whatever reason - maybe I ran out of memory on my old PC, or the fact my new PC is ridiculously better specced and being 20 years in the future - it rendered fine first time.
So here it is, the music video for 'Turtlesque' by Sunday League, in full for the first time.