I’m continuing to have trouble getting the Premiere 3.1 upgrade on my MacBook Pro. So I thought I’d post a quick note about what I know so far in case it helps someone else figure out what is going on with their system.

First, I have a desktop Mac Pro with the full CS3 Production Premium suite and it gets any and all updates from Adobe without any incidence whatsoever. On the same network, I also have a MacBook Pro (laptop) with a second install of the CS3 Production Premium suite.

(In case you weren’t aware, Adobe allows for 2 copies of it’s software to be installed for just this purpose: one on your desktop and one on your laptop. All with the same serial number.)

Unfortunately, on this laptop I can’t get the Premiere 3.1 software update. In fact, I’ve now realized I haven’t gotten ANY updates on this machine, for any of the CS3 apps. So I wrote to some friends at Adobe and they recommended that I open the Adobe Updater (in the Utilities folder) and choose “Delete All” and then try updating again. The Adobe Updater window should look something like this:

Only one problem, I can’t even get to that screen! When I launch the Adobe Updater it gives me this screen where the only option is to launch the Preferences window:

So I launch the Preferences window and here is where I realize the core of my problem… the updater doesn’t see ANY of my CS3 apps! None of them. To the updater, it’s like they were never installed. The only Adobe application it sees on my entire drive is the Adobe Reader. Take a look:

So the solution is that I need to force the updater to see all of my Adobe CS3 apps, something that I’m currently trying to find a workaround for. I sent my “aum.log” file (on Macs found using this path: ~user/library/Application Support/Adobe/Updater5) to the good folks at Adobe to investigate the problem further and I’m waiting to hear back from them.

From what I can tell, it seems that those of us that installed the Beta releases of CS3 PP are the ones affected by this problem. Even those of us (myself included) that took the extra time to run the “Clean Install” script that Adobe provided to completely wipe out any trace of the Beta release before installing the shipping version are affected by this. As for now, there is no solution for me to manually update to Premiere 3.1 on my MacBook Pro. However, I am keeping an eye on the following two links in anticipation of Adobe adding the 3.1 update to it’s website so that I can download it manually, instead of through the Adobe Updater. As of this writing, it still is not available.

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=98&platform=Windows
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=98&platform=Macintosh

So the moral of this story… Beta’s can bite you even 6 months after you’ve wiped them off of your system. As soon as I find a fix for this problem, I’ll post it here.