Frequently asked

Prewatch is a Mac app that watches your footage before you edit. For every clip it finds the shots, keyframes and camera motion, flags soft, dark or frozen footage, reads the camera metadata, transcribes speech, tells speakers apart and groups the clips into days and scenes. With your own Claude or OpenAI key it also describes each clip and marks the moments worth cutting, with in and out points. Claude or ChatGPT then answers questions about your footage from this index and, in DaVinci Resolve Studio, builds the cut with you.

No. Nobody has to tap, mark or take notes on set. Prewatch works on the footage you already have: today's cards, last year's trip, a shoot nobody logged. Point it at the folder and it watches every clip itself.

To chat with your footage you need Claude Desktop or the ChatGPT app for Mac, signed in to your account. Prewatch connects to either with one click. Claude Code and the Codex CLI work too. ChatGPT in a web browser can't reach apps on your Mac.

An API key is optional. Indexing, transcripts, speakers, scenes and search all run on your Mac without one. Descriptions, moments and the better English translations use your own API key from Anthropic (Claude) or OpenAI; that company bills you for the use directly, and Settings shows what a clip costs before you turn it on.

No. There is no Prewatch account and no sign-up. The subscription runs through your Apple Account on the Mac App Store, and the index is written to your own disk.

Indexing does, once the speech models are on your Mac. The first transcription downloads them once (Whisper's model is about 1.6 GB), so start it while you are online. After that, shots, transcripts, speakers, tags, scenes and search need no connection. Chatting needs the internet, because Claude and ChatGPT run in the cloud, and so do descriptions.

Measured on an M4 Mac mini with the footage on a local disk: a 30-second 4K clip in about 5 seconds, and a ten-minute 4K clip in about 10 seconds when a low-resolution proxy sits beside it, because Prewatch analyzes the proxy. Both clips had no speech. Speech adds time: Whisper transcribes every stretch where someone talks, and telling speakers apart takes about four minutes per hour of talk. Footage on a network share is slower to read than a local disk.

100 languages, from English, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese to Japanese, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic (the full list). Whisper detects the language of each clip and transcribes it on your Mac. Speech in another language also gets an English translation: written by Claude or OpenAI when descriptions are on, or a rougher one by Whisper on the Mac without a key. You can set a folder's language if detection gets it wrong.

No. Prewatch is an independent app by Jere & CO. It works alongside DaVinci Resolve, Claude and ChatGPT and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blackmagic Design, Anthropic or OpenAI.

Building timelines by chat needs DaVinci Resolve Studio 21.1 or later, whose built-in MCP server lets your assistant work in Resolve. With the free version you can still index your footage, search it and ask Claude or ChatGPT about it, then place the clips yourself. A file handoff that the free version can import is planned.

Not directly. The chat-to-timeline workflow is built for DaVinci Resolve Studio. A file handoff that Final Cut Pro and the free Resolve can import is planned; there is no Premiere Pro integration. Whatever you edit in, the index is plain files, so you can search your footage, find the clips and timecodes and bring them in yourself.

DaVinci Resolve Studio's MCP server lets an AI assistant operate Resolve: organize media, build timelines, change settings, render. Prewatch gives the same assistant an index of what is inside every clip of your footage folder: shots, transcripts, speakers, scenes and moments with in and out points. Used together in Claude Desktop or ChatGPT, the assistant finds the material with Prewatch and builds the timeline with Resolve.

No. Prewatch only reads your footage and writes its own files. Changes to a Resolve project are made by Resolve's own MCP server, when you ask your assistant for them in the chat.

Macs with Apple silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 26 or later. Transcription runs on the Mac's GPU. There is no Intel or Windows version.

Footage from Sony, Canon, Panasonic, Nikon, Fujifilm, Blackmagic Design, ARRI, RED, DJI, GoPro, Insta360 and iPhone, in the formats macOS decodes: H.264, HEVC (including 10-bit 4:2:2), ProRes and MPEG-2 in MOV and MP4, and AVCHD (.MTS and .M2TS). It reads the camera metadata that Fujifilm, GoPro, DJI, Canon and iPhone files carry, and uses the low-resolution proxies that DJI drones (.LRF) and Resolve's Proxy folder provide, so a card indexes faster. Raw formats (Blackmagic RAW, REDCODE, ARRIRAW, Sony X-OCN, Canon Cinema RAW Light, ProRes RAW) and MXF files are in development; today they appear in the list but are not analyzed.

Yes. Point Prewatch at a folder on the Mac, an external drive, a network share or a synced folder. It can watch the folder and index new clips as they arrive, waiting until a file has finished copying. Clips are identified by their content, not their path, so the index still matches after you copy the footage to another drive or mount the share somewhere else. To search and chat while the drive is unplugged, keep the index in a library on your Mac.

Yes. One Mac indexes a folder; any number of Macs can read its Prewatch folder, even when the share is mounted at a different path on each.

No video and no audio ever leaves your Mac. If you turn descriptions on and add your key, Prewatch sends still keyframes, one overview contact sheet and the transcript text of each clip to the provider you chose, Claude or OpenAI. Locations and anything about speakers are never sent. When you chat in Claude or ChatGPT, the assistant reads what Prewatch answers, as part of your conversation. Every step and where it runs.

By default in a Prewatch folder next to your footage, so the index travels with the media to another drive, a NAS or a synced folder. You can keep it in a library on your Mac instead, which also works while the footage drive is unplugged. Either way it is plain Markdown, JSON, TSV, subtitle and JPEG files, with a README that explains the layout to any person or AI agent that opens the folder.

It keeps working: newer versions read the indexes older ones wrote. When an update reads something better, such as camera metadata, Prewatch refreshes the affected clips the next time it looks at the folder. A clip that has to be indexed again keeps the description you already paid for. To rebuild a whole library with new settings, use Re-index Everything.

Prewatch is an App Store subscription with a 14-day free trial: $59 a year or $7.99 a month after it. You manage or cancel it in your Apple Account's subscription settings; cancel before the trial ends and you are not charged.

Apple handles payments and refunds for App Store subscriptions, so a refund is requested from Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com, signed in with the Apple Account you subscribed with. If you cancel instead, Prewatch keeps working until the end of the period you paid for.

You choose Claude or OpenAI and use your own key. With the default Claude model (Claude Haiku 5.5), describing a typical clip costs a fraction of a cent and a long take about one cent; the moments come back in the same request. OpenAI's default (GPT-6 Luna) is priced the same. Settings shows what a typical clip costs with the provider you chose, and describing clips you already have shows the full estimate before you confirm.

No. Chatting with your footage uses your normal Claude or ChatGPT app and plan. Descriptions use the separate API, billed by Anthropic or OpenAI per use, so you need an API key from their developer console. It is optional: everything else works without it.

The index stays yours. It is plain Markdown, JSON, TSV, subtitle and JPEG files on your own disk, readable in any text editor or by any AI agent, with or without Prewatch. Indexing new footage and the connection to Claude or ChatGPT need an active subscription.

Write to hello@getprewatch.com. For a problem, say which Mac and macOS version you use, what you did and what happened; a screenshot helps.