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What Claude Code Can and Can't Do in DaVinci Resolve: Five Tasks and What Went Wrong
ยท RenderBob team
A write-up of hands-on tests lists five editing tasks an AI coding assistant can drive in DaVinci Resolve, and records where it failed. Useful for rough work, with a person still finishing.
A write-up of hands-on tests lists five editing tasks an AI coding assistant can drive in DaVinci Resolve, and records where it failed. It supports our Resolve 21.1 view: useful for rough work, with a person still finishing.
The source
Implicator.ai published the piece on 19 August. It is labelled an AI-assisted summary reviewed by an editor. It does not name the testers, and it draws on documented runs from April, July, and August. Treat the numbers as indicative of those runs.
How it connects to Resolve
The assistant reaches Resolve Studio through two routes: a third-party open-source Resolve MCP server and Resolve Studio's own Python and Lua scripting. The article notes that capabilities change with each release, which is the territory we covered in our 11 October piece on Resolve 21.1's MCP server.
Project setup and media organisation
Creating projects, importing clips, building timelines, adding markers. One July run imported three clips and set up a 29.97 fps timeline.
Rough cuts from timestamped transcripts
Finding retakes, filler words, and dead air. An April test cut a 50-second clip to about 27 seconds. After taste decisions the demonstrated edit landed at 32 seconds. A separate rough cut described in the piece took 5 minutes 41 seconds.
Graphics, captions, and overlays
Generating motion graphics from an SRT file and placing them. An August pass took 1 hour 38 minutes. A tighter restyle in the same write-up took about 20 minutes and still needed resizing by hand.
Finishing and export
Applying a known LUT, grouping clips, queuing exports. A LUT applied in about two minutes, and the editor then reduced its strength by hand.
Keeping the editor in the loop
Marking uncertain silences, keeping earlier versions, and rendering comparison clips for the editor to judge. The MCP documentation quoted in the piece requires a plan, a review, and a confirmation before a destructive action.
What went wrong
- Silence markers were misplaced, a clear gap was missed, and clips detached during a move.
- Graphics renders cropped the wrong side of a face, covered the speaker, and ignored an uploaded logo.
- Colour-page nodes and effects could not be added through the MCP route that was tested. Related work in Fusion still left glow, halation, and grain to be added by hand.
- Transcript analysis cannot judge the best performance or whether a cut works.
The article found no support for unattended professional editing.
How to use this
Use an assistant for the tedious first pass: organising, transcript-based cuts, and queueing exports. Keep every version, review every cut, and do the colour and the final delivery yourself. This matches the suggestive-editing lane in our earlier two-lanes piece.
What to watch
Resolve releases that widen what scripting and MCP can reach, and independent tests that report failure rates as well as speed.
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