How to Connect SmoothyEdit to Adobe Premiere Pro

Copying timestamps from a browser window and manually scrubbing to find them on a Premiere Pro timeline is one of those small inefficiencies that compounds over time. If you are cutting shorts from a 45-minute podcast three times a week, you might spend 20-30 minutes per session just navigating between the browser and your NLE.

The SmoothyEdit desktop plugin eliminates this step entirely by establishing a direct connection between the webapp and Adobe Premiere Pro.

What the Plugin Does

The desktop plugin runs locally on your machine and connects to Premiere Pro through Adobe's CEP (Common Extensibility Platform). It communicates with the SmoothyEdit webapp through a local WebSocket connection — no data leaves your machine.

The core functionality is sending AI-generated results directly from the webapp to your Premiere Pro timeline. When you run tools like Find Shorts or Find B-Roll on the dashboard, each result includes a Send to Premiere button that drops color-coded markers at the exact timestamps on your open sequence.

Beyond the web connection, the desktop plugin also includes its own set of tools that run directly inside Premiere Pro:

• Auto-Switch Multicam — automatically cuts between cameras based on speaker detection
• AI Captions — generates word-level captions locally using Whisper AI
• Silence Removal — detects and removes silent sections with configurable threshold and padding
• Best Shorts Markers — AI detection of engaging moments, with markers placed directly on your timeline

Setting It Up

The setup process takes about five minutes:

1. Download the plugin. Go to the Premiere Pro Plugin page and download the installer for your operating system (macOS or Windows).

2. Install the extension. Run the installer. It places the extension into Premiere Pro's extensions folder. Restart Premiere Pro if it was already open.

3. Open the extension panel. In Premiere Pro, go to Window → Extensions → SmoothyEdit. The panel will appear in your workspace.

4. Connect to the webapp. Open SmoothyEdit in your browser. The plugin and webapp will discover each other automatically over the local WebSocket. You will see a green "Connected" indicator in both the browser and the Premiere Pro panel.

Using Markers in Practice

Once connected, the workflow becomes straightforward:

1. Upload your content to the SmoothyEdit dashboard.
2. Run the Find Shorts tool (or any other tool that produces timestamps).
3. Each result card will show a Send to Premiere button.
4. Click it. Markers appear instantly on your active sequence timeline.
5. Jump from marker to marker in Premiere Pro using the standard marker navigation and make your cuts.

The markers include color coding and descriptions, so you can see at a glance what each flagged section contains without switching back to the browser.

Silence Removal

One of the most tedious parts of editing talking-head or podcast content is removing dead air. The silence removal tool scans your sequence for sections where the audio drops below a configurable threshold and removes them automatically.

You can adjust two key parameters:

• Threshold — the volume level below which audio is considered "silent." Lower values catch only true silence; higher values catch quiet breaths and pauses.
• Padding — how many milliseconds of buffer to leave on either side of each cut. This prevents the edit from feeling unnaturally tight. A padding of 100-200ms usually produces clean, natural-sounding results.

The output is a set of cuts applied directly to your sequence. You can review and fine-tune them rather than building the entire edit from scratch.

Desktop vs. Web

The desktop plugin tools (multicam, silence removal, captions, shorts markers) complement the web-based tools (hooks, titles, descriptions, thumbnails). The web tools are about content ideation — generating ideas from your transcript. The desktop tools are about timeline manipulation — automating repetitive editing tasks directly in Premiere Pro.

Both connect to the same account, and both work with the same content pipeline.