Video Editor MCP

What is Video Editor MCP about?

Video Editor MCP provides an MCP server that lets users manage video assets, perform multimodal analysis, search by content, and automatically generate or edit videos. It integrates with the Video Jungle platform via API keys and exposes a set of tools (add‑video, search‑videos, generate‑edit‑from‑videos, etc.) that can be invoked from LLM prompts.

How to use Video Editor MCP?

1. Create a Video Jungle account and obtain an API key from the settings page.
2. Run the server (example with UV):

   uv run video-editor-mcp YOUR_API_KEY
   

   or, to enable local Photos app access on macOS:

   LOAD_PHOTOS_DB=1 uv run video-editor-mcp YOUR_API_KEY
   

3. Invoke tools in a conversational interface (e.g., Claude Desktop) using natural‑language prompts such as:
   • can you download the video at https://... and name it fly traps?
   • can you search my videos for fly traps?
   • can you create an edit of all the times the video says "fly trap"?
4. Monitor logs in app.log for debugging or use the MCP Inspector for a UI view.

Key Features of Video Editor MCP

• Custom vj:// URI scheme for referencing individual videos and projects.
• Multimodal analysis of uploaded videos (audio + visual) enabling rich search.
• Toolset covering video import, project creation, local timeline export, edit generation, asset retrieval, and live update of edits.
• Search by embeddings & keywords to find exact moments across your library.
• Integration with Davinci Resolve via edit-locally tool for professional editing.
• Optional macOS Photos database access for leveraging personal media.
• Logging & inspector support for easier debugging.

Use Cases of Video Editor MCP

• Content creators: Quickly pull clips from a personal library and assemble highlight reels.
• Marketing teams: Generate promotional videos by searching for brand‑specific visual/audio cues.
• Educators: Build instructional videos by extracting relevant segments from lecture recordings.
• Social media managers: Automate short‑form video creation based on trending keywords.
• Post‑production workflow: Sync generated edits directly into Davinci Resolve for fine‑tuning.

FAQ

Q: Where do I get the API key? A: Sign in to Video Jungle, go to Profile → Settings, and copy the API key.

Q: Do I need any special environment variables? A: Only if you want to search your macOS Photos library – set LOAD_PHOTOS_DB=1 before launching the server.

Q: How are videos stored and referenced? A: Uploaded videos are assigned a vj:// URI which can be used in subsequent tool calls.

Q: Can I see what the server is doing in real time? A: Yes, logs are written to app.log. For a richer view, launch the MCP Inspector with:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv run --directory /path/to/video-editor-mcp video-editor-mcp YOUR_API_KEY

Q: Is there a way to edit videos locally? A: Use the edit-locally tool – it creates an OpenTimelineIO project and opens it in a running Davinci Resolve Studio instance.

Q: How do I publish updates to Video Jungle? A: The update-video-edit tool pushes live updates; changes appear in Video Jungle if the app is open.

Video Editor MCP server

See a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG6TMLD8GmA

Upload, edit, search, and generate videos from everyone's favorite LLM and Video Jungle.

You'll need to sign up for an account at Video Jungle in order to use this tool, and add your API key.

Components

Resources

The server implements an interface to upload, generate, and edit videos with:

• Custom vj:// URI scheme for accessing individual videos and projects
• Each project resource has a name, description
• Search results are returned with metadata about what is in the video, and when, allowing for edit generation directly

Prompts

Coming soon.

Tools

The server implements a few tools:

• add-video
  • Add a Video File for analysis from a URL. Returns an vj:// URI to reference the Video file
• create-videojungle-project
  • Creates a Video Jungle project to contain generative scripts, analyzed videos, and images for video edit generation
• edit-locally
  • Creates an OpenTimelineIO project and downloads it to your machine to open in a Davinci Resolve Studio instance (Resolve Studio must already be running before calling this tool.)
• generate-edit-from-videos
  • Generates a rendered video edit from a set of video files
• generate-edit-from-single-video
  • Generate an edit from a single input video file
• get-project-assets
  • Get assets within a project for video edit generation.
• search-videos
  • Returns video matches based upon embeddings and keywords
• update-video-edit
  • Live update a video edit's information. If Video Jungle is open, edit will be updated in real time.

Using Tools in Practice

In order to use the tools, you'll need to sign up for Video Jungle and add your API key.

add-video

Here's an example prompt to invoke the add-video tool:

can you download the video at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RumgYaH5XYw and name it fly traps?

This will download a video from a URL, add it to your library, and analyze it for retrieval later. Analysis is multi-modal, so both audio and visual components can be queried against.

search-videos

Once you've got a video downloaded and analyzed, you can then do queries on it using the search-videos tool:

can you search my videos for fly traps?

Search results contain relevant metadata for generating a video edit according to details discovered in the initial analysis.

search-local-videos

You must set the environment variable LOAD_PHOTOS_DB=1 in order to use this tool, as it will make Claude prompt to access your files on your local machine.

Once that's done, you can search through your Photos app for videos that exist on your phone, using Apple's tags.

In my case, when I search for "Skateboard", I get 1903 video files.

can you search my local video files for Skateboard?

generate-edit-from-videos

Finally, you can use these search results to generate an edit:

can you create an edit of all the times the video says "fly trap"?

(Currently), the video edits tool relies on the context within the current chat.

generate-edit-from-single-video

Finally, you can cut down an edit from a single, existing video:

can you create an edit of all the times this video says the word "fly trap"?

Configuration

You must login to Video Jungle settings, and get your API key. Then, use this to start Video Jungle MCP:

$ uv run video-editor-mcp YOURAPIKEY

To allow this MCP server to search your Photos app on MacOS:

$ LOAD_PHOTOS_DB=1 uv run video-editor-mcp YOURAPIKEY

Quickstart

Install

Installing via Smithery

To install Video Editor for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:

npx -y @smithery/cli install video-editor-mcp --client claude

Claude Desktop

You'll need to adjust your claude_desktop_config.json manually:

On MacOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

 "mcpServers": {
   "video-editor-mcp": {
     "command": "uvx",
     "args": [
       "video-editor-mcp",
       "YOURAPIKEY"
     ]
   }
 }

 "mcpServers": {
   "video-editor-mcp": {
     "command": "uv",
     "args": [
       "--directory",
       "/Users/YOURDIRECTORY/video-editor-mcp",
       "run",
       "video-editor-mcp",
       "YOURAPIKEY"
     ]
   }
 }

With local Photos app access enabled (search your Photos app):

  "video-jungle-mcp": {
    "command": "uv",
    "args": [
      "--directory",
      "/Users/<PATH_TO>/video-jungle-mcp",
      "run",
      "video-editor-mcp",
      "<YOURAPIKEY>"
    ],
   "env": {
        "LOAD_PHOTOS_DB": "1"
    }
  },

Be sure to replace the directories with the directories you've placed the repository in on your computer.

Development

Building and Publishing

To prepare the package for distribution:

1. Sync dependencies and update lockfile:

uv sync

2. Build package distributions:

uv build

This will create source and wheel distributions in the dist/ directory.

3. Publish to PyPI:

uv publish

Note: You'll need to set PyPI credentials via environment variables or command flags:

• Token: --token or UV_PUBLISH_TOKEN
• Or username/password: --username/UV_PUBLISH_USERNAME and --password/UV_PUBLISH_PASSWORD

Debugging

Since MCP servers run over stdio, debugging can be challenging. For the best debugging experience, we strongly recommend using the MCP Inspector.

You can launch the MCP Inspector via npm with this command:

(Be sure to replace YOURDIRECTORY and YOURAPIKEY with the directory this repo is in, and your Video Jungle API key, found in the settings page.)

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv run --directory /Users/YOURDIRECTORY/video-editor-mcp video-editor-mcp YOURAPIKEY

Upon launching, the Inspector will display a URL that you can access in your browser to begin debugging.

Additionally, I've added logging to app.log in the project directory. You can add logging to diagnose API calls via a:

logging.info("this is a test log")

A reasonable way to follow along as you're workin on the project is to open a terminal session and do a:

$ tail -n 90 -f app.log