Premiere Pro MCP Server

Premiere Pro MCP Server

An MCP server that drives Adobe Premiere Pro: projects and bins, sequences and their settings, timeline edits, markers, effects, keyframes and transitions, transcripts, metadata and export. It runs on the machine where Premiere Pro is installed and talks to it through a small UXP plugin inside Premiere Pro.

Status: untested against a real Premiere Pro. Every script is checked against Premiere Pro's UXP API reference and run against a stand-in DOM in the tests, but none has been run in Premiere Pro yet. Expect rough edges; see What is not certain yet.

Requires Premiere Pro 25.6 or later (macOS or Windows), the UXP Developer Tool to load the plugin, and Node.js 18 or later.

Why a plugin

Premiere Pro has no outside scripting route the other servers in this repository use: no AppleScript dictionary, no COM object on Windows, and its /C es.processFile command line works only while Premiere Pro launches, returns no result and is unsupported. Adobe's supported way to automate Premiere Pro is a plugin running inside it, and UXP is the plugin platform Adobe is moving to (generally available from Premiere Pro 25.6; CEP stops taking new Marketplace submissions in December 2027 and is removed from December 2029).

A UXP plugin can open WebSocket connections but cannot accept them. So this server listens on 127.0.0.1 and the plugin connects to it:

MCP client --stdio--> adobe-mcp-premiere --ws://127.0.0.1:3011--> MCP Bridge panel (in Premiere Pro)

There is one process to run: the MCP server is also the WebSocket server.

Install

1. Add the server to your MCP client.

Claude Code:

   claude mcp add premiere -- npx -y adobe-mcp-premiere

Any client that reads an mcpServers block:

   {

"mcpServers": { "premiere": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "adobe-mcp-premiere"], "env": { "BRIDGE_TOKEN": "a long random string" } } } }

1. Load the plugin in Premiere Pro. Until it is published, load it with the UXP Developer Tool:

• In Premiere Pro, turn on Developer Mode in the Plugins settings.
• Install and open the UXP Developer Tool from the Creative Cloud app.
• Add Plugin and choose uxp/plugin/manifest.json from this package: in a clone, packages/premiere/uxp/plugin; after npm install adobe-mcp-premiere, node_modules/adobe-mcp-premiere/uxp/plugin. premiere_status prints the folder of the copy your server runs from.
• Click Load, then open the MCP Bridge panel from Premiere Pro's Window menu.

1. In the panel, set the port (3011 unless you changed PREMIERE_WS_PORT) and the token (if you set BRIDGE_TOKEN), and click Connect. The panel remembers both and reconnects every 3 s whenever the connection drops, so it connects again by itself after the MCP server restarts.

1. Ask your client to run premiere_status. It shows the port, whether the plugin is connected, the Premiere Pro version and the active project.

Conventions

• Sequences are chosen with sequence: { name }, { guid } (from list_sequences), or omitted for the active sequence.
• Project items are chosen with item: { id } (from list_project_items), { path: "Footage/Interviews/a.mov" } (bins from the project root), or { name } when only one item has that name.
• Clips in a sequence are chosen with clip: { track, trackIndex, clipIndex }, as list_clips reports them: track is video or audio, indexes start at 0 (track 0 is V1 or A1). Tools that take several clips take clips: { items: [...], selected: true }, where selected adds the clips selected in the Timeline. Indexes shift after edits; list again.
• Effects are chosen by component index and parameter name (or index) from list_clip_effects.
• Times are seconds. Files must be absolute paths inside your home folder or a directory in PREMIERE_ALLOWED_DIRS; tools that write a file refuse to replace an existing one unless you pass overwrite: true.

Tools

help({ tool }) describes any tool's parameters.

Most tools work with Premiere Pro 25.6. These need a later version, and say so in their descriptions: export_timeline (26.2; AAF 26.3), renaming a track (26.3), export_sequence's startQueue and xmp (26.3), the frame rate in set_sequence_settings (26.2), close_sequence (26.2), create_subclip (26.3), positioning the Source Monitor (26.3), the work area in set_sequence_times (26.5), transcribe_clip and clear_media_cache (26.5). On an older version those calls fail with a message transcribe_clip (26.5), listing languages in list_transcription_languages (26.3; checking given codes works earlier). On an older version those calls fail with a message naming the version.

Not offered, because Premiere Pro's UXP API has no call for them: linking and unlinking clips, audio transitions, playing the Program Monitor, clip speed, clip gain (other than the Volume effect's Level), editing caption text, track targeting, nesting, menu commands, undo, Lumetri's Auto button, and Lumetri curves (RGB and Hue Saturation curve points are not simple parameter values).

How it stays out of your way

• One undo step per call. Edits are built inside project.lockedAccess and run with project.executeTransaction, as Premiere Pro requires from 26.3, so each call is one entry in Edit > Undo. The few steps Premiere Pro does not record (playhead, track mute, work area, saving) say so.
• No dialogs. Opening and closing projects turn Premiere Pro's prompts off; importing passes suppressUI.
• One script at a time. The plugin runs scripts in order, never two at once.
• Timeouts say why. If Premiere Pro does not answer within PREMIERE_SCRIPT_TIMEOUT_MS (default 120 s), the error says a dialog may be open. Raise it for long exports and transcriptions.
• No raw input in scripts. Every value a caller passes is validated and written into the script as a JSON literal.

Configuration

Security

• Local only. The server listens on 127.0.0.1, never on other interfaces.
• Token. Without BRIDGE_TOKEN, any program on this machine can connect to the port as the plugin while none is connected (and would then receive the scripts and could answer them), and can send scripts through the HTTP endpoint described below. Set BRIDGE_TOKEN on any machine other people or untrusted software use. With a token, the plugin's first message mus