It connects but nothing happens

The phone finds the computer and pairs, then sits there. Firewall rules, background output and a missing restart are the usual causes.

The computer appears in the list, the connect goes through — and then the phone stays on Connecting…, or drops back to the connect screen after about eight seconds.

That eight seconds is the app's own escalation timer: if it is not streaming by then, it gives up and returns you to the list. It almost always means the control channel opened but the video never arrived, which is a port problem far more often than a plugin problem.

If you get as far as a live picture and then have trouble, you want The screen is black or The stream stutters or lags instead.

1. Restart the Adobe app after installing

Premiere Pro scans for plugins only at launch. If PreviewMonitor was installed while Premiere Pro was open, the entry can be missing entirely, or stale.

Quit Premiere Pro completely and reopen it. The Windows installer says the same thing on its final page: PreviewMonitor was installed. Restart Adobe Premiere to load the plugin.

2. Windows: check the firewall rule on both profiles

The stream uses three different ports and all of them have to be open on the profile Windows has assigned to your current network:

Protocol	Ports	Carries
TCP	47100 (Premiere Pro), 47110 (After Effects)	control channel
UDP	47101	video
UDP	47102	audio
UDP	5353	discovery (mDNS)

The installer creates a single inbound rule named PreviewMonitor covering TCP 47100, 47110, 47120 and 47130, UDP 47101–47102, and UDP 5353 — on both the Private and the Public profile. It does that deliberately, because new networks default to Public and a rule scoped to Private only would silently fail there.

Confirm the rule survives, from an elevated Command Prompt:

netsh advfirewall firewall show rule name=PreviewMonitor

You should see three rule entries (TCP, UDP data, UDP mDNS), each listing Profiles: Domain,Private,Public or at minimum Private,Public. If the command reports No rules match the specified criteria, the rule was removed — reinstall PreviewMonitor to recreate it.

Windows Defender Firewall inbound rules filtered to the PreviewMonitor entries

All three PreviewMonitor inbound rules must be enabled and green, and the Profile column must include both Private and Public.

If you clicked Cancel on the Windows prompt

This is the one that is genuinely hard to diagnose, because the symptom is permanent and there is no warning anywhere.

If Premiere Pro ever showed the Windows Security Alert — allow this app to communicate on these networks? dialog and you dismissed it with Cancel, Windows did not "do nothing". It wrote a Block rule for that executable. Block rules take precedence over allow rules, so the PreviewMonitor port rules are still there and still ignored.

Open Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security (run wf.msc), and select Inbound Rules.

Sort by the Action column and look for Block entries whose Program is Adobe Premiere Pro.exe or AfterFX.exe. There are usually two — one for TCP and one for UDP.

Delete them. Do not merely disable them; a disabled block rule can be re-enabled by a later prompt.

Restart Premiere Pro and reconnect. If Windows prompts again, tick both Private networks and Public networks before clicking Allow access.

Third-party security suites (ESET, Bitdefender, Norton, Kaspersky) install their own firewall in front of the Windows one, and the PreviewMonitor rule does not apply to them. If one is installed, allow Adobe Premiere Pro.exe for inbound TCP 47100 and inbound UDP 47101–47102 and 5353 there as well.

3. macOS: allow incoming connections

macOS asks Do you want the application "Adobe Premiere Pro" to accept incoming network connections? the first time the plugin opens its listening socket. PreviewMonitor does not touch the macOS firewall and cannot pre-authorize itself, so this prompt is unavoidable and it is easy to click Deny while looking at something else.

The macOS accept-incoming-connections prompt for Adobe Premiere Pro

Click Allow. This is the only host-side permission PreviewMonitor needs on macOS.

If you already denied it, fix it in System Settings → Network → Firewall → Options: find Adobe Premiere Pro in the list and set it to Allow incoming connections. If the app is not listed, add it with the + button and point it at the Premiere Pro application inside /Applications.

The prompt names the Adobe app, not PreviewMonitor. The plugin runs inside Premiere Pro's process, so the listening socket belongs to Premiere Pro as far as macOS is concerned.

4. Leave background output enabled

In Preferences → Playback, Disable video output when in the background must stay unchecked.

Premiere Pro Preferences Playback panel with PreviewMonitor listed under Video Device

Video Stream ticked, Audio Stream ticked if you want sound, and Disable video output when in the background unchecked.

With it checked, Premiere Pro stops pushing frames the moment it loses focus. Since you are almost certainly looking at the phone and not at Premiere Pro, the stream dies exactly when you start using it — which reads as "it connects, then nothing".

5. Check the plugin log

On Windows, the plugin writes to:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\PremiereLive\plugin.log

After Effects writes to plugin-ae.log in the same folder. The file rotates to plugin.log.1 at 4 MB, so there are never more than two.

Confirm the sockets came up at all:

findstr /C:"StartListening" "%LOCALAPPDATA%\PremiereLive\plugin.log"

A healthy line reads StartListening control=:47100 video=:47101 audio=:47102. If that line is missing, the plugin never started — go back to step 1. If it is present and the phone still cannot connect, the ports are being blocked between the two devices: firewall, or a network that isolates its clients.

On macOS there is no log file. Read the log with Console.app, or:

/usr/bin/log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.premierelive.plugin"' --last 10m --info

The --info flag is required — without it the informational lines are hidden.

More detail in Logs and diagnostics.

6. Only one phone at a time

A second iPhone connecting replaces the first. If a colleague's phone is already streaming from that machine, yours takes over and theirs drops — and if they reconnect, yours drops. Check nobody else is connected before assuming the connection is broken.