One price. Your own key. No credits.

Prewatch is a Mac app that indexes a folder of video before you edit. For every clip it finds the shots, keyframes and camera motion, flags problems, transcribes speech, tells speakers apart and groups the clips into days and scenes. It writes all of this as plain files next to your footage, so Claude can answer questions about the footage and help you cut it in DaVinci Resolve.

The chat-to-timeline workflow uses the MCP server built into DaVinci Resolve Studio 21.1, which trade press reports as a Studio feature. With the free version of Resolve you can still index footage and ask Claude about it. A file handoff (FCPXML) that free Resolve and Final Cut Pro can import is planned and not available yet.

To chat with your footage you need Claude Desktop, signed in to your Claude account. Prewatch connects to it with one click.

An API key is optional. Indexing, transcripts, speakers, scenes and search all run on your Mac without one. Written descriptions and summaries of each clip use your own Claude API key from Anthropic; Anthropic bills you for that use directly, and Prewatch shows an estimate before anything is sent.

With the default model (Claude Haiku 5.5) a request covers twelve keyframes and costs about $0.001, so a typical clip costs a fraction of a cent and a long take about one cent. Prewatch shows the estimate for the folder before it starts. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is finer on landscapes and wildlife at roughly twenty times the price.

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 Claude API. Locations are never sent with them. When you chat in Claude Desktop, Claude reads what Prewatch answers, as part of your conversation. Every step and where it runs.

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.

Video files that macOS itself can decode, in MOV and MP4: H.264, HEVC and ProRes from cameras, drones, action cameras and phones. It reads the camera metadata that Fujifilm, GoPro, DJI, Canon and iPhone files carry, and uses the low-resolution proxies that DJI (.LRF), GoPro (.LRV) and Resolve's Proxy folder provide. Raw formats such as Blackmagic RAW and REDCODE are listed but not analysed.

By default in a Shotlog 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.

Yes. One Mac indexes a folder; any number of Macs can read its shotlog, even when the share is mounted at a different path on each. Clips are identified by their content, not their file path.

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.

The Shotlog files are yours. They are plain Markdown, JSON, TSV, WebVTT and JPEG files on your own disk, and they stay there.

No. Prewatch is an independent app. It works alongside DaVinci Resolve and Claude Desktop and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blackmagic Design or Anthropic.