{"slug": "splicekit-for-final-cut-pro-command-palette-and-mcp-server", "title": "SpliceKit for Final Cut Pro – Command Palette and MCP Server", "summary": "SpliceKit, a free and MIT-licensed open-source plugin framework for Final Cut Pro, introduces a Command Palette, an MCP server with ~200 tools, and a plugin framework that exposes 78,000+ ObjC classes, enabling AI-driven editing via Apple Intelligence or Claude. The project, available for download, aims to unlock Final Cut Pro's full potential through community-built plugins.", "body_md": "# SpliceKit\n\n**Final Cut Pro, unlocked. A Command Palette, MCP server, and an open plugin framework to do almost anything.**\n\nFree to [download](download/) and MIT Open Source!\n\n## The Three Pillars\n\n### 🎹 The Command Palette\n\n*One keystroke to anything.*\n\nHit **COMMAND+SHIFT+P** inside the patched Final Cut Pro. Fuzzy-search 100+ built-in editing actions — blade, trim, color, speed, markers, effects, transitions, export — or type plain English and let **Apple Intelligence** (on-device, private) figure out what you meant.\n\n#### Try saying…\n\n*\"add markers every 5 seconds\"**\"slow this clip to half speed\"**\"blade at every scene change\"**\"remove all the silences\"**\"add a cross dissolve\"*\n\nNo more menu hunting. No more memorizing shortcuts. No cloud.\n\n### 🤖 The MCP Server\n\n*Claude (or any other LLM) can drive your editor — and teach it new tricks.*\n\nSpliceKit ships with an MCP server that exposes ~200 tools covering every major FCP subsystem. Point **Claude Code**, **Claude Desktop**, or any MCP-compatible AI client at it and you can say things like:\n\n*\"cut this 40-minute interview down to its best moments\"**\"remove the silences from this podcast, add captions, and export\"**\"assemble a rough cut from these clips, synced to the beat of this song\"*\n\nIt's not a chat wrapper around keyboard shortcuts. The MCP talks to Final Cut Pro's internal ObjC runtime directly — so it can read timeline state, inspect clips, blade, retime, color-correct, apply effects, and render without ever touching the user interface.\n\n#### The editor that gets smarter every week\n\nThe first time you ask for something complicated, the AI might be a little clumsy. It's improvising — stitching together primitives, trial-and-error against your timeline, occasionally picking the long way around.\n\nWhen that happens, don't settle for the workaround. **Tell it to build the ability.**\n\nEvery clumsy first attempt is a prompt to turn that workflow into a first-class feature. The editor you use six months from now is smarter than the one you installed today — and most of that improvement won't come from the SpliceKit team. It'll come from you, and from the community shipping plugins back.\n\n### 🧩 The Plugin Framework\n\n*Everything is a plugin.*\n\nSpliceKit isn't a feature list — it's a platform. Once the SpliceKit dylib is loaded into Final Cut Pro, the entire ObjC runtime (78,000+ classes, including all private APIs) is open for plugins to use.\n\n#### What a plugin can do\n\n- Add new panels and windows inside FCP\n- Put buttons on the toolbar, menu, or Enhancements menu\n- Register commands in the Command Palette\n- Expose new tools over the MCP server\n- Hook into timeline events, selection changes, and playback\n- Ship custom Motion templates, FxPlug effects, and Workflow Extensions\n- Be written in Objective-C / C++, Swift, Lua, or Python\n\n#### And you can ask an AI to build one\n\nDescribe what you want. Hand the spec to Claude. It writes the plugin against the SpliceKit framework — the project ships full API reference docs designed for AI consumption.\n\n## Example Plugins\n\nWhat Ships in the Box...\n\nEvery one of these is a plugin. They're bundled so you can use SpliceKit the day you install it, and they double as working examples for anyone building their own.\n\n### Text-Based Editor\n\nTranscribe every clip on your timeline with on-device speech recognition (NVIDIA Parakeet — 25 languages, no cloud, with speaker diarization). Click a word to jump there. Select a sentence, hit Delete, and the video gets cut to match. Drag words to reorder clips. Export as SRT or plain text.\n\n### Audio Mixer\n\nMix by **role**, not clip-by-clip. Drop a compressor, EQ, or reverb on your Dialogue bus and every clip tagged Dialogue inherits it — past, present, and future. Retag a clip's role and it instantly picks up the new bus's processing. Set volumes, solo, and mute per role from one panel.\n\n### Sections\n\nA color-coded section bar above the timeline that shows the shape of your edit at a glance. Name sections, color them, jump between them in one click — perfect for long-form edits, podcasts, multi-chapter projects, or anywhere you want to see structure without scrubbing.\n\n### Silence Remover\n\nPoint it at an interview or podcast recording and it finds and cuts every silent pause. Configurable threshold, minimum duration, and padding. Pure Apple-native AVFoundation + Accelerate under the hood.\n\n### Social Media Captions\n\nGenerate word-by-word highlighted, animated captions in 13 built-in styles (Bold Pop, Neon Glow, Karaoke, Typewriter, Bounce, and more). Captions land directly on your timeline as editable Motion titles.\n\n### Scene Detection\n\nFinds every shot change in your footage using vImage histogram comparison. Add markers, blade the timeline, or both.\n\n### Beat Detection & Song Cut\n\nPulls BPM, beats, bars, and song sections from any music file. Hand **Song Cut** a music track and a folder of footage and get back a beat-synced music video on your timeline, with selectable pacing (natural, medium, fast, aggressive) or custom step weights.\n\n### LiveCam\n\nA built-in webcam booth that records straight to your library or active timeline. Live preview with color adjustments, audio meter, and a subject-lift green-screen matte that works on people *and* objects (macOS 14+).\n\nPick \"Transparent\" as the green-screen color and LiveCam writes ProRes 4444 with a real alpha channel.\n\n### URL Import\n\nPaste a YouTube, Vimeo, or Twitter link and pull it into your library as a real clip. Auto-discovers `yt-dlp`\n\nand `ffmpeg`\n\nfrom your shell PATH.\n\n### Batch Export\n\nOne command, every clip on your timeline exports as its own file — all effects, color grades, and transitions baked in.\n\n### Native Codecs\n\nDrop Blackmagic RAW (`.braw`\n\n) and VP9/WebM files straight onto your timeline — no transcoding, no wrappers.\n\n##### Blackmagic RAW requires BRAW Toolbox\n\nTo enable Blackmagic RAW support in SpliceKit you need to have a legitimate paid version of LateNite's [BRAW Toolbox](https://brawtoolbox.fcp.cafe) installed.\n\nSpliceKit ships a BRAW RAW Processor and a VP9 decoder that plug into Final Cut Pro through Apple's MediaExtension framework, so the clips show up as first-class media with thumbnails, scrubbing, and full quality decode.\n\nA huge unlock for anyone cutting Blackmagic camera footage or pulling down WebM video from the web.\n\n### Lots More!\n\nDual Timelines, FlexMusic, Montage Maker, OpenTimelineIO exchange, Lua REPL, in-process debugger and more.\n\nEvery one of them is code in [ Sources](https://github.com/elliotttate/SpliceKit/tree/main/Sources) you can read, fork, or gut for parts.\n\n## Is it safe?\n\nWhilst powerful tools like [CommandPost](https://commandpost.fcp.cafe) have existed for over a decade, SpliceKit uses safe but powerful code injection to get inside Final Cut Pro, giving you **complete control**.\n\nSpliceKit loads a custom framework directly inside Final Cut Pro's process space giving you **full access** to all everything **INSIDE** Final Cut Pro's codebase.\n\nSpliceKit doesn't touch your original Final Cut Pro installation - so you can easily jump between the SpliceKit version of Final Cut Pro and the official version.\n\nYour Final Cut Pro library is always **fully compatible** with Apple's shipping version - giving you confidence that if there is a SpliceKit bug, you can always jump back to the official release.\n\nHowever, generally speaking, SpliceKit is actually **MORE** stable than Apple's version, fixing annoying bugs, like poor Effects Browser scrolling performance.\n\nSpliceKit contains a bunch of amazing Final Cut Pro enhancements, allowing you to do things that was never possible before with [CommandPost](https://commandpost.fcp.cafe).\n\nLike [CommandPost](https://commandpost.fcp.cafe) though, it also has a **Lua-scripting environment**, so you can easily code your own Lua Scripts for powerful automation.\n\nBecause SpliceKit has a MCP server, Claude Code, Codex, ChatGPT and other cloud and on-device LLMs have full control over Final Cut Pro.\n\nSpliceKit is **free and open-source**, and we encourage you to [contribute](contribute/).\n\nThe best place to chat about SliceKit is the [FCP Cafe Discord](https://ltnt.tv/discord).\n\n**Welcome to a new world for Final Cut Pro users... 🥳**", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/splicekit-for-final-cut-pro-command-palette-and-mcp-server", "canonical_source": "https://splicekit.fcp.cafe/", "published_at": "2026-08-23 04:29:15+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-23 04:43:23.682306+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-tools", "ai-agents", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["SpliceKit", "Final Cut Pro", "Apple Intelligence", "Claude", "Claude Code", "Claude Desktop", "NVIDIA Parakeet"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/splicekit-for-final-cut-pro-command-palette-and-mcp-server", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/splicekit-for-final-cut-pro-command-palette-and-mcp-server.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/splicekit-for-final-cut-pro-command-palette-and-mcp-server.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/splicekit-for-final-cut-pro-command-palette-and-mcp-server.jsonld"}}