Pre 7 crashes when opening v2 project file

Question

Hi,
I upgraded to v7 from v2 a few months ago.  For the most part things have been going fine, but when I recently tried opening a project file I had worked on in v2 I got the following error:
Sorry, a serious error has occurred that requires Adobe Premiere Elements to shut down. We will attempt to save your current project.
Not too helpful mind you.  I still had v2 installed, so I tried opening it in there and it worked.  So that kind of ruled out a corrupt file.  I searched forums and contacted support, and not much help there.  I tried deleting parts of the timeline and re-saving in v2 but I still couldn't open in v7.  I finally removed the DVD menus, and surprise it opened in v7.  I investigated further, and it appears that since v3 DVD menus are named with _pal_ whereas in v2 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 v7 however it did not show any DVD menus.  I suspect I also should 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 its probably safer to remove the DVD menus in the older Pre and then open it in Pre v7.  Anyway, just a tip for others if they run into this problem.  Much easier than re-installing Pre7 or junking the project file and starting from scratch.
Take care
Marc

Answer 1

Hi, thanks for the response.  The project was actually finished in v2, but I wanted to open it in v7 as a reference.  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, Pre7 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").
Marc