# SpliceKit for Final Cut Pro – Command Palette and MCP Server > Source: > Published: 2026-08-23 04:29:15+00:00 # SpliceKit **Final Cut Pro, unlocked. A Command Palette, MCP server, and an open plugin framework to do almost anything.** Free to [download](download/) and MIT Open Source! ## The Three Pillars ### 🎹 The Command Palette *One keystroke to anything.* Hit **COMMAND+SHIFT+P** inside the patched Final Cut Pro. Fuzzy-search 100+ built-in editing actions β€” blade, trim, color, speed, markers, effects, transitions, export β€” or type plain English and let **Apple Intelligence** (on-device, private) figure out what you meant. #### Try saying… *"add markers every 5 seconds"**"slow this clip to half speed"**"blade at every scene change"**"remove all the silences"**"add a cross dissolve"* No more menu hunting. No more memorizing shortcuts. No cloud. ### πŸ€– The MCP Server *Claude (or any other LLM) can drive your editor β€” and teach it new tricks.* SpliceKit 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: *"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"* It's not a chat wrapper around keyboard shortcuts. The MCP talks to Final Cut Pro's internal ObjC runtime directly β€” so it can read timeline state, inspect clips, blade, retime, color-correct, apply effects, and render without ever touching the user interface. #### The editor that gets smarter every week The first time you ask for something complicated, the AI might be a little clumsy. It's improvising β€” stitching together primitives, trial-and-error against your timeline, occasionally picking the long way around. When that happens, don't settle for the workaround. **Tell it to build the ability.** Every 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 β€” and most of that improvement won't come from the SpliceKit team. It'll come from you, and from the community shipping plugins back. ### 🧩 The Plugin Framework *Everything is a plugin.* SpliceKit isn't a feature list β€” 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. #### What a plugin can do - Add new panels and windows inside FCP - Put buttons on the toolbar, menu, or Enhancements menu - Register commands in the Command Palette - Expose new tools over the MCP server - Hook into timeline events, selection changes, and playback - Ship custom Motion templates, FxPlug effects, and Workflow Extensions - Be written in Objective-C / C++, Swift, Lua, or Python #### And you can ask an AI to build one Describe what you want. Hand the spec to Claude. It writes the plugin against the SpliceKit framework β€” the project ships full API reference docs designed for AI consumption. ## Example Plugins What Ships in the Box... Every 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. ### Text-Based Editor Transcribe every clip on your timeline with on-device speech recognition (NVIDIA Parakeet β€” 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. ### Audio Mixer Mix by **role**, not clip-by-clip. Drop a compressor, EQ, or reverb on your Dialogue bus and every clip tagged Dialogue inherits it β€” 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. ### Sections A 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 β€” perfect for long-form edits, podcasts, multi-chapter projects, or anywhere you want to see structure without scrubbing. ### Silence Remover Point 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. ### Social Media Captions Generate 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. ### Scene Detection Finds every shot change in your footage using vImage histogram comparison. Add markers, blade the timeline, or both. ### Beat Detection & Song Cut Pulls 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. ### LiveCam A 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+). Pick "Transparent" as the green-screen color and LiveCam writes ProRes 4444 with a real alpha channel. ### URL Import Paste a YouTube, Vimeo, or Twitter link and pull it into your library as a real clip. Auto-discovers `yt-dlp` and `ffmpeg` from your shell PATH. ### Batch Export One command, every clip on your timeline exports as its own file β€” all effects, color grades, and transitions baked in. ### Native Codecs Drop Blackmagic RAW (`.braw` ) and VP9/WebM files straight onto your timeline β€” no transcoding, no wrappers. ##### Blackmagic RAW requires BRAW Toolbox To enable Blackmagic RAW support in SpliceKit you need to have a legitimate paid version of LateNite's [BRAW Toolbox](https://brawtoolbox.fcp.cafe) installed. SpliceKit 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. A huge unlock for anyone cutting Blackmagic camera footage or pulling down WebM video from the web. ### Lots More! Dual Timelines, FlexMusic, Montage Maker, OpenTimelineIO exchange, Lua REPL, in-process debugger and more. Every one of them is code in [ Sources](https://github.com/elliotttate/SpliceKit/tree/main/Sources) you can read, fork, or gut for parts. ## Is it safe? Whilst 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**. SpliceKit 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. SpliceKit 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. Your 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. However, generally speaking, SpliceKit is actually **MORE** stable than Apple's version, fixing annoying bugs, like poor Effects Browser scrolling performance. SpliceKit 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). Like [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. Because SpliceKit has a MCP server, Claude Code, Codex, ChatGPT and other cloud and on-device LLMs have full control over Final Cut Pro. SpliceKit is **free and open-source**, and we encourage you to [contribute](contribute/). The best place to chat about SliceKit is the [FCP Cafe Discord](https://ltnt.tv/discord). **Welcome to a new world for Final Cut Pro users... πŸ₯³**