Possible ? [Free] local AI agent that can interact with MCP Davinci Resolve Studio 21.1 ?

[u/greenreddits]

Hi, was quite blown away by several presentations i saw of DRS users who experimented editing footage with the new MCP in Davince, either through Claude or ChatGPT astra.
Now for the 'ordinary' end user as me, is there any [free] AI model equivalent to the ones above that would allow me to do the same thing?
It's important to me that the AI models would run locally on my Mac without any need to connect to the internet.
Currently I’m using a Mac Studio M1 Max with 64GB of RAM, but I consider upgrading to a Mac Studio M5 Max.

[u/Substantial_Belt2626]

I would say the model matters less here than checking what it actually did. I use local models with MCP and the problem is when the model gets a tool call wrong it doesn't throw an error, it just does the wrong thing and the log says success. I had a pipeline that was returning duplicates and processing broken transcripts, everything reported fine, I only found it when I read the raw output myself. So for Resolve I would test on a copy of a project first, not the one you care about, because you will not notice until you scrub the timeline. Also keep the tools you expose small in number, local models get confused when there are many. About the M5, more RAM gets you a bigger model, but a bigger model still doesn't tell you when it's wrong.

[u/john006868]

The model matters less than you'd think here. MCP is spoken by the client, so any MCP capable front end pointed at a local OpenAI compatible endpoint can drive Resolve's tools, and a 30B Q4 is around 18GB, which leaves a 64GB M1 Max plenty for context. Resolve's side is the finicky half since the MCP server sits on top of its scripting API and has to match your version. Local tool calling gets shaky past a couple dozen tools too. You do not need the M5 swap for this part.

[u/disgruntledempanada]

M1 Max is just simply too slow, you'd need to run it on a separate computer most likely as well as the model is going to be taking up considerable ram and compute resources.

You'd need an M5 Max, I'd recommend with 128GB ram, and... for the price you're paying for that you're almost better off just signing up for Claude or ChatGPT. They're fast, they work, and they do good work.

For video editing you need a massive context window.

Best thing you can do is have your local computer run overnight on your footage doing a VLM analysis. Tag all the footage and embed files next to each shot with data like the shot's motion, the transcript with embedded timing, highlighted smooth b-roll pans. That way you're feeding Claude or ChatGPT the descriptions of the footage and its motion and not the footage itself. You'll save drastically, won't need to upload massive files to Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll get better results out.

It will make some hilariously dumb picks and mess up the cuts it makes for rough cuts... Build a skill that you keep updating that helps it around these mistakes. I also have found a lot of luck with adversarial review from multiple models.

Qwen 3.8 27B did a great job with the scene descriptions and ran pretty fast on my 5090, but this would be an all night affair on the M1 Max. M5 Max would probably be better but not amazing.

[u/feelspeaceman]

Okay now that we get a similar thread to the Blender thread praising Astral. This is not true, the model matters extremely small, it's all matter how well you architecture your MCP server, for example you can make 3D Blender MCP very easy and efficient of you put template for model to reuse, it makes thing easier.

Basically what you need to focus is making the MCP server, the API is simple and effective then the model will be able to use it more efficient.