CS4 Scenes to CS3

[Michael Szalapski]

You can’t open AE files created in newer versions of the software.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Christopher Rotter]

Thought so, alright, thank you.

[Steve Bentley]

Actually you can – well at least on the Mac so perhaps this will work on the PC.
Make a CS3 file, save it. Open the CS3 file in a text editor (like notepad) and spread the view out so you don’t get any uneccesary line returns that aren’t built into the file.
Copy the first chunk of code out of it. It always has a similar look to the code below with a space before the rest of the file. (area in blue is what you copy)



That little circle is the dead giveaway of the end of the header.
Then open your CS4 project that you want to convert in a text editor and highlight the same chunk even though many of the characters will not match.
Paste your code from the CS3 file so that it replaces this code in the CS4 file. Now save the file as a new text doc but if prompted don’t add an extension. Once saved rename it so that the extension is .aep.
Now in CS3 import the new file (don’t “open” it) and in the import dialogue set the type to “project” if it doesn’t do so on it’s own.
Hit ok and you’re there.
Not all things will translate but I’ve had some heavy projects with lots of plug ins and everything was perfect. Only weird plug ins, or massively out of date ones that have had complete rebuilds between versions seem not to work.
Good luck.

[Christopher Rotter]

Hello, Steve. What editor are you using to view the After Effects File ? I’ve tried notepad in Windows and Notepad++ and I don’t know where to cut, here is what my code looks like, maybe you can tell me.

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[Stevan Del george]

I am also having trouble making this work. The header from the CS4 file looks like the header listed above, but my CS3 project header info/area looks nothing like it.

Could it me my CS3 AE is PPC (on a G5) so the header is different? Here is the entire text from an empty CS3 project:
RIFX

[Ryan Peterson]

Confirmed!

This thread saved me time, money, and my rep.