Premiere Claude Bridge

AI assistant editor for Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve

premiere-claude-bridge is a free, open-source MCP server that lets Claude Code or Codex do the assistant editor's work inside your own project. You ask in plain language. It logs the footage, transcribes the speech, lays out a rough cut on your timeline and checks the result before you ship it.

*Real session, no cuts: one request in Claude, and the bridge imports the clips, builds the vertical sequence, lays the shots on the timeline and adds markers and captions. Watch the mp4.*

Install in one sentence

Open Claude Code (the Code tab of the Claude desktop app works) and send it this:

Install premiere-claude-bridge from github.com/koptsev63/premiere-claude-bridge following its README, and take me to the green "Connected" label in Premiere.

Claude clones the repo, sets everything up and tells you when to restart Premiere. Then:

1. In Premiere open Window → Extensions → Claude Bridge. The panel should say "Connected to Claude".
2. Start a new chat and ask: "Check the connection to Premiere."
3. Keep that Claude session open while you edit.

On DaVinci Resolve Studio there is no panel. Set Preferences → System → General → External scripting using to Local, restart Resolve, and ask Claude to set the project up for Resolve.

You need Premiere Pro 2024 or newer, or DaVinci Resolve Studio, and a Claude or Codex subscription. Tested on macOS. Windows has install steps but nobody has confirmed them yet. Prefer to do it by hand? See Manual install.

По-русски: для монтажёров

Как поставить. Откройте Claude (приложение, вкладка Code) и отправьте ему фразу: «Установи мост Premiere с github.com/koptsev63/premiere-claude-bridge и доведи меня до зелёной надписи Connected в Premiere». Дальше Claude всё сделает сам и скажет, когда перезапустить Premiere.

Как работать. В Premiere откройте Окно → Расширения → Claude Bridge. Панель должна гореть зелёным. Пишите Claude обычными словами: «собери секвенцию 1080 на 1920 из этого файла», «поставь маркеры на паузы», «открой все секвенции подкаста вкладками».

Как обновиться. Скажите Claude: «обнови мост». Потом закройте и снова откройте Claude, а в Premiere закройте и снова откройте панель. Когда выходит новая версия, Claude сам говорит об этом при проверке связи.

Если Premiere не отвечает. Чаще всего в Premiere открыто окно, которое ждёт нажатия. Спросите Claude: «Premiere ждёт клика?» Он назовёт окно и кнопку.

Если видео пришло без картинки. Ролики с YouTube часто в формате, который Premiere открывает без изображения. Просто попросите Claude импортировать файл: мост проверит его заранее и при необходимости сделает рабочую копию.

Помочь обучать ассистента. В панели есть галочка «Помогать обучать ассистента», с версии 0.8.3 она стоит по умолчанию. Мост сам отправляет обезличенную схему монтажа: где разрезы, сколько кадров снято, длины планов. Без видео, звука и названий. Уходит только работа после обновления моста. Не хотите: снимите галочку или скажите Claude «не отправляй журнал». Проект под NDA можно исключить: галочка «Не отправлять этот проект» или фраза Claude «не отправляй этот проект». Сняли главную галочку - всё отправленное удалилось. Подробно и политика конфиденциальности: DATA.md.

Чат монтажёров. Вопросы, ошибки, пожелания, приёмы: t.me/+Fw5nSiqUkCswNjBi

What you can ask it to do

Sort the footage

• Watch a whole folder of rushes and write a log: what is in the shot, where the motion and the sound are, which clips are shaky or tilted. You get one page with a frame strip per clip.
• Transcribe speech offline, in Russian, English, Hungarian and other languages, then flag the words it probably misheard.
• Find material by words: a character's lines, a topic, "the long monologue at night".

Build the cut

• Put takes on the timeline in order and mark the story beats.
• Cut out pauses and dead air.
• Pick the strongest moments of a long recording for a short version.
• Build two contrasting rough cuts from the same material so you choose.
• Make variants of a cut you built by hand: drop a scene, insert a block, keep every other frame where it was.

Sound and subtitles

• Duck music under speech and level the takes against each other.
• Deliver subtitles as SRT and burned in.

Colour and hand-off to the colourist

• Match camera, AI-generated and drone shots to one colour point, shot by shot, then bake three looks as LUTs and render them with ffmpeg.
• Pull a "kolbasa" for grading from an editor's Resolve .drt: every shot relinked to the camera originals, grade removed, ProRes 422 HQ. It stops before the render if one shot out of eighty does not match the editor's cut.

Check before delivery

• Refuse a grade with blown highlights or red skin, and a grade nobody can see.
• Refuse a file with wrong proportions, shaky edges or no sound.

Follow your hands. Move the cuts, retype a caption, save the project. It reads your saved .prproj and works from your version from then on.

It has no taste. Decisions stay with you; it takes the logging, sorting and checking.

What an editor said

"Все установилось по твоей инструкции без проблем, единственный затык, который случился - это настройка первого коннекта."

"Я пока попробовал использовать помощника только для базовой организации файлов на таймлайне, типа расставить в хронологическом порядке дубли, срезать пустые фазы и т.д. С этим он справился отлично, все вполне интуитивно."

Andrey, film editor, October 2026

In English: "Everything installed by your instruction with no problems. The only snag was setting up the first connection." And: "So far I have used the assistant only for basic organisation of files on the timeline, like putting takes in chronological order and cutting the empty phases. It handled that very well, it is all quite intuitive."

The snag he hit is now step 2 above.

New in 0.4: the wrong shot nobody sees

A real Sunday on a festival teaser. The editor cut it in Resolve on proxies and sent a .drt. The colourist needed the same cut on the 4K S-Log3 camera originals. The import looked clean and the length matched to the frame. One shot of 79 was still wrong, and it went out three times:

1. Resolve put a crowd shot where the editor had an orbit around the hero.
2. The "fix" trusted the number in the .drt and put in a third shot.
3. The editor sent the timecode, and only then was the shot right.

A contact sheet with a frame every seven seconds cannot see a three-second shot. So core/drt_audit.py reads the cut twice, once from the .drt and once from what the NLE actually laid down, and compares them clip by clip. If they disagree, it does not render. It prints both readings and asks you for the editor's timecode. Neither file is the truth. The editor is. A clip the editor played backwards or retimed is read through Resolve's speed map, not its In field: a reverse goes into the pull as the forward source piece with a note to flip it back, any other speed change stops for the editor's timecode.

Same release: core/shotmatch.py pulls camera, AI and drone shots to one colour point and bakes the result into LUTs, about 60 times faster than grading every frame in Python. Details in CHANGELOG.

Demo

The clip above is a real 23-second session: a vertical reel assembled from one request. Below, the same thing as text:

You:    "Open Premiere. Import all .MTS from ~/Desktop/Footage/.

Create a 1080p25 sequence called 'Rough'. Place clips 00118 (1-6s), 00149 (4-9s), 00130 (1-5s) on V1 in order. Add markers at every emotional beat per Murch's hierarchy."

Claude: ✓ Imported 108 clips into bin '01_Source_MTS' ✓ Created Rough — 1920x1080, 25fps, 3 V / 6 A tracks ✓ Placed 3 clips on V1, total 14 sec ✓ Marked 5 emotional beats: HOOK @0s, COMEDY @5s, PIT @8s, BREATH @11s, PAYOFF @13s

→ Real output from this exact prompt. See examples/grave-stakes-teaser/cutlist_v3.json for the full 12-clip cutlist that built the case-study teaser.

How this compares to other Premiere and Resolve MCP servers

There are about fifteen Premiere MCP servers on GitHub now, and several for Resolve. The big ones are good at something this project is not, so here is the honest split (checked October 2026).

Where the others are ahead

• Typed timeline tools. hetpatel-11/Adobe_Premiere_Pro_MCP and leancoderkavy/premiere-pro-mcp ship hundreds of typed tools for effects, keyframes, transitions and multicam. Here those go through pr_eval_jsx.
• Install. They have npm packages and installers. This repo is a clone and a symlink.
• UXP. Both have a UXP preview. This panel is CEP only.
• Resolve depth. samuelgursky/davinci-resolve-mcp covers Fusion, Fairlight and the free edition. This project needs Resolve Studio and is tested on macOS.

What this project does that their READMEs do not mention

If you need an agent that can reach every button in Premiere, pick one of the big servers. If you want an assistant editor for documentary material that checks its own output and follows your manual changes, this one is for you.

Why I built this

I'm a film director (festival shorts, currently developing two features in screenplay labs — *Doukhobors* in TFL Next, *Grave Stakes* in Cinéfondation). I monkey with Adobe Premiere all the time, and I burn 4-6 hours per teaser on the same boring assistant-editor work: watching all the dailies, writing notes in Excel, dragging selects to a timeline, trimming, re-timing.

I tried Adobe's own AI tools. Their official Creative Cloud connector advertises "Premiere capabilities" but the actual surface is four cloud video tools that have nothing to do with the desktop app. The Adobe docs themselves say: *for trim by timestamp, use Adobe Premiere*. So I made the thing that actually does that.

The non-obvious bit: I didn't want a chatbot that randomly clicks buttons. I wanted one that thinks like an editor. So the core of this repo is skills/film-editing/SKILL.md — Walter Murch's *In the Blink of an Eye* compressed into machine-actionable decision rules. Every cut my AI assistant proposes ranks Emotion > Story > Rhythm > Eye-trace > 2D > 3D, and I can override per shot.

It worked on my actual *Grave Stakes* teaser. I wa