Every video editing MCP server in 2026, and what each requires
About a dozen MCP servers will let an AI agent cut your video. None of them are official, half are abandoned, and the free ones usually are not free.
The Delivvo team· July 17, 2026 12 min read
If you want an AI agent to cut your video, there are roughly a dozen MCP servers that will let it. Not one of them is official. The Model Context Protocol's own reference server list covers Everything, Fetch, Filesystem, Git, Memory, Sequential Thinking, and Time (modelcontextprotocol/servers). There is no video server on it, and there never has been. Every option below is somebody's side project, startup, or paid product.
That matters because the quality spread is enormous. One has 10,733 stars and shipped code this morning. Another has 3 stars and has not been touched since the day it was created. Several have no licence at all, which legally means all rights reserved. This is a map of what exists, what each connects to, and what it costs to run.
What a video editing MCP server actually is
MCP is an open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems, described by its own docs as "like a USB-C port for AI applications" (modelcontextprotocol.io). A server exposes a set of tools. Your agent calls them.
For video, that splits into two very different things, and the distinction is the whole story:
Bridges. The server drives an editor you already own, through that editor's scripting API. Your agent is a remote control.
Editors. The server is the application. The AI is a first-class way to drive it.
MCP is not a niche bet. Anthropic donated it to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation on December 9, 2025, co-founded with Block and OpenAI (). That announcement counts "more than 10,000 active public MCP servers" and "97M+ monthly SDK downloads across Python and TypeScript." Video is a rounding error inside that number.
Resolve attracts MCP developers because Blackmagic ships an official Python scripting API. Six public servers target it. Adoption is not close.
samuelgursky/davinci-resolve-mcp is the leader at 1,668 stars, MIT, last pushed July 15, 2026. It exposes 34 compound tools, or 341 granular ones in --full mode. The interesting part is a second, offline Node server with 18 tools that reads and edits .drp, .drt, and .drx files "with no Resolve running." Offline conform analysis without launching the app is a genuinely different capability.
barckley75/resolve-claude-mcp is second at 276 stars, MIT, 52 tools spanning project navigation, media pool, colour, render, Fusion, and Resolve's Neural Engine features like Magic Mask. It is honest about its limits: "Tested only on macOS (Apple Silicon)."
Then the tail: hiteshK03 (19 stars), Tooflex (17 stars, pushed once on the day it was created in March 2025, no licence), and lordhoell (4 stars, claiming "440+" tools). That last one is worth pausing on, and I come back to it below.
The catch nobody puts in the headline: you need Resolve Studio. samuelgursky states it plainly: "The free edition does not support external scripting." barckley75 agrees: "DaVinci Resolve Studio is required for full scripting API access. The free version has limited scripting support." Studio is a $295 one-time licence. Every "free, open source" Resolve MCP server sits behind it.
After Effects works. Premiere Pro barely exists.
Dakkshin/after-effects-mcp has 492 stars, MIT, 15 tools, and drives AE through a bridge panel running inside the app on ExtendScript. It needs After Effects 2022 or later.
Premiere Pro is the hole in this entire ecosystem. The most widely used professional NLE on earth has one public MCP server: nepfaff/premiere-pro-mcp, at 3 stars, no licence, created February 9, 2026 and last touched February 10, 2026. One day of work, then silence.
Its design is actually clever. Rather than a fixed tool list, "this one exposes a single execute-script tool. The LLM generates the code on the fly, giving you the full power of the Premiere Pro API." But 3 stars is 3 stars.
The likely cause is plumbing, not demand. Resolve ships a documented Python API. Premiere needs a UXP plugin sideloaded through a developer tool. Six servers went where the API was easy.
The editors: the AI is the point
Palmier Pro is the loudest thing in this space and it is three months old. 10,733 stars, GPL-3.0, created April 7, 2026, pushed the morning I wrote this. It calls itself "The video editor built for AI." When the app is open "it exposes an MCP server at http://127.0.0.1:19789/mcp via HTTP."
Its split is unusual and worth quoting exactly: "The video editor (without the generative AI features) is fully open source. The MCP server and the agent chat are also open source. The only thing that is closed source is the generative AI processing." The editor and MCP are free; Pro is $29/mo and Max $69/mo for generation credits.
The blocker is brutal if you are not on the right hardware: "Requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) on Apple Silicon." No Windows, no Linux, no Intel Mac.
The rest: search, hosted, and headless
Jumper indexes instead of editing
Jumper does not edit. It indexes, then hands the agent the good clips. It is the only thing here that spans all four majors, reading timelines from and exporting to Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer, and Final Cut Pro.
Its architecture is the interesting bit: "Jumper runs a local server on your machine (localhost). All the heavy work (visual search, transcription, face recognition) happens on your computer. Your footage never leaves it" (Jumper docs). The agent gets metadata: paths, timecodes, transcript excerpts. Not your rushes.
It is closed source and commercial. Its own docs carry a warning worth knowing before you buy: "Claude Cowork currently does not reliably pick up the Jumper integration."
reap and Video Jungle run in the cloud
reap is short-form repurposing with 10 tools: create_clips, add_captions, dub_video, translate_subtitles, transcribe, reframe, get_status, get_results, list_templates, export_video. It is cloud only by design: "No local server. One URL to connect." Your footage goes to their servers. For a public marketing clip that is fine. For anything under NDA it is a decision, not a detail.
Worth flagging: reap's own two pages disagree about what you get. The MCP page says "Every paid plan includes MCP, API, and CLI access" and lists "AI clipping via MCP" under the free tier. The pricing page lists "MCP-ready workflows" only under Studio at $29/mo. Free is $0, Creator $9.99/mo, Studio $29/mo. I could not reconcile those two claims from published material, so budget for $29/mo rather than assume the free tier works.
Video Jungle has 281 stars and 8 tools, needs an API key, and one tool (edit-locally) requires a running Resolve Studio. Two problems: it was last pushed October 9, 2025, and it has no licence file, which means all rights reserved by default.
The headless FFmpeg wrappers
If you do not need a GUI, FFmpeg wrappers are the deep end of the pool, and mostly abandoned.
KyaniteLabs/kinocut is the exception and the one to look at: 80 stars, Apache-2.0, pushed the same morning as Palmier, 142 MCP tools plus 121 CLI commands. It describes itself as "a free, open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, Python library, and kino CLI that gives AI agents a guardrailed local video-editing surface." It "runs on your machine, no Kinocut account or API key required for the core surface, and media is not uploaded to a Kinocut cloud." You need FFmpeg on your PATH. Note the repo was renamed from mcp-video, so older write-ups quoting "26 tools" are out of date.
video-creator/ffmpeg-mcp has 140 stars and MIT. Beyond those two the long tail is large and dead: misbahsy/video-audio-mcp last pushed May 2025, conneroisu/vfx-mcp last pushed July 2025 with 7 stars, and a dozen more.
A close-up of an editing timeline with audio waveforms on a laptop screen
Five things this roundup makes obvious
1. Tool count does not predict adoption. It may predict the opposite. Line them up: lordhoell claims 440+ tools and has 4 stars. samuelgursky ships 341 and has 1,668. Dakkshin's After Effects server has 15 tools and 492 stars. A big tool surface on an abandoned repo is a README, not a product. Judge these by last-pushed date, not by the number on the tin.
2. Half of this ecosystem is abandoned. Live today: Palmier, kinocut, samuelgursky. Stale by nine months or more: Video Jungle, video-audio-mcp, vfx-mcp, Tooflex. Check pushed_at before you build anything on one.
3. "Free" usually is not. Resolve MCP needs Resolve Studio at $295. reap's MCP tier reads as $29/mo. Video Jungle needs an API key. The genuinely free-to-run options are Palmier (if you own a Tahoe Apple Silicon Mac) and kinocut (if you are comfortable in a CLI).
4. Licences are missing. Video Jungle, nepfaff's Premiere server, and Tooflex's Resolve server ship no licence. No licence means all rights reserved. If you are putting this into client work, that is a real problem, not a formality.
5. Nobody talks about the safety problem. These tools hand file-system-level power to a model that is sometimes wrong. barckley75 says the quiet part out loud: "AI agents can make mistakes: they may modify, overwrite, or delete your projects, timelines, clips, render queues, or files on disk." The two available answers are guardrails (kinocut's preflight validation and provenance receipts) or verification (making the agent prove what it did). Most of these servers do neither. They pass the call through and hope.
A laptop on a wooden desk running editing software, the everyday reality behind the agent hype
Where Cutroom fits
Cutroom is the one I build, so read this knowing that. It is an MCP server with a real editor attached, and it takes the opposite side of two bets from most of this list.
It is Windows. Palmier, the strongest AI-native editor here, requires macOS 26 on Apple Silicon. barckley75's Resolve server is macOS-tested only. If you are on a Windows machine, most of this roundup is closed to you. Cutroom runs on Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit.
Its MCP server registers 96 verbs. I counted them from the manifest rather than a marketing page: color_grade, reframe, remove_silence, transcribe, dub, add_broll, export, and 89 more. The rule is parity. Anything you can do by hand, the agent can do by conversation, and whatever it makes lands on a real timeline you can grab and change.
Two design choices are worth contrasting with the list above:
It reads the manual before it acts. Every verb ships documentation with parameters, ranges, and worked examples, and the agent's instruction is explicit: never guess a parameter name, unit, range, or enum value, read the docs first. Most MCP servers hand a model a JSON schema and hope. This is the difference between an agent that knows what a LUT does and one that is pattern-matching on a tool name.
It checks its own work, and export is gated on that. Before an export runs, the agent renders the real export frames, reads them back, scans the audio for clipping and for cuts landing mid-word, and logs what it found. No logged review, no file. That is a direct answer to the "they may modify, overwrite, or delete" problem: the agent has to look at what it made before it can ship it.
On privacy it sits closer to Jumper and kinocut than to reap. The editor, transcription (whisper.cpp), and background removal (local ONNX matting) all run on your machine. Your originals are never modified. The honest exception, and it applies to every agentic editor here: connect an AI and it does read frames and audio, because that is how it checks its own work, and anything you ask it to generate goes to the provider whose key you brought. Nothing routes through us.
It is $99 once, not a subscription, and it works as a normal editor with no AI connected at all. Connecting an agent needs Node.js installed, which is the one prerequisite worth knowing before you buy.
Cutroom is a real Windows video editor with an MCP server built into it, so your Claude reaches all 96 of the same verbs you do, reads the manual before it touches a frame, and has to review the actual export frames before it can render. See what it does.
What I could not verify
This is a documentation review. I read published docs, repos, and pricing pages, and I checked every star count and last-pushed date against the GitHub API on July 17, 2026. I did not run all of these tools. Specifically:
Palmier Pro's tool count. Not published anywhere I could find. The list appears to live in-app under Help, and the app needs a Tahoe Apple Silicon Mac. I am not going to invent a number.
Jumper's price. The pricing page renders tier names and billing periods with no dollar amounts, likely injected by JavaScript. I can tell you it is a per-seat lifetime licence with a trial. I cannot tell you what it costs.
Whether Jumper's MCP is PRO-gated. The comparison table puts "Agentic Editing" under PRO. The docs never say so outright. Treat it as likely, not confirmed.
reap's MCP tier. Two of reap's own pages contradict each other, as above.
lordhoell's "440+ tools". Self-reported, on a 4-star repo created and abandoned the same day. I am repeating the claim, not endorsing it.
One naming trap, since it wrecks searches for this topic: reap is not REAPER.reap.video is video repurposing. REAPER is a digital audio workstation, and its MCP servers (bonfire-systems/reaper-mcp, shiehn/total-reaper-mcp, and others) are audio tools with nothing to do with video. Search results blend them constantly.
FAQ
Is there an official video editing MCP server?
No. The official reference servers are Everything, Fetch, Filesystem, Git, Memory, Sequential Thinking, and Time. Every video MCP server is third-party.
Can I use an MCP server with free DaVinci Resolve?
Generally no. The two most-adopted Resolve servers both state that external scripting needs Resolve Studio, a $295 one-time licence. The free edition does not support it.
Is there a good Premiere Pro MCP server?
Not yet. The only public one has 3 stars, no licence, and one day of commits. Resolve has six servers because Blackmagic ships a Python API; Premiere needs a sideloaded UXP plugin.
Do these upload my footage?
It depends, and it is the first thing to check. Jumper, kinocut, and Cutroom keep media on your machine. reap is hosted by design. Video Jungle needs an API key and a cloud account. Any agent you connect will read frames and audio regardless, and anything you generate goes to that provider.
Which one should I actually use?
If you are on an Apple Silicon Mac running Tahoe, Palmier. If you live in a terminal and want FFmpeg with guardrails, kinocut. If you own Resolve Studio, samuelgursky's server. If you need to search a big archive across Premiere, Resolve, FCP, or Avid, Jumper. If you are on Windows and want the agent to drive a real editor, that is what I built Cutroom for.
