Video size issues/slow performance after update to CC 2014

Question

Hello everyone,
I'm not an editor by trade, so please bear with me here. I've spent the last few days searching around for an answer and haven't been able to come up with much.
I'm on a late 2011 Macbook Pro, 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3, AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB, Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63b).
I spent a month cutting my first little experimental feature which the assistant editor set up for me (and who is currently away).
My computer isn't rocket fast, but I was able to complete the first few passes on Premiere CC (7.2.2?) with few major issues.
About a week ago, I upgraded to Premiere CC 2014 8.0.
I immediately noticed that my footage went from this:
To this:
(The specifics of the footage:
As you might be able to tell, we shot very old school VHS to help sell the 90's setting. It was a nightmare to find the best way to export it all. I'm still not sure if we did this entirely properly -- and hopefully it's not the cause of these issues. Also, I know VHS is only SD -- we chose to import at the utmost quality, i.e. 1920x1440 and ProRes 422, because more of the image detail was present in low-light.)
I found that I had to select all the clips in each timeline, right click, and select the 'Set to Frame Size' to have the video full frame once again. Then I had to render everything.
As I tried to resume my edit, the performance was much slower. Playback is a nightmare. I get the beach ball of death constantly. It would take several minutes to save the project. And it started to crash about once an hour on top of everything.
But I continued to work for the last eight days, hoping that I'd be able to rectify this somehow.
I cleared the cache with no luck.
I read that I could uncheck 'Composite in Linear Color' to make it faster, but that wasn't an issue in the last build.
My playback and paused resolution is 1/4.
I read that I should update my OS to OS X Mavericks, but that keeps crashing too! Haha.
I understand that my system isn't the best, but I just want my project to perform as well as it did on Premiere CC before the update.
I just spoke to an Adobe tech who basically told me that there wasn't a solution here besides reverting back to Premiere CC from CC 2014 -- or buying a new Macbook.
But there has to be a way that I can get the same performance that I did before the upgrade, right? I have a feeling something happened to how CC 2014 is using the existing footage.
(Also, I noticed that clips where I increased the zoom, i.e. 100% to 110%, were back at their original size. And instead of saying 100%, it was now saying 300%. I'm assuming this is because of the 'Set to Frame Size' setting, but this wasn't the case on Premiere CC.)
Does anyone have any ideas what I can do here?
Here's my sequence settings on CC 2014:
And on CC:
For some reason, portions of this window are grayed out, and not in CC 2014. Not sure if this has anything to do with the issue.
Thanks a ton in advance everyone! I really can't afford to lose 8 days worth of work, so any help would be greatly greatly appreciated!
I'll be more than happy to provide additional info.
I'm really looking to find out, definitively, if my only two options are: a) go back to Premiere CC and lose my recent work, or b) buy a new laptop, which I can't afford.
(As a side question, is there any way I can transfer my recent work from CC 2014 to CC? I understand it's not backwards-compatible, but there has to be at least a partial solution.)
Best,
Jon

Answer 1

Thanks for the quick response!
So just this right (to DV):
I scrubbed through really quick, seems like it just may have worked.