davinci-resolve-mcp

DaVinci Resolve MCP Server

        

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets AI assistants control DaVinci Resolve Studio through the official Scripting API. It provides full API coverage plus guarded workflow helpers for editing, media pool organization, render setup, review markers, grading, Fusion, Fairlight, project lifecycle tasks, extension authoring, and source-safe media analysis.


A local browser control panel ships with the server for inspecting Resolve state, running source-safe analysis, drilling into analyzed clips and shots, and editing analysis output inline. See the Control Panel Guide for the full tour.

Quick Start

npx davinci-resolve-mcp setup

Before connecting, open DaVinci Resolve Studio and set Preferences > General > External scripting using to Local. (On the free edition that preference does not help — see Free edition below.) The npm launcher installs a managed copy under your user application-data directory, then runs the universal Python installer. The installer creates a virtual environment, detects Resolve paths, and can configure Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Zed, Continue, Cline, Roo Code, OpenCode, and JetBrains IDEs.

For source installs:

git clone https://github.com/samuelgursky/davinci-resolve-mcp.git
cd davinci-resolve-mcp
python install.py

For platform paths, client-specific config, and manual setup, see Installation and Configuration.

The installer and server check the latest GitHub release for MCP updates. Checks are best-effort and throttled; the server never blocks MCP startup for a prompt. The installer can prompt, snooze, ignore a release, disable checks, or apply an opt-in safe auto-update for clean git checkouts.

Free edition (in-app bridge)

Blackmagic gates external scripting to Studio: on the free edition scriptapp("Resolve") refuses a foreign process, whatever the preference says. The Workspace ▸ Scripts menu is not gated — a script launched from it is handed the live resolve object on any edition — so the server can reach the free edition through a small script that runs inside Resolve and re-exports it over an authenticated loopback listener.

python scripts/install_resolve_bridge.py
# restart Resolve, open a project, then: Workspace > Scripts > resolve_bridge
export DAVINCI_RESOLVE_BRIDGE=1      # opt-in; unset changes nothing

Requires a framework Python (python.org). Resolve enumerates .py scripts only when it finds one — Homebrew, pyenv and conda interpreters are not detected, and the script silently never appears in the menu. A Lua canary is installed alongside so you can tell that apart from a wrong folder.

Validated on free 21.0.3.7 and Studio 19.1.3.7. This is the documented in-app path, not a licence circumvention, but Blackmagic could close it — treat it as a supported-until-it-is-not tier. Loopback only, HMAC-signed requests, one-use nonces.

Local Control Panel

Launch the single-user local control panel from the repository root:

venv/bin/python -m src.control_panel

The command starts a localhost server and opens the control panel in your browser. To have an AI coding agent do this, ask: "Open the Resolve MCP control panel for this repo." Agents should use venv/bin/python -m src.control_panel unless your Python environment is already active. Persisted analysis jobs refresh the local search index automatically after successful slices; the manual Build Index action is for rebuilding from existing reports.

Server Modes

| Mode | Entry point | Tools | Best for | |------|-------------|-------|----------| | Compound | src/server.py | 34 | Default mode for most assistants. Related Resolve operations are grouped behind action parameters to keep context usage low. | | Full / granular | src/server.py --full or src/resolve_mcp_server.py | 341 | Power users who want one MCP tool per Resolve API method. |

The compound server is recommended unless you specifically need the granular one-tool-per-method surface.

Advanced server — beyond the scripting API (optional, Node)

The same package ships a second, optional MCP server: davinci-resolve-advanced-mcp (bin bin/davinci-resolve-advanced-mcp.mjs). Where the Python server drives a live Resolve over the sanctioned scripting API, the advanced server does what the API can't — it reads and edits Resolve files (.drp / .drt / .drx) and applies DB/XML-level changes with no Resolve running, so it runs cloud or local. 18 tools: drp, drt, drx (per-clip grade codec plus a deterministic, offline grading/QC catalog — within-camera + cross-camera skin (v2 skin-line metric) + b-roll + neutral-patch WB matching, match-to-reference, saturation/black-balance, contrast-normalize, ASC CDL import, lossless grade-transfer + season-look authoring, named-LUT attach, scope reads + intent tags, verify-grade, display-referred frame extraction, broadcast-legal QC), offline_ref, conform (frame-oracle conform/relink QC + lineage), color_trace (carry grades across a re-conform), fusion, audio_plan, fairlight (bus routing), audio, project_read, project_db, pipeline (a DB-as-truth pipeline: compile YAML project specs into a canonical SQLite DB, then run stages with gates, provenance, and intent↔actual drift detection), capabilities, deliverable (deliverable QC / compliance), media (media front-end / AE ingest), editorial (editorial integrity / changelist), provenance (provenance / audit / episode report). It can also be consumed as a library (importable engine API), not just spawned as a server.

DRX grade writes are live-calibrated against Resolve Studio: grade params take Resolve's on-screen panel units by default (space: 'ui' | 'drx'), and the structural writes (power windows, qualifiers, HDR zones, HSL curves, ColorSlice, blur/key/motion-effects) are panel-readback-verified — per-control status in resolve-advanced/vendor/drx-parameters/CALIBRATION-STATUS.md. It also closes a UI-only gap: programmatic "Cleanup Node Graph" (drx relayout for one clip, project_db relayout_node_graphs for a whole project) — node layout tidied, grade content byte-preserved.

Add it alongside the live server (both ship in one npm install):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "davinci-resolve": { "command": "<python>", "args": ["<path>/src/server.py"] },
    "davinci-resolve-advanced": { "command": "node", "args": ["<path>/bin/davinci-resolve-advanced-mcp.mjs"] }
  }
}

install.py prints both entries. The core is pure-JS/MIT with no required native modules; a few features need user-installed tools (ffmpeg for audio, sharp/better-sqlite3 for some paths) — call the capabilities tool for live status and install hints.

Bradford Post Assistant — managed application (closed beta)

The maintainers also build Bradford Post Assistant, a desktop application on top of this open foundation. Where the MCP servers give an agent hands, Post Assistant is the working copilot around them — an on-device AI assistant for post-production where client material never leaves the workstation:

• A post-production copilot — a desktop app that sits alongside DaVinci Resolve and

watches the session live (timeline, grades, and frames — not just API calls), with an embedded AI assistant and agent runtime, local media analysis (transcription, frame analysis, editorial intelligence), and in-app conform QC.

• Memory — persistent, encrypted on-device assistant memory plus cross-episode learning

mined from your pipeline's decoded facts (season-look drift, per-camera correction priors, hero-frame libraries, conform path-map reuse), with accumulation managed for you and a reviewed-insight workflow.

• Self-contained by design — Post Assistant wires everything itself: this MCP for

Resolve control, the Bradford API for its extended services, and your choice of LLM provider. Nothing to configure by hand, no separate clients to manage, and the app keeps itself (and its bundled MCP) current with signed auto-updates.

• An extended professional toolset — grade surgery on live projects, 22+ adaptive grade

families, a curated looks library, delivery-spec validation, editorial pacing/cleanup analysis, natural-language color direction, and Fusion composition authoring — delivered through the managed Bradford API.

• Production workflows — the raw tools composed into finished, real-world flows

(turnover → conform → QC → delivery, season-look carry, episode reporting) with the guardrails and approvals a client-facing shop expects.

It is currently in closed beta — you can request access at bradfordoperations.com/software/post-assistant. The open-source servers are complete and fully functional on their own.

What You Can Do

"List all projects and open the one called 'My Film'"
"Create a timeline called 'Assembly Cut' from all clips in the current bin"
"Build a multicam prep timeline from selected camera angles and preserve source media"
"Detect 2-pops or slate claps and suggest record offsets for sync prep"
"Publish analysis summaries, keywords, people, and slate hints into Resolve clip metadata"
"Probe this timeline for gaps, overlaps, missing media, and source frame ranges"
"Safely import this image sequence, organize it into bins, and normalize clip metadata"
"Build a ProRes 422 HQ render plan, validate the settings, and queue the job"
"Copy review markers from the timeline to the selected clip and export a review report"
"Snapshot this clip's grade, validate a CDL update, and export a temp LUT"
"Create a Fusion TextPlus overlay on the selected clip and verify graph connections"
"Report audio channel mappings, voice isolation availability, and subtitle support"
"Install this MCP-marked DCTL or script, classify refresh/restart needs, then remove it"

Core Capabilities

| Area | What the compound server supports | |------|-----------------------------------| | App and project control | Launch/reconnect, page switching, project CRUD, project folders, databases, cloud project wrappers, settings, presets, archives | | Media pool and ingest | Safe import, image sequences, multicam prep timelines, bin organization, metadata normalization, metadata field inventory, marks, annotations, relink/proxy/full-resolution guards | | Media analysis | Source-safe file/clip/bin/project analysis, 2-pop/slate-clap sync-event detection, default Resolve metadata and Media Pool marker writeback, persisted analysis artifacts, existing-report reuse, host_chat_paths visual analysis (finalized per clip with commit_vision, works with any vision-capable MCP client) with opt-out, transcription with opt-out | | Timeline editing and conform | Track/item probing, title text key scans/writes, copy/move/duplicate helpers, range operations, gaps/overlaps, source ranges, checked interchange exports/imports | | Review annotations | Timeline/item/clip markers, custom data, flags, clip color, copy/move/sync cleanup, review reports, marker thumbnail review | | Color and grading | Node graph probing, CDL validation, grade copy, DRX/LUT helpers, versions, Gallery stills, color groups | | Fusion | Timeline-item comps, safe tool creation, input writes, port inspection, validated connections, scoped bulk writes | | Audio and Fairlight | Track/item probes, source mapping, guarded audio property writes, voice isolation, auto-sync planning, transcription/subtitle probes | | Render and deliver | Format/codec matrix probing, render settings validation, queued job lifecycle checks, guarded Quick Export | | Extension authoring | Fuse, DCTL, ACES DCTL, and Resolve-page Lua/Python script lifecycle helpers with safe MCP-marked install/remove |

Optional Extras

The core install is deliberately small: Python, ffmpeg, and the Resolve scripting API. Some features need more, and each one refuses honestly with its own install line rather than degrading into a guess — a fabricated tempo or an invented level produces confident, wrong output, which is worse than no feature.

Run python scripts/doctor.py to see which of these you have.

| Extra | Unlocks | Licence | |---|---|---| | ffmpeg on PATH | Silence detection, dead-space markers, level measurement, audio analysis. The single most useful thing to install. | LGPL/GPL — invoked as a subprocess, never bundled | | pip install numpy | Colour pre-balance, reference-still matching, sound-density audit | BSD | | pip install librosa | Beat, bar and phrase detection for music-driven cutting | ISC | | pip install -U openai-whisper | Transcription, and everything word-level built on it | MIT | | pip install open_clip_torch | Visual similarity and find_similar | MIT | | pip install transformers | CLAP audio embeddings | Apache-2.0 | | pip install opencv-python | Additional frame analysis | Apache-2.0 |

media_analysis action capabilities reports the analysis stack in detail and tells you what each missing piece would enable.

Nothing here is bundled. Model weights carry their own licences separate from the code that loads them; check them before commercial use.

What This Does Not Do

Knowing where a tool stops is worth as much as knowing what it does, and it is cheaper to read it here than to discover it mid-project.

| Not supported | Why, and what you get instead | |---|---| | Choosing the best take | Performance is most of what makes a take right, and none of it is measurable from a waveform or a transcript. rank_takes ranks fluency — fillers, restarts, script coverage — and says so in every response. The take that plays is regularly the least fluent one, because the hesitation is often the acting. Use it to find the clean safety take, not to choose the read. | | Cutting to music | No beat or downbeat detection yet. Speech-driven tools will read a music bed as one long region and are the wrong instrument for it. | | Judging a cut | Nothing here has an opinion about whether an edit is good. Every destructive action is plan → review → confirm for that reason. | | Replacing an editor | The output is a first-pass assembly, in the assistant-editor sense: ingest, sync, organize, string out, flag problems. It is a starting point you cut, not a finished cut. Defaults are deliberately generous — a first assembly is supposed to run long, because trimming is fast and visible while recovering discarded material is slow and invisible. | | Modifying your source media | By design and without exception — see below. |

Anything analyzed but unverifiable is reported as unverified, never folded into "fine". An empty result means "nothing found", never "nothing to find".

Source Media Safety

This project treats camera originals and source media as immutable. Analysis tools read source files and write reports only to sidecar, scratch, or project analysis directories; confirmed metadata publishing writes only to Resolve's project database. The server must not modify, transcode, proxy, or create derivatives of source media unless the user explicitly asks for that. See Media Analysis Guide for the detailed source-safe workflow.

Security Posture

The default server is a local stdio process launched by your MCP client; it does not expose a network listener or built-in multi-user auth surface. Tool metadata includes MCP client-safety hints for read-only, destructive, idempotent, and external-resource operations. See Security Policy for operational boundaries, confirmation guidance, and vulnerability reporting.

Key Stats

| Metric | Value | |--------|-------| | MCP Tools | 34 compound / 341 granular (live server) | | Advanced (offline) tools | 18 — .drp/.drt/.drx + DB authoring, no Resolve running | | Kernel Actions | 136 guarded workflow actions across 9 compound tools | | API Methods Covered | 336/336 (100%) | | Methods Live Tested | 331/336 (98.5%) | | Live Test Pass Rate | 331/331 (100%) | | Tested Against | DaVinci Resolve 19.1.3 Studio + Resolve 20.3.2 Studio |

For method-by-method status, see API Coverage and Test Results. For current workflow support, see Kernel Action Coverage.

analyze_media executes directly by default, persists inspectable reports/artifacts under the analysis root, requests host-chat visual analysis via the host_chat_paths protocol (analyze returns absolute frame paths + a JSON schema; the host chat reads each frame as an image and calls media_analysis(action="commit_vision", ...) to finalize), runs transcription through the configured local backend, and writes analysis summaries plus source-time Media Pool clip markers back to the Resolve project. Pass include_visuals=false, include_transcription=false, publish_metadata=false, timed_markers=no, or dry_run=true only when you want to opt out of those default behaviors. Skipping commit_vision leaves the run in pending_host_vision_analysis — surfaced as a failure mode, not silently downgraded.

Documentation

| Document | Use it for | |----------|------------| | Installation and Configuration | Requirements, installer options, supported clients, server modes, manual config | | API Coverage and Test Results | Key stats, API coverage table, live-test status, full method reference | | Kernel Action Coverage | Current guarded workflow action map | | AI Skill Reference | Operational context for AI assistants using the compound server | | Control Panel Guide | Local browser panel tour: Overview, Review (bin/clip/shot), Analyze, Setup, Preferences | | Media Analysis Guide | Source-safe FFprobe, FFmpeg, Whisper, sidecar, and analysis-root workflows | | Multicam Setup Helper Guide | Stacked timeline prep, helper/API boundary, and Resolve UI conversion steps | | Editorial Decision Guide | Project-owned editorial craft guidance for analysis and timeline decisions | | Color Decision Guide | Project-owned color correction guidance and Resolve color API boundaries | | Contributing and Project Layout | Contribution workflow, platform support, security notes, repository structure | | Security Policy | Local stdio trust boundary, tool metadata, confirmation guidance, reporting | | Release Process | Maintainer release checklist, version surfaces, validation, tags, and release notes | | Changelog | Historical release notes |

Extension authoring references live in docs/authoring. Resolve developer-package notes live in docs/notes and docs/integrations. Prompt recipes live in examples.

Requirements

• DaVinci Resolve 18.5+ on macOS, Windows, or Linux. Studio supports external scripting directly. The free edition does not — Blackmagic gates external scripting to Studio — but it is still reachable through the in-app bridge, which runs inside Resolve from the ungated Workspace ▸ Scripts menu.
• Python 3.10+ (3.10-3.12 is the lowest-risk range). Python 3.13/3.14 also work on recent Resolve builds (verified on Studio 20.3.2); older builds may fail to connect on 3.13+, in which case use 3.10-3.12.
• Resolve external scripting set to Local (Studio). On the free edition this

preference has no effect — use the in-app bridge instead.

Resolve 19.1.3 remains the compatibility baseline. Resolve 20.x scripting calls are additive, version-guarded, and live-tested on 20.3.2. Resolve 21.0 scripting additions (audio classification, speaker-detection transcription, IntelliSearch, slate analysis, motion-deblur, speech generation, session background-task control) are exposed behind runtime capability detection, so they stay inert on older builds and activate automatically on Resolve 21+.

Development

python src/server.py          # Compound server
python src/server.py --full   # Granular server
venv/bin/python tests/test_import.py
venv/bin/python scripts/audit_api_parity.py

Release and validation rules are in docs/process/release-process.md. AI agents working in this repository should start with AGENTS.md; Claude Code users can also read CLAUDE.md, which points to the same canonical instructions.

License

MIT

Author

Samuel Gursky (samgursky@gmail.com)

• GitHub: github.com/samuelgursky

Acknowledgments

• Blackmagic Design for DaVinci Resolve and its scripting API
• The Model Context Protocol team for enabling AI assistant integration