- Does any of our material leave the building?
- None of it. Your schedules, artwork, footage, project files, renders and delivery
filenames stay on the machine — EndFrame reads them and drives After Effects and
Premiere locally. Two things do go out, and nothing else: a check for a newer version,
and a licence check that sends the licence key and a machine identifier so a licence
covering a set number of editors can be counted. The machine identifier is a one-way
hash, so it identifies the machine to us only as a number and cannot be turned back
into anything about it. There is no analytics, no telemetry and no account to sign
into.
- Does it need internet access?
- Yes, at least once a week, and this one is worth passing to whoever manages your
firewall. A licensed panel must reach backtime.tools over HTTPS
(port 443) successfully once every 7 days. In between it works fully offline, so an
outage, a location shoot or a locked-down afternoon costs you nothing. But a machine
that can never reach it will stop running new jobs after 7 days, with a notice asking
for a connection. If some of your bays are permanently offline, tell us before you
buy rather than after.
- Is the extension signed?
- Yes. The panel ships as a signed ZXP, so Adobe's extension loader accepts it without
putting the machine into debug mode. An unsigned zip is included as well, for the
known Adobe installer issue on some versions.
- What happens if the licence lapses?
- The panel stops running new jobs. Everything it has already made is an ordinary
After Effects project and ordinary Premiere sequences, which keep working with or
without EndFrame installed. Nothing you have delivered depends on us.