Major Bug: Watchtower is breaking Premiere Pro MAC (Multiple Devices)

thefadedhero

Description
Since upgrading to premiere 2025 I've experienced countless bugs and issues, which I suspected was a result of the new adobe release. But it's only after completely uninstalling Watchtower that I've realized the issue is with the Watchtower plugin, not Premiere.

The plugin bricks multiple window panels (in my case, Text and Export). If you try and open these panels, they simply fail to open. If you wait long enough, the panels will eventually open, but they're unusable as the response time is major (talking minutes between actions), and the export panel simply refuses to work.

As a result for the past 3 months I've just been sending every finished project to Media Encoder which is a temporary solution, but I eventually got tired of it and thought, "Maybe watchtower is the issue..." so I uninstalled it from my machine, and would you know it, the issues were COMPLETELY gone and the program returned to working as expected.

This was not an isolated incident either. I just wrapped production on a large documentary project in which we had 3 editors (one realtime deliverables, main doc editor, assistant editor). I purchased additional licenses for Watchtower so that we could all utilize the plugin to auto-import new footage. Great idea in concept... turned out to be a nightmare. None of our editing machines could load the text panel or the export panel. Not sure if other windows are effected, but this is what led us to discard WatchTower in our workflow and the issues disappeared.

Love the program!! But currently not a viable option as it's interrupting an important feature set in Premiere.

Watchtower version: V1.5.0 as well as latest version
Premiere Pro (After Effects) version: 25.2.3
Operating System and version: Apple M1 Max, 15.6.1

I would share more screenshots, but the plugin simply stops the panels from loading, so not much to see

thefadedhero

For reference, after uninstalling watchtower, the 'Text' and 'Export' panel is working perfectly

Sir_Ivan

What you experienced is related to ExtendScript engine logic. It is synchronous. If it is occupied by Watchtower, Export/Text panels won't work (because they also rely on ExtendScript).
Watchtower might occupy ExtendScript on project load, to cache data, so then it works faster.
In your case, how big was your project, specifically how many items did you have in your project panel?

thefadedhero

Sir_Ivan Thanks for the fast reply. I've experienced this issue with projects of various sizes. From standard projects with a few camera sources and about 15-20 clips inside each, to large scale documentaries or recurring content projects with hundreds of files. On other projects I've also used Watchtower to sync an assets folder containing all of my sound effects, overlays, textures, etc.. (₈₀₀+ files).

With your statement that Extendscript is synchronous... is there a solution to the issues introduced by using watchtower? Or is there a patch in the works? Otherwise the tool is unusable in it's current state.

Sir_Ivan

thefadedhero do you have that issue reproducible in your current projects? If yes, that will be great to troubleshoot it together, can you write me to support@knightsoftheeditingtable.com and we can continue there.