Your coding agent can now edit your videos, for free

# Your coding agent can now edit your videos, for free

DaVinci Resolve's own AI assistant editor shipped in Resolve 21.1. It only runs on Studio, the $295 one-time upgrade. There's a free, open-source MCP server that does the same job on the free edition, for $0, and it's already been running for a year and a half.

davinci-resolve-mcp (https://github.com/samuelgursky/davinci-resolve-mcp) is a free, MIT-licensed MCP server. MCP means "Model Context Protocol": it's the standard that lets a coding agent like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex CLI reach outside your terminal and control another piece of software directly. Install it, and your agent gets hands inside your actual Resolve timeline: it can build an assembly, sync cameras, mark silences, copy a grade, and queue a render, just by you typing what you want in plain English. 2,940 stars, 339 forks, still getting pushed the same day this was checked.

Once it's connected (see the setup kit below), these are the five prompts that map to what the video shows:

1. "Create a timeline called 'Assembly Cut' from all clips in the current bin." Builds your first assembly. It runs long on purpose. Trimming is fast; recovering something an assembly left out is not.
2. "Detect 2-pops or slate claps and suggest record offsets, then build a multicam prep timeline." Finds your sync point and lines up the angles without touching your camera originals.
3. "Probe this timeline for dead space and silence and mark every gap." Needs ffmpeg on your PATH. It marks the gaps for you to review. It doesn't delete anything on its own.
4. "Copy the grade from this clip across the scene and export a temp LUT." The one genuinely destructive move here. It replaces the target's existing grade with no version to undo from, so the tool makes you explicitly confirm before it runs.
5. "Build a ProRes render plan, validate it, and queue the job." Checks your codec and settings before it queues anything.

On Resolve Studio: npx davinci-resolve-mcp setup (then Preferences → General → External scripting: Local). The installer writes the config for Claude Code, Cursor or Codex CLI itself. On the free edition you add the in-app bridge: python scripts/install_resolve_bridge.py, restart Resolve, then Workspace → Scripts → resolve_bridge.

This is a first-pass assembly, not a finished cut. In the maintainer's own words: "a starting point you cut, not a finished cut." It doesn't generate sound effects, music, or B-roll. Nothing here creates new media; it only organizes what you already shot. It doesn't pick your best take either; a separate ranking tool measures fluency (fillers, restarts, how much of a script got said), not performance, and says so on every response. The take that actually plays is often the least fluent one, because the hesitation is the acting.

The free-edition path matters here, and it comes with a real caveat. Blackmagic gates external scripting to Studio on purpose, so this project reaches the free edition through a small script that runs inside Resolve itself, from the ungated Workspace ▸ Scripts menu. This is a documented in-app path, not a licence workaround. That's verified working on free 21.0.3.7. On free 21.1, Resolve moved Python scripting to Studio-only, and one user report on the project's own tracker (Fedora 44, issue #203) says the Scripts menu stops listing .py files entirely there. The maintainer hasn't confirmed that beyond the one report. If you're already running free 21.0.x, this works today. If you're about to update Resolve and you're relying on this, hold off, or move to Studio, which this MCP talks to directly with no bridge step at all.

Blackmagic's own native assistant, "Setup AI Assistants," is real and it's good. It's also locked to Studio, a one-time $295 purchase from their store. This MCP is the same category of thing, built by one outside maintainer, MIT-licensed, and free. It won't match a $295 product feature-for-feature forever, and it says so about itself rather than overselling: no cut judgment, no automatic music editing beyond beat-detection cut points, your source media is never modified by design.

The setup kit has the exact install steps for Studio and for the free edition, the config your agent needs (with the caveat spelled out first), and all five prompts above ready to paste. Comment EDITOR and I'll send you the setup, or grab it directly below.