The hardest part of any plugin suite is not the plugins, it is the five minutes right after you install them. You have a new desktop app sitting open, your host app looks exactly the same as it did before, and nothing is obviously different. I have watched enough editors hit that exact moment to know it deserves a proper walkthrough instead of a line in a readme.
So here is the whole thing, start to finish. Filmit Studio is the desktop app that installs and manages our tools, and it is also the panel you work from once you are inside After Effects or Premiere Pro. Once it is installed you get a hub panel in your host app, every tool you own launches from that panel as a native panel of its own, and our effects and transitions show up in the host app's normal effects list right alongside everything else you already use.
This is a getting-started guide, so I am going to be precise about the order of operations and the exact menu paths, because one of them (a restart) is where almost everybody gets briefly stuck. Follow it top to bottom and you will have a tool running inside After Effects or Premiere Pro by the end of it.
This video may reference an older version of Filmit Studio. Features and UI may have changed since recording.
Start in the desktop app
After you download and install Filmit Studio, the desktop app opens on its dashboard. It is deliberately plain. The dashboard is where we post news and updates, so it is worth a glance whenever you open it, because that is where you will hear about new releases and changes before anywhere else.
Below that you have the tools section. This is the part to actually spend a minute in. It lists what is available so you can browse the library, read what each tool does, and install the ones you want. There are more sections to click through as well, and none of it needs configuring, it is just there to look through. The important idea is that the desktop app is your installer and your library. Nothing you do inside After Effects or Premiere Pro requires you to keep the desktop app in front of you.
Let Studio finish its installation process before you move on. That matters for the next step.
Open your host app (and restart it if it was already open)
Once Filmit Studio has finished installing, open After Effects or Premiere Pro.
If the host app was already open while Studio was installing, you have to restart it. This is the one rule that catches people out, and it is not our quirk, it is how Adobe host apps work. After Effects and Premiere Pro only scan for installed extensions at launch, so an app that was already running never saw the new files land. Quit it completely (not just close the project) and open it again. Almost every time someone tells me they installed everything and still cannot find the panel, this is the whole answer.
Open the panel: Window, Extensions, Filmit Studio
With the host app freshly launched, go to Window, then Extensions, then Filmit Studio. Same path in both After Effects and Premiere Pro. The panel opens like any other panel, so dock it, float it, or tuck it into the side of your workspace, whatever suits how you work.
One thing you will notice in that Extensions list: Filmit Studio is not the only thing in there. You will probably see other extensions listed too, including ones from other vendors and any older standalone plugins you have installed over the years. That is normal and expected, nothing has gone wrong. Filmit Studio is the hub you actually work from, so open that entry and launch everything else from inside it. You should not need to go back to the Extensions menu again except to reopen the hub.
Launch any tool as a native panel
Inside the Studio panel, every tool you have installed is listed with an Open button. Click Open on the one you want and it launches as a native panel inside After Effects or Premiere Pro. Not a browser window, not a separate app, a real panel you can dock next to your timeline and treat like any built-in panel.
In the walkthrough I open RoughCut, and that is a good one to try first because you can see straight away that it behaves like part of the host app rather than something bolted on. Whatever else you have installed opens exactly the same way, and more tools are on the roadmap, so the list you see now grows over time without you changing anything about this workflow.
Shrink Studio down into a compact toolkit
Here is the small trick that changed how I use it day to day. Once your tool is open, shrink the Filmit Studio panel down to a narrow strip. It stays perfectly usable at that size, and it turns into a compact launcher you can keep parked next to whatever you are working in.
That is genuinely how I run it. RoughCut, or whichever tool I am in, gets the real screen space. Studio squishes down beside it as a quick way to browse and jump between tools without rebuilding my workspace or going back to the menu bar. If you dock the narrow Studio strip and then save your workspace in After Effects or Premiere Pro, it comes back that way every time you open the app.
Two ways to apply effects and transitions
Our effects and transitions are part of the same subscription, and you can reach them from either side. Both routes end up doing the same thing, so use whichever fits your habits.
From the Studio panel
Open the effects section in the Studio panel, select your footage in the timeline, and click Apply. That is it. The effect lands on the selected layer or clip, and you carry on adjusting it in the host app's own effect controls like anything else. This route is handy when you are browsing, because you are looking at the effects laid out visually rather than reading a text list.
From the host app's Effects panel
The other way is to stay exactly where you already are. Open the Effects panel in After Effects or Premiere Pro, type filmit in the search box, and every Filmit effect and transition appears in the results. From there you drag and drop onto your footage like any native effect. In the walkthrough I grab the VHS effect this way, and I use this route more often than the panel, purely because typing a search into the Effects panel is already muscle memory after years of editing.
Worth knowing: the effects and the transitions both live in that same search. So one search for filmit gives you the effect library and the transition library in one list, which saves hunting around two different bins.
Settings, community, and support: the profile icon
In the corner of the Studio panel there is a profile icon, and it is the menu worth remembering. From there you can:
- Open the settings panel and browse your options.
- Join our Discord, which is where you can talk to us live.
- Join the Reddit community, where we post updates and answer questions in public.
- Click Contact Support to submit a support ticket.
That last one matters more than it sounds. If something is wrong with Studio or with any plugin, you can raise a ticket from inside the panel without leaving your edit or digging through a website for a contact form. Those tickets come straight to us and we answer quickly, and the team is genuinely active in Discord alongside that. When people report a problem clearly, we tend to ship the fix fast, so telling us beats working around it.
Updates and getting signed back in
When there is a Filmit Studio update available, an update banner appears in the panel. It prompts you to open the Studio desktop app, so click that, run the update from the desktop app, and you are current. Then restart After Effects or Premiere Pro afterwards, for the same reason as the first install: the host app reads your extensions when it launches, so a fresh launch is what makes the new versions live.
And if you ever get signed out of Filmit Studio, whether that is the desktop app or the panel, you can sign straight back in from the panel itself. No hunting for a browser tab. Open Window, Extensions, Filmit Studio, sign in with the same account, and everything you installed is right where you left it.
If you are a Resolve editor too
The same Studio panel concept exists in DaVinci Resolve, with one difference: Resolve has no Window, Extensions menu, so the panel opens there as a Workflow Integration instead. Once it is open, browsing your library and launching tools works the same way it does here. If Resolve is your main host app, read the Filmit Studio walkthrough for DaVinci Resolve instead of this one. The subscription covers all three host apps, so you are not choosing a side.
The short version
- Install Filmit Studio and let it finish. Downloading the app is free and needs no card.
- Install the tools you want from the tools section of the desktop app.
- Open After Effects or Premiere Pro, and restart it if it was already open.
- Go to Window, then Extensions, then Filmit Studio.
- Click Open on any tool to launch it as a native panel, then shrink Studio down beside it.
- Apply effects from the panel with footage selected, or search filmit in the host app's Effects panel and drag them on.
- Use the profile icon for settings, Discord, Reddit, and support tickets.
That is the entire setup. The trial runs 7 days and does need a card, and it unlocks the whole suite rather than one tool, so the fair way to judge it is to install two or three things you would actually use this week and put them through a real job. If you want to knock the price down, MAX10 gives you 10% off. And if you get stuck anywhere in the steps above, the fastest fix is the profile icon: submit a ticket or come find us in Discord and we will sort it out.
