Known limitations

Every known limitation in PreviewMonitor, what triggers it, and what to do about it — including the silent black screen on 4K HEVC on Windows.

An honest list of what PreviewMonitor does not do, and what goes wrong when you push it past those edges. Everything here is current behavior, not a roadmap.

At a glance

Limitation	Affects	What to do
Silent black screen on 4K HEVC	Windows, Pro, Resolution Limit at Source or 2160p on a 4K sequence	Lower Resolution Limit, or switch Codec to H.264, or turn on the HW HEVC toggle
One PC appears many times in the device list	Windows	Tap any of the rows — they are all the same machine
Long GOP Mode can't go below about one keyframe per second	Windows with NVIDIA or Intel hardware encoding	Nothing needed — the bandwidth win still lands
Frame-step in After Effects moves the selected layer	Both platforms, After Effects	Deselect all layers before using transport, or use transport in Premiere Pro only
No audio in After Effects, ever	Both platforms, After Effects	Monitor audio from Premiere Pro, or from the host's own speakers
No shuttle controls at all	Everywhere	Use the five buttons that exist
Transport needs the host app in front	Windows, keystroke fallback only	Leave Premiere Pro or After Effects focused while using the transport bar
No HDR or Rec.2020	Everywhere	Judge framing only on HDR timelines; grade on a calibrated display
One phone at a time	Everywhere	A second phone replaces the first
Local network only	Everywhere	Both devices on the same Wi-Fi; no VPN, no internet
English only	Everywhere	—
iPhone only, no iPad	Everywhere	—
Installers are unsigned	Both platforms	Click through SmartScreen / Gatekeeper once
The macOS `.pkg` has no uninstaller	macOS	Delete the two bundles by hand
Discoverable on network doesn't apply until restart	Windows	Restart Premiere Pro after changing it
No IP address printed under the QR code	macOS	Open Advanced info → NETWORK to read it
Trusted-phone list overflows its card	Windows, from about four paired phones	Cosmetic only; Forget phones you no longer use
Downscaling aliases fine detail	Windows, any Resolution Limit below Source	Raise the rung, or check fine detail at Source
An unusual GPU's encoder is not offered	Windows, GPUs other than NVIDIA, Intel and AMD	Use Software (CPU)
Preferences → Control Surface shows the old name	Both platforms	Cosmetic; it is the right plugin

Silent black screen: 4K HEVC on Windows

This is the failure most likely to look like "the product is broken". There is no error message, no dialog and no banner — on either side. The device is ticked, the phone says it is connected, and the picture is black.

All of these have to be true at once:

Windows host with an NVIDIA or Intel GPU
Codec is H.265 (the default)
The Setup window's Use NVIDIA / Intel HW HEVC encoder toggle is off (the default)
The encoded picture is above about 6 megapixels — in practice, Resolution Limit at Source or 2160p on a 4K sequence

Why it happens. NVIDIA and Intel expose hardware HEVC only through an asynchronous Media Foundation transform. With the toggle off, the plugin skips every asynchronous transform, so hardware HEVC becomes unavailable and the encoder falls through to Media Foundation's software HEVC encoder. That encoder is refused above 6 megapixels on purpose: at 4K it blocked Premiere Pro's video thread long enough for Premiere Pro's own watchdog to kill the application with no crash dump. The measured boundary on the machine where this was found was 1620×2880 encoding fine and 2160×3840 deadlocking. Refusing the configuration is the lesser failure — but it produces no picture and says nothing.

Any one of these fixes it:

Lower Resolution Limit. 1080p or below is well under the ceiling and is what most phone monitoring wants anyway.
Switch Codec to H.264. The software H.264 encoder is a different, well-behaved component and is not subject to the cap. It is CPU-hungry at 4K but it works.
Turn on Use NVIDIA / Intel HW HEVC encoder in the Setup window, then restart Premiere Pro. This gives you real hardware HEVC at 4K.

The default Resolution Limit of 720p never trips this, and the free tier's 360p cap cannot reach it. It is specific to a Pro user choosing maximum quality.

One Windows PC appears many times in the device list

On Windows the plugin can end up holding several network advertisements for the same machine, so the phone's device list fills with near-identical rows — zoock-pc — premiere, zoock-pc — premiere (2), zoock-pc — premiere (3) and so on. Thirteen duplicates for a single running copy of Premiere Pro have been observed.

Some duplication is legitimate: Premiere Pro creates one Transmit instance per monitor, so Program plus Source is two. A long numbered run is not.

Every row is the same host, on the same port, with the same identity — tap any of them and it connects normally. The duplicates are cosmetic, but they are also the first screen a new user sees, which is why this is listed as high impact rather than low.

Restarting Premiere Pro does not reliably clear them; the extra registrations appear to survive a restart.

Long GOP can't go below about one keyframe per second

On Windows with NVIDIA or Intel hardware encoding, the encoder inserts a keyframe roughly once a second regardless of the GOP size the plugin asks for. The plugin forces additional keyframes in software when you pick All-Intra or Short, so those two modes are exact. It cannot force fewer.

So Long — nominally a 600-frame GOP — behaves as roughly one keyframe per second on that hardware. Getting below that would mean bypassing Media Foundation for NVIDIA's encoder API directly.

In practice this costs you almost nothing: the reason to pick Long is smaller predicted frames and therefore lower bandwidth, and you still get that. Fewer keyframes was never the product benefit.

After Effects transport

After Effects gets video from the same shared plugin, so the picture works exactly as it does in Premiere Pro. Transport is a different story.

The dedicated After Effects transport plugin, PremiereLiveAE.aex, is Windows-only and ships in no installer — neither the .exe nor the MSI includes it, because its install path is After Effects-version-specific and After Effects may not be installed at all. On macOS it does not exist.

Without it, every transport button falls back to synthetic keystrokes using Premiere Pro's key map. On Windows those are injected into the system input queue with SendInput, so they reach whatever application is in front; on macOS they are posted into the host application's own event queue, so the foreground barrier is different there. Either way After Effects interprets Premiere Pro's keys with its own map, and the results diverge:

Phone button	Key sent	What After Effects does
Play/Pause	Space	Toggles preview — correct
Step forward / back one frame	→ / ←	Shifts the selected layer one frame in time. After Effects steps the playhead with Page Down / Page Up, not the arrow keys.
Go to In point / Go to Out point	Shift+I / Shift+O	Premiere Pro's Go to In / Go to Out shortcuts; After Effects maps these keys differently

The frame-step buttons move a selected layer in After Effects, which changes your composition. The playhead does not move, so nothing re-renders and the phone's picture is unchanged — there is no feedback that it happened, and Undo is the only way back. Deselect all layers (Edit → Deselect All) before touching the transport bar, or simply do not use transport from the phone in After Effects.

If PremiereLiveAE.aex is placed by hand, frame stepping and the two jump buttons switch to the real AEGP API and move the composition's current-time indicator correctly — and the two outer buttons genuinely go to the comp's start and its last whole frame, unlike Premiere Pro's In/Out behavior. Play/pause is still a Space keystroke, but the bridge posts it directly to After Effects' panel window and flips the application's active flag first, so it lands even when After Effects is minimized. With the bridge, nothing needs After Effects in front.

After Effects has no audio at all

There is no audio handling anywhere in the plugin's After Effects side — not on the free tier, not on Pro, on neither platform. Nothing to enable, no setting that changes it.

The phone cannot tell either. The app assumes a host has audio until the plugin reports otherwise, and the After Effects side never reports otherwise, so the speaker button stays in its ordinary state instead of turning orange. It looks like a working mute toggle and delivers permanent silence.

Monitor audio from Premiere Pro, or from your machine's own output. See No audio.

There are no shuttle controls

The iPhone app declares five transport commands: Go to In point, Step back one frame, Play/Pause, Step forward one frame and Go to Out point. None of them is a shuttle, and there is no button on any screen that sends one.

The wire protocol reserves opcodes for large steps and for shuttle left / stop / right, and the desktop plugin implements all of them against Premiere Pro's transport suite — but no shipping build of the app can send those commands to any host. They are protocol headroom. This is not an After Effects limitation; shuttle is unreachable in Premiere Pro too.

See The After Effects artist's guide and Transport control.

Transport needs the host app in front, on Windows

This applies only to the synthetic-keystroke fallback — which on Windows is the shipping state for After Effects (no installer places the .aex), and in Premiere Pro applies whenever the Control Surface plugin has not loaded. The fallback uses SendInput, so Windows delivers the keystroke to whatever application currently has focus. If the Setup window, a browser, or anything else is in front, the keystroke lands there instead.

Neither bridge has this problem: the Control Surface plugin names commands through Premiere Pro's SDK, and the After Effects bridge posts to After Effects' own window. On macOS the fallback itself posts into the host's event queue rather than the system input queue, so the foreground requirement does not apply there.

Keep Premiere Pro or After Effects focused while you use the transport bar. See Transport does nothing.

No HDR, no Rec.2020

The pipeline is 8-bit in and 8-bit 4:2:0 out, with no transfer-function handling, no tone mapping and no wide-gamut support. An HDR timeline still streams, but what you see is Premiere Pro's own 8-bit conversion decoded as BT.709 SDR.

Related and worth reading before you trust a color decision: the plugin writes no color-space tags into either bitstream. See Picture and color.

One phone at a time

The plugin accepts one control connection. A second phone connecting replaces the first — the first phone's stream stops. There is no fan-out and no multi-viewer mode.

Local network only

Both devices must be on the same local network, over IPv4. No internet, no VPN, no IPv6 tunnel, no relay.

This is a design decision rather than an unfinished feature — it is why there is no account, no cloud and no upload, and it is what keeps latency in tens of milliseconds. See Network reference.

English only

The app ships no localization. Every string is English, on every device, regardless of system language.

iPhone only

There is no iPad build. The app is built for the iPhone device family and requires iOS 17.0 or newer.

Unsigned installers

Platform	What you see	What to do
Windows	SmartScreen warns on first run because the installer is unsigned	More info → Run anyway
macOS	The `.pkg` is unsigned and un-notarized, so Gatekeeper refuses a double-click	Right-click the `.pkg` → Open, then confirm

Code signing is planned. Nothing about the plugins themselves changes when it lands.

The macOS package has no uninstaller

The macOS .pkg installs two bundles and provides no removal tool. To uninstall, delete both by hand:

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/7.0/MediaCore/PremiereLive.bundle
/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/ControlSurface/PremiereLiveCtrl.bundle

PremiereLive is the internal engineering name; these are the correct paths. Quit Premiere Pro first. See Reset and reinstall.

Windows does have an uninstaller, under Add or Remove Programs, and it also removes the firewall rules the installer wrote.

Smaller things

Discoverable on network needs a restart, on Windows

Unticking Discoverable on network in the Windows Setup window saves the change but does not apply it to the running transport — the machine stays visible to phones until Premiere Pro restarts. macOS applies it immediately.

No IP address under the QR code, on macOS

The macOS Setup window is missing the IP-address caption that Windows prints under the QR code, which is exactly what you want when discovery has failed and you need to type an address by hand. The address is still available: expand Advanced info and read the NETWORK card.

The trusted-phone list overflows, on Windows

The TRUSTED IPHONES card on Windows is a fixed height, so from about four paired phones onward the rows draw past its edge, and at most 30 rows are drawn at all. Cosmetic — the pairings all still work. Forget phones you no longer use to tidy it. macOS has no such limit.

Downscaling aliases fine detail, on Windows

The Windows scaler is nearest-neighbor while the macOS scaler is Lanczos, so at any Resolution Limit below Source a Windows host aliases fine detail — hair, fabric, small type — where a Mac host does not. Details and workarounds in Picture and color.

An unusual GPU's encoder is not offered, on Windows

The Encoder picker lists entries only for NVIDIA, Intel and AMD. A hardware encoder from any other vendor is detected but gets no entry, so the picker shows only Software (CPU). Use that; it works.

Preferences → Control Surface shows the old name

In Premiere Pro's Preferences → Control Surface, the device is listed as PremiereLive rather than PreviewMonitor. It is the right plugin; only that one display string was never renamed. Everything else — the Transmit device in Preferences → Playback, the Setup window, the installer, the network advertisement — reads PreviewMonitor.

Not limitations, just design

Worth stating plainly, because they get reported as bugs:

The stream does not adapt automatically. You pick Resolution Limit, GOP Mode, Codec and Encoder by hand, and they stay where you put them. That predictability is the point.
Nothing is ever retransmitted. Recovery is forward error correction plus a keyframe on demand. See Network reference.
Adobe Media Encoder is not supported. The plugin binary happens to load there; that is not support and it is not tested.

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