Showing a cut to a client
Set the phone up as a clean handheld playback monitor — full-screen picture, no chrome, screen awake — and know what happens when it locks or a call arrives.
Handing someone a phone is a different job from monitoring your own edit. They should see the picture and nothing else: no HUD, no stats, no letterbox bars, no status bar. This guide sets that up, and then covers the things that go wrong in a room with a client in it.
The setup, in four taps
Turn the stats HUD off. Under gear → Developer Tools, make sure Show stats is off. It ships off, so this is only a check if you have been debugging.
Pick the Full Screen layout. Tap the grid button, then Full Screen. The picture is scaled to cover the whole screen with its aspect preserved and the overflow cropped — a 16:9 program feed scales up until it spans the phone top to bottom and the left and right edges run off-screen.
Confirm Controls is set to Stay on. Under gear → HUD → Controls. This is the default, so it is a check rather than a change. Auto-hide fades the chrome on a timer, which also means it reappears the moment anyone touches the screen and then fades again mid-sentence; Stay on puts you in control of when it is up.
Tap the picture. One tap hides the HUD and the iOS status bar together. Tap again to bring both back. This works in either Controls mode — the tap is never a no-op.
With the HUD hidden and Full Screen selected, nothing is drawn over the picture and the status bar is gone — the phone is just the shot.
Full Screen and Standard are both free. Full Screen crops to fill; Standard letterbox-fits and keeps the entire frame visible. Use Standard when the client needs to see the true frame edges and Full Screen when you want the screen filled.
Which one to choose
| Layout | The picture | Choose it when |
|---|---|---|
| Full Screen | Fills the screen, edges cropped | The shot matters more than the frame boundary — the cinematic hand-over |
| Standard | Whole frame, letterboxed | Aspect ratio or edge framing is under discussion |
The screen will not sleep
While the app is actively streaming, PreviewMonitor disables the iOS auto-lock timer, so a phone sitting on a table showing a parked frame stays lit indefinitely. Normal auto-lock is restored the instant streaming stops.
You do not need to change the phone's Auto-Lock setting for a live review. You do need to if you are reviewing a rendered file from Photos or Files instead — the clip monitor does not hold the screen awake. See Reviewing a cut with no computer.
Saving stills to send
The download button in the top HUD writes the current frame to Photos. With Full Screen or Standard active there is no overlay to composite, so under Standard you get the decoded program frame at its own resolution.
The first save asks for photo access; PreviewMonitor requests add-only permission, so it can write to the library but never read it. A Saved to Photos confirmation appears for about a second and a half.
Stills are encoded frames, at whatever Resolution Limit and codec the stream is running. They are fine for "this is the moment we discussed" and wrong for anything anyone will grade or print. Export from Premiere Pro for that.
Audio
Audio is off by default at the host end — it is a separate tick from video. If the speaker button in the HUD shows a slash and a warning, the plugin is telling you audio is switched off in Premiere Pro. Tapping it opens the instructions:
Premiere Pro → Preferences → Playback. (Adobe renamed this menu to Settings in the 2025 releases; same item.)
Under Video Device, turn on PreviewMonitor's Audio Stream, leaving Video Stream on.
Play something with an audio track.
Run the review from Premiere Pro. After Effects has no audio path at all, and the speaker button gives you no warning there — it behaves like an ordinary mute toggle and stays silent forever. See No audio.
Once it is flowing, the speaker button is a mute toggle. It sets the mixer gain, so unmuting is instant rather than delayed.
Continuous audio is Pro. On the free tier the speaker button plays a 10-second sample on demand, with a countdown on the button; the upgrade options appear after the sample ends. Retries are unlimited — you can tap it again immediately.
Practical notes for a room:
- The app plays through the standard playback route, so it ignores the ring/silent switch and follows the phone's volume buttons.
- Plugging in or pulling out AirPods or headphones is handled — the engine re-activates the session and restarts on a route change, rather than going silent until you reconnect.
- For anything resembling a real listen, use the room's speakers from the host machine. A phone speaker is a phone speaker.
Networking away from your studio
PreviewMonitor is LAN-only by design: the phone and the host machine must be on the same local network. There is no cloud relay, no account, and nothing to configure remotely.
On someone else's network, the two things that break are predictable:
- Guest Wi-Fi with client isolation. Most guest networks stop devices talking to each other. Discovery finds nothing and a direct connection is refused. There is no workaround from inside the app — you need a network that permits device-to-device traffic.
- Two different networks. The laptop on Ethernet and the phone on Wi-Fi, or either one on a corporate VLAN, will not see each other.
If the machines are genuinely on the same network but discovery is slow or blocked, use the manual path: Connect a Device on the home screen, then Connect via IP address instead. The host's IP is shown in the plugin's setup window.
Ports, firewall rules and the discovery mechanism are in Deploying on multiple machines and Network reference.
What happens when things interrupt
The phone gets locked, or you switch apps
PreviewMonitor has no background execution. Lock the phone or switch to another app and the stream stops; the sockets go with it.
Coming back is handled automatically, in two tiers:
- Back within 5 seconds — the display layer is rebuilt and a fresh keyframe requested. A brief black flash, then the picture returns.
- Back after longer than that — the receiver reconnects fully, both the control channel and the video sockets, and requests a keyframe. Takes a moment longer.
If the connection cannot be re-established within 20 seconds, the app gives up and returns to the home screen rather than spinning forever. The host is listed there with its status.
A call comes in
An incoming call interrupts the audio session. The engine stops touching the audio graph while the interruption is active and restarts when it ends, so audio comes back on its own. Video is unaffected while the app stays foreground — a call banner does not background the app. Answering the call does, at which point the lock/switch behavior above applies.
Premiere Pro stops sending frames
A pill reading Premiere isn’t sending frames appears over the picture and stays there. This is not an error state and it never tears the session down — Premiere Pro raises it every time it is minimized on a parked playhead, and a client studying a frame for five minutes is the product working. Tap the pill for the walkthrough if Transmit really has been switched off.
Before a review session, check that Disable video output when in the background is unchecked in Premiere Pro's Playback settings. With it ticked, clicking away from Premiere Pro — to a browser, to your notes, to anything — stops the phone dead.
Related
- Layouts — Full Screen and every other overlay
- Live view — HUD behavior, chrome modes, zoom
- Audio — the full audio path and its settings
- Save frame — what the download button writes
- Stream won't start — when the connection does not come back
Last updated on
Working in After Effects
Video from After Effects works exactly as it does in Premiere Pro. Transport control does not — what works, what does not, and how to install the bridge.
Deploying on multiple machines
Ports, firewall rules, silent install, discovery, pairing storage and unsigned binaries — the facts for rolling PreviewMonitor out on a managed network.