No account[01]
Nothing to sign up for
Prewatch has no account or login. The App Store handles the purchase and the free trial.
Privacy
Where each step runs
Prewatch indexes your footage on your Mac. Video and audio never leave it, and nothing is sent to us. Here is every step, where it runs and what, if anything, goes out. This page is also Prewatch's privacy policy.
On your MacClaude or OpenAIYour AI app
Last updated October 19, 2026
No tracking[02]
No analytics in the app
The app contains no analytics, tracking, advertising or crash-reporting code.
No server[03]
Nothing is sent to us
There is no Prewatch server. Your footage and its index stay on your own disks.
Opt-in[04]
AI descriptions are your call
They stay off until you turn them on with your own Claude or OpenAI key, and you see the cost first.
Indexing
Indexing runs on your Mac
Everything Prewatch needs to index a folder runs on the Mac, with no account and no key.
| Step | Where it runs | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Decoding video | On your Mac | Decoded with macOS's own AVFoundation and VideoToolbox, inside the app. Your footage is read, never changed, copied or uploaded. |
| Shots, keyframes and contact sheets | On your Mac | Cuts inside each clip, the sharpest frames of each shot at three sizes, and contact sheets mapped to times. |
| Camera motion and quality flags | On your Mac | Locked off, steady, handheld or shaky per shot; flags for black, frozen, static, under- or overexposed, flat log and soft footage. |
| Camera metadata and location | On your Mac | Read from the file: camera, lens, exposure, timecode. Serial numbers are never read. A location the camera or phone recorded is kept as coordinates, with no place-name lookup, and you can switch recording it off in Settings. |
| Voice activity and loudness | On your Mac | A small voice-activity model finds the stretches with speech, so only those are transcribed. Loudness and loud moments are measured too. |
| Transcription | On your Mac | Whisper (whisper.cpp) on the Mac's GPU, in the language it detects. No audio is sent anywhere. |
| Speakers told apart | On your Mac | Speaker models shipped inside the app tell voices apart in each clip and recognize the same voice across a folder's clips (on by default; off in Settings → Speech & People). The voiceprints this needs are kept only on this Mac, in the app's own storage: never in the Prewatch folder, never sent anywhere, and deleted with Settings → Delete Voiceprints. Voices are named only by you. |
| Image tags | On your Mac | Apple's on-device Vision classifier labels the keyframes. |
| Days and scenes | On your Mac | Grouped from the clips' own capture times and locations. |
| The index | On your Mac | Written as plain files in a Prewatch folder next to the footage, or in a library on your Mac. Nothing is synced anywhere. |
Descriptions
Descriptions, only if you turn them on
They are optional. Nothing is sent until you turn descriptions on in Settings and save your own Claude or OpenAI API key, and you see what a clip costs first; describing clips you already have shows the full estimate before you confirm.
| Step | Where it runs | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Descriptions and summaries | Claude or OpenAI | A paragraph per clip, tags and a sentence per keyframe, written by the model you chose. |
| Moments with in and out points, and shot role | Claude or OpenAI | Returned by the same request. The moments are then scored on the Mac for sharpness, steadiness and exposure. |
| Translation into English | Claude or OpenAI | With descriptions on, transcript text in another language is translated by the same model. Without a key, Whisper translates on the Mac instead (rougher). |
| Checking your key | Claude or OpenAI | When you press Test key, one request asks the provider to list its models. It spends nothing and sends nothing about your footage. |
Sent, per clipTo Claude or OpenAI
- Still keyframes, as 768 px JPEGs (up to 12 per request)
- One overview contact sheet per clip
- The clip's file name, duration and camera
- Its shots and quality flags
- What is said: the transcript lines and their times
Never sentAnywhere
- Video or audio
- Locations
- Speaker labels, or anything about who speaks
- Serial numbers
- Anything to us: requests go straight to Anthropic or OpenAI
Prewatch · Settings · DescriptionsMac app
The screenshot arrives with the app
Descriptions stay off until you turn them on here and save your own key. The cost of a clip is shown first.
Chat and timelines
Chatting happens in your AI app
Claude or ChatGPT reads Prewatch's answers in your conversation, so they go to Anthropic or OpenAI like anything else you type there.
| Step | Where it runs | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Prewatch's MCP server | On your Mac | Runs with the app on your Mac. Claude Desktop, the ChatGPT app, Claude Code or Codex start it locally and ask it questions; it answers from the Prewatch folder. It never changes your footage or your edit. |
| Your conversation | Your AI app | What you ask, and what Prewatch answers (clip names, times, transcript lines, descriptions, and a frame when the assistant checks one), becomes part of your Claude or ChatGPT conversation, under your account and that company's terms. |
| DaVinci Resolve's MCP server | On your Mac | Runs with DaVinci Resolve Studio on your Mac. Your AI app asks it to build the timeline in the project you have open; Prewatch itself does not connect to Resolve. |
Network
Every connection the app makes
Indexing needs no internet. These are the only connections Prewatch makes, and none of them goes to us.
| Destination | When | What is sent |
|---|---|---|
| huggingface.co | The first time Prewatch transcribes, and again if you pick another speech model in Settings | A download of the Whisper speech model and a voice-activity model under 1 MB, each checked against a fixed checksum. Nothing about you or your footage is uploaded. |
| api.anthropic.com | Only with descriptions on and a Claude key saved | The keyframes, contact sheet and text listed above, with your key. Anthropic bills you directly. |
| api.openai.com | Only with descriptions on and an OpenAI key saved | The same, sent with store: false, so OpenAI keeps no copy of the response for later retrieval. OpenAI bills you directly. |
| Apple's App Store | When you start the trial, subscribe or restore a purchase | Handled entirely by Apple, under its privacy policy. We receive no names, email addresses or payment details from Apple. |
Legal
Privacy policy
Who we are
Prewatch is made by Jere & CO, Itäinen Pitkäkatu 90 as 4, 20810 Turku, Finland, the data controller for the personal data described on this page. Write to hello@getprewatch.com with any question about it.
The app
The Prewatch app collects no personal data. It has no account, and no analytics, tracking, advertising or crash-reporting code. Your footage, transcripts and index stay on your disks, and nothing is sent to us. The only connections it makes are listed above.
Claude, OpenAI and your AI app
If you turn descriptions on, the data listed under Descriptions goes from your Mac directly to Anthropic or OpenAI, under your own account and API key with them, and their terms and privacy policies apply. Your key is kept in the macOS Keychain, used only for those requests and never written to a file or a log. We never see it or the data.
When you chat, Claude or ChatGPT reads what Prewatch answers as part of your conversation, under your account with Anthropic or OpenAI.
This website
getprewatch.com is hosted on Cloudflare and sets no cookies. Cloudflare processes each request, including your IP address, to deliver the page and protect the site; we keep no log of visits.
Visitor statistics. To see which pages are read and where visitors come from, the site uses Umami, an open-source analytics tool we run ourselves (umami.jere.app, on our own server rented from Hetzner in Germany and reached through Cloudflare), so no analytics company sees the data. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. It records the page, the referring site, your browser, operating system, device type and country, and two events: opening the launch-email form and signing up (never the address you type). Your IP address is used only to work out the country and is not stored; visits are counted with a hash that changes every day, so you can't be followed from one day to the next or across sites. If your browser sends Do Not Track, nothing is recorded. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used.
The launch email
If you ask to hear when Prewatch is on the App Store, we store your email address and the time you gave it, and nothing else: no IP address, no browser details, no cookies. It is kept in a Cloudflare D1 database in the EU. We use it once, to send a single launch email from our own mailbox (no mailing-list service), and then delete every address.
We store it because you asked us to. To have yours removed sooner, write to hello@getprewatch.com.
Third parties
- Anthropic
- The Claude API (descriptions, with your key), Claude Desktop and Claude Code.
- OpenAI
- The OpenAI API (descriptions, with your key), the ChatGPT app and Codex.
- Blackmagic Design
- DaVinci Resolve Studio and its MCP server, on your Mac.
- Apple
- The App Store (purchases and the trial) and the macOS frameworks Prewatch uses on your Mac.
- Cloudflare
- Hosting for this website and the launch-email list.
- Hugging Face
- Hosting for the speech models the app downloads.
- Hetzner
- The server in Germany where our own visitor statistics (Umami) run.
Each handles data under its own terms. Apart from Cloudflare and Hetzner, which run this website and its statistics for us, you choose whether to use them, and we share nothing with any of them.
Your rights
You can ask what we hold about you (at most, your address on the launch list), and have it corrected or deleted, by writing to hello@getprewatch.com. We answer within a month. You can also complain to your data protection authority; in Finland, where we are based, that is the Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman (tietosuoja.fi).
Changes
When this policy changes, we update this page and the date on it.
Questions
Something not covered here?
Write to us and we'll answer, and add it to this page if others are likely to ask.