Your first stream

Tap your computer in the app and the picture should arrive within a second or two. Then tap the picture itself: all the on-screen controls disappear and you are left with a clean feed. That gesture is the one worth learning first.

What a correct connection looks like

1. You tap the computer under Devices on this network.
2. The row shows Connecting… Tap to cancel with a spinner.
3. First time only: the host puts up a 6-digit code and the phone asks you to type it.
4. The screen goes black, then fades up on your Program Monitor.

Total: a second or two, plus however long it takes you to type six digits. If the phone drops back to the home screen instead, nothing answered within 8 seconds — see Stream will not start.

The picture is your Program Monitor, not your desktop and not the timeline. Whatever Premiere Pro is showing there is what you get, at the sequence's aspect ratio.

"Waiting for video"

If the screen stays black, an overlay appears after a moment:

Connected to Premiere Waiting for video — open or play a comp/sequence in Premiere.

This overlay only appears after about a second and a half, so a normal fast connect never flashes it — seeing it means frames genuinely are not arriving.

This is usually not a bug. Mercury Transmit is a push API: the host hands the plugin a frame only when the picture it is displaying changes. Nothing moving means nothing to push. A parked playhead on a static frame, a sequence that was never opened, an After Effects project with no comp in the viewer — all of them produce a legitimately silent stream.

The plugin nudges the playhead one frame and back at connect time specifically to force one render, so a fresh connection normally paints something even while paused. When that nudge cannot land, this overlay is what you see.

Move the playhead, or press play. If the picture arrives, everything is working.

If it stays black with the timeline moving, the cause is on the host side — most often the device unticked in Playback preferences, or Disable video output when in the background left ticked. The overlay's Still nothing? Open the setup guide link opens that walkthrough; the longer version is No picture.

The live screen

Everything on top of the video is chrome, and all of it hides.

Everything visible here except the picture itself is chrome: the house button top left, the button row top right, and the transport capsule at the bottom.

Tap the picture

One tap on the video hides the whole HUD and the iOS status bar. Tap again to bring it back. This works in both control modes, so a clean feed is always one tap away.

By default the chrome is set to Stay on — it never fades by itself, and the tap is what removes it. Switch it to Auto-hide in the settings panel if you would rather it faded after a few seconds of no input.

The top row

Buttons sit along the top of the screen:

The resolution chip

The chip is its value: it reads 720p, 360p, Src, and so on, so the current cap is legible without opening anything. Tapping it opens the Resolution Limit menu — Source, 2160p, 1440p, 1080p, 720p, 540p, 480p, 360p, 240p — with 720p marked Recommended.

This is the only place the Resolution Limit lives. It is not in the settings panel.

The stats HUD

Off by default. Turn it on in the settings panel and a strip appears under the button row, in five rows: host, stream, encoder, encode and network — resolution, frame rate, bitrate, codec, packet loss and latency. Details: Stats HUD.

The transport bar

A capsule at the bottom with five controls: go to In point, step back one frame, play/pause, step forward one frame, go to Out point.

Each tap sends one command over the control channel, and Premiere Pro's own transport dispatcher does the work — so it drives real playback, not a local scrub of the video you are watching. The play/pause glyph follows Premiere Pro, so starting playback at the keyboard flips the glyph on the phone too.

In After Effects this behaves differently and can be destructive on a stock install — read Enable in After Effects first.

Pinch to zoom

Pinch the picture to punch in on detail, then drag to pan. The ceiling is 4x on the free tier and up to 30x on Pro.

Set your expectations

Two things are deliberately limited until you subscribe, and both are visible on the very first stream:

• Resolution is capped at a 360-pixel short side. For framing and caption legibility that is genuinely enough. For judging grain or a grade, it is not.
• Audio is a 10-second sample, on demand. Tapping the speaker plays ten seconds and stops. Continuous audio is Pro.

Everything else on the first stream — the layouts you can pick from, safe zones, transport, save frame, the stats HUD, Preview from Photos or Files — is free.

Where to go from here

• The live view — every control on this screen in depth.
• Layouts — safe zones and platform overlays.
• Encoding settings — codec, GOP mode, encoder engine, and what to change when.
• Transport — how the transport bar maps to each host.
• Audio — enabling it on the host and what the sample does.
• Free vs Pro — everything the subscription changes.