DaVinci Resolve MCP Bridge

Control DaVinci Resolve from an AI assistant over MCP. Works with local models (LM Studio, Ollama) as well as Claude, Cursor and others. Includes a local Whisper + vision suite, so a local model can "hear" and "see" your footage without any cloud service.

This is a personal fork of samuelgursky/davinci-resolve-mcp (MIT). Changes in this fork: a local_ai tool (Whisper transcription + LM Studio/Ollama vision), a motion_graphics tool (Remotion + Three.js templates rendered straight into Resolve), the installer always installs the Resolve bridge, the installer can set up LM Studio directly, promo for the upstream's paid app is removed, and this README is shorter.

Install

git clone https://github.com/Thefrizzy1/davinci-resolve-mcp-bridge.git
cd davinci-resolve-mcp-bridge
python install.py

The installer runs these steps in order:

1. Finds Resolve and creates a venv/ with the dependencies.

2. Always installs the in-app bridge into Resolve's Scripts/Utility folders. You need it on the free edition. On Studio it does no harm.

3. Asks whether to install the local AI extras (faster-whisper).

4. Asks whether to install the motion graphics extra (Remotion + Three.js). The default answer is no, since many people already have their own setup.

5. Asks "Install straight into LM Studio?", which writes ~/.lmstudio/mcp.json. After that you can pick any other clients.

6. Checks the connection to Resolve.

To run it without the prompts:

python install.py --lmstudio --local-ai          # LM Studio + Whisper
python install.py --motion                       # add Remotion + Three.js motion graphics
python install.py --clients lmstudio,cursor      # several clients
python install.py --clients manual               # just print the JSON config

Before connecting:

• Studio: set Preferences ▸ General ▸ External scripting using to Local.

• Free edition: restart Resolve, open a project, then run Workspace ▸ Scripts ▸ resolve_bridge. The server finds the bridge automatically.

Related MCP server: DaVinci Resolve MCP Server

What's what

Local AI: transcription and vision

local_ai(action="status")
local_ai(action="transcribe", params={"clip_name": "A001_C003", "write_srt": true, "add_markers": true})
local_ai(action="describe",   params={"path": "/footage/interview.mov", "frames": 4})
local_ai(action="analyze",    params={"clip_name": "A001_C003"})   # both at once

• Target: use one of path (a file), clip_name, or clip_id (a Media Pool clip).

• Transcribe: uses faster-whisper on CPU, or on CUDA if it's available. You get back text and timed segments. Options:

  • write_srt saves an .srt next to the media.

  • import_srt also brings that .srt into the Media Pool.

  • add_markers puts one marker per spoken line on the clip.

  • translate: true outputs English.

  • The model downloads once on first use. The default is base; you can also use tiny, small, medium, large-v3 or turbo.

• Describe: pulls a few frames (with ffmpeg, or OpenCV as a fallback) and sends them to the vision model loaded in LM Studio (default http://127.0.0.1:1234/v1) or Ollama. Load a vision model first, for example Qwen2.5-VL, Gemma 3 or LLaVA. If you don't name a model, it picks a loaded vision model automatically.

• The built-in media_analysis pipeline also uses faster-whisper as its first-choice transcription backend.

Install the extras later with venv/bin/pip install -r requirements-local-ai.txt (on Windows, venv\Scripts\pip).

Motion graphics: Remotion + Three.js

This is an optional extra. Install it with python install.py --motion (needs Node 18.18+). The AI picks a template, fills in the props, renders it, and drops the result onto your timeline:

motion_graphics(action="list_templates")
motion_graphics(action="render", params={"template": "LowerThird",
    "props": {"name": "Ada Lovelace", "title": "Mathematician"},
    "import_to_resolve": true, "track_index": 2, "at_playhead": true})
motion_graphics(action="render", params={"template": "Captions",
    "transcript_from": {"clip_name": "A001_C003"}, "import_to_resolve": true})
motion_graphics(action="still", params={"template": "Text3D", "props": {"text": "SEASON 2"}})

• Every template accepts durationSeconds, fps, width and height.

• Captions can take segments, an srt_path, or transcript_from. With transcript_from it runs local_ai Whisper first, then renders word-by-word subtitles.

• Long renders return a job_id. Poll it with job_status. The import onto the timeline happens when the render finishes.

• studio opens Remotion Studio so you can preview and tweak in the browser. You can also run cd motion-graphics && npm run studio.

• Claude Code and other shell tools can call the renderer directly: node motion-graphics/render.mjs --template TitleCard --props '{"title":"Hi"}' --out title.mp4

• Already have your own Remotion project? Skip the extra and set DAVINCI_RESOLVE_MCP_MOTION_PROJECT=/path/to/project. The tool will list and render your own compositions with your own Remotion version.

• To add a template, put a component in motion-graphics/src/templates/, register it in src/Root.jsx, and add an entry to templates.json.

• Licence: Remotion is free for individuals and companies of up to 3 people. Larger companies need a Remotion company licence. Three.js is MIT.

LM Studio tips

• The installer adds the server as davinci-resolve to ~/.lmstudio/mcp.json. Any other servers already in that file stay as they are. Restart LM Studio after installing.

• Use a model that's good at tool calling (for example Qwen 2.5/3 or Llama 3.1+ instruct) with a context of 16k or more, because the tool list is large.

• You can run a text model for chat and a separate vision model for local_ai describe at the same time.

Free edition (in-app bridge)

Blackmagic only allows external scripting on Studio. The bridge is a small script that runs inside Resolve (Workspace ▸ Scripts ▸ resolve_bridge) and passes commands from the server over loopback, using HMAC-signed requests with one-time nonces. install.py always installs it. To reinstall it by hand, run python scripts/install_resolve_bridge.py. Once it's running, the server uses it automatically. Set DAVINCI_RESOLVE_BRIDGE=1 to force the server to use only the bridge.

Things to know

• Your source media is read-only. Analysis writes only sidecar reports and Resolve metadata. It never re-encodes or changes your camera files.

• Free edition, 21.1 and later: Blackmagic moved Python scripting to Studio, so the bridge reliably works only up to 21.0.x on the free edition.

• macOS with the free edition: Resolve finds Python only via PYTHON3HOME or /usr/local/bin/python3. If the bridge doesn't show up in the Scripts menu, run: launchctl setenv PYTHON3HOME "$(python3 -c 'import sys; print(sys.prefix)')" then restart Resolve. The resolve_bridge_canary script in the menu tells you whether Resolve can see Python.

• Safety: Risky edits use a plan, review, then confirm flow. Grade copies that would overwrite hand work are refused unless you pass acknowledge_trap: true.

More docs

• Install and client config

• AI skill reference

• Media analysis guide

• API coverage

• Control panel

• Security

Requirements

• DaVinci Resolve 18.5 or later (Studio, or the free edition through the bridge)

• Python 3.10–3.12 is the safest choice. 3.13+ works on recent Resolve builds.

• Optional: ffmpeg, Node 18.18+ (for motion graphics) / 20.9+ (for the advanced offline server)

License

MIT. Original work © DaVinci Resolve MCP Contributors (Samuel Gursky et al.). See LICENSE.