Install on Windows
Run the PreviewMonitor Windows installer — SmartScreen, UAC, closing Adobe apps, what gets installed, the firewall rules, and how to uninstall.
Download PreviewMonitor-Setup-<version>.exe from the download page and run it. It installs two plugin files into the shared Adobe plug-ins folder and writes the Windows Firewall rules the stream needs. Budget two minutes, plus a restart of Premiere Pro.
Close Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Media Encoder before you start — the installer will make you do it anyway, and it cannot save your project for you.
What you will see
SmartScreen warns you
The installer is not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC" the first time you run it.
Click More info, then Run anyway.
The "Unknown publisher" line is what an unsigned installer looks like. Signing is planned; until then this prompt is expected on every fresh download.
Approve the UAC prompt
The installer always asks for administrator rights. This is not optional and there is no per-user install mode: the plugins go into C:\Program Files\Adobe\Common\Plug-ins, which is not writable without elevation.
Click Yes.
Close any open Adobe applications
If Premiere Pro, After Effects or Media Encoder is running, the wizard shows a Close Adobe applications page listing exactly which ones, one row each:
These Adobe apps are open and lock the plugin files. Save your work and close them, then click Re-check.
Each row names one open host; the Re-check button at the bottom re-scans without leaving the page.
This page exists because Adobe hosts hold a lock on the plugin files and do not reliably respond to Windows' graceful-close request. The installer deliberately never closes your apps for you — there is no reliable way to make Premiere Pro save an open project first, so you do it.
Save your work, quit the apps, and click Re-check. The page swaps to "All Adobe applications are closed. Click Next to continue."
Clicking Next with a host still open gets you an error dialog, not an install. If one gets reopened between this page and the file copy, the installer catches that too and offers Retry or Cancel.
If nothing Adobe is running, this page is skipped entirely.
Let it install
There is no install-location page and no Start-menu-folder page. The paths are fixed.
Finish
The final page says:
PreviewMonitor was installed. Restart Adobe Premiere to load the plugin, then open the PreviewMonitor app on your iPhone to connect.
A checkbox labelled Show me how to connect is ticked by default; leaving it ticked opens this documentation's Connect your iPhone page in your browser when you click Finish.
The closing note is the reminder people most often skip: the plugin is on disk, but Premiere Pro will not see it until it is relaunched.
What gets installed
| File | Destination | What it does |
|---|---|---|
PremiereLive.prm | C:\Program Files\Adobe\Common\Plug-ins\7.0\MediaCore\ | The Mercury Transmit device — the video and audio stream itself |
PremiereLiveCtrl.acsrf | C:\Program Files\Adobe\Common\Plug-ins\ControlSurface\ | The Control Surface plugin — lets the phone's transport bar drive Premiere Pro's playhead |
MediaCore is the same shared folder NDI, Blackmagic and every other Transmit device uses, which is why Premiere Pro finds it with no further configuration.
The filenames still carry the internal engineering name PremiereLive. That is deliberate — Adobe loads plugins by filename, and the device you actually see in Premiere Pro is named PreviewMonitor.
The After Effects transport plugin (PremiereLiveAE.aex) is not included in this installer. After Effects still gets the live picture from PremiereLive.prm like Premiere Pro does; only transport control is affected. See Enable in After Effects.
Firewall rules
The installer writes three inbound Windows Firewall rules, all named PreviewMonitor, on both the private and public profiles:
| Rule | Protocol | Ports |
|---|---|---|
| Control channels | TCP | 47100, 47110, 47120, 47130 |
| Video and audio | UDP | 47101–47102 |
| Discovery (mDNS) | UDP | 5353 |
Both profiles are covered on purpose. If the rules were not written up front, Premiere Pro would raise the standard "allow on private / public networks?" prompt at the moment the stream starts — and the checkbox you tick there has to match how Windows happened to classify your Wi-Fi. New networks default to Public, so the obvious answer is the wrong one, and clicking Cancel writes a Block rule that silently kills discovery with no visible error.
The rules are port-scoped rather than program-scoped because the Premiere Pro executable path changes with every yearly version. Re-running the installer deletes the existing PreviewMonitor rules before adding them again, so repeat installs never stack duplicates.
Start menu
Two entries land under PreviewMonitor:
- How to Connect — opens the connect guide in your browser.
- Uninstall PreviewMonitor — runs the uninstaller.
Restart Premiere Pro
Adobe hosts scan for plugins once, at launch. If Premiere Pro was already running when you installed — which the wizard tries hard to prevent — quit and reopen it before looking for the device.
Then go to Enable in Premiere Pro. The plugin does nothing at all until the device is ticked in Preferences.
Uninstall
Either:
- Start menu → PreviewMonitor → Uninstall PreviewMonitor, or
- Settings → Apps → Installed apps, find PreviewMonitor (Premiere plugin), and choose Uninstall.
Uninstalling removes both plugin files and deletes the PreviewMonitor firewall rules.
Close Premiere Pro and After Effects first, for the same file-locking reason as the install.
Two things the uninstaller leaves behind on purpose, because they are your data rather than the product:
%APPDATA%\PremiereLive\— the device identity and the list of trusted iPhones.%LOCALAPPDATA%\PremiereLive\—plugin.logand any crash dumps.
Delete those by hand if you want a genuinely clean slate. See Reset and reinstall.
Next
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Requirements
Adobe host versions, operating systems, iPhone and network requirements for PreviewMonitor — and what is explicitly not supported.
Install on macOS
Install the PreviewMonitor .pkg on macOS — the Gatekeeper block and how to get past it, the admin password, the firewall prompt, and manual removal.