Takes for Mac MCP server

Record on your Mac or iPhone. Claude Code writes the script, cuts the edit and drafts the posts. gettakes.app

Takes shows each post the way LinkedIn, X, YouTube or Shorts will show it, so you review the real thing. No coding needed, no account, no usage data: your videos stay in folders on your Mac.

Install

Paste this in Terminal:

curl -fsSL https://gettakes.app/install | bash

It installs Takes, ffmpeg, Apple's developer tools and Claude Code, signs you in to Claude and opens Takes. Run it again to update. You can read the script first: it is 94 lines.

Other ways to install

• Download: get Takes.dmg from Releases and drag Takes to Applications. Takes is not notarized yet, so open System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway once (pictures of each step). Then click Finish setup in the sidebar.
• From source: clone this repo, brew install ffmpeg, then ./build.sh install.

How a video goes

1. Storyboard. Ask "storyboard my next video". Claude writes the script and sketches each shot.
2. Record. Read off a teleprompter that follows your voice. Camera and screen record as two synced files. Star the take you keep.
3. Post. Ask "cut my last take" and "write the posts". Review each draft as the platform shows it, leave comments on a frame or a line, and schedule it.

On your iPhone

Your videos, takes, storyboards and posts, from anywhere. Ask Takes from the phone too. Record a take on the phone and it lands in the session on your Mac. The phone reaches your Mac over Tailscale; nothing goes through a server of ours.

To install it you need Xcode and an Apple ID: TAKES_TEAM= ios/install.sh. With a free Apple ID, install it again every 7 days.

How it works

Your library is plain folders in ~/Movies/Takes. The app records into them, your agent reads and writes them through the takes MCP server, and the app updates when a file changes. The chat panel in the app runs on Claude Code or Codex, on your own plan: the line under "Takes" in the chat picks the agent and the model, and Settings › Agents shows which agents can open your library.

The server works with any MCP agent. On its first launch Takes adds it to each one on your Mac: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, opencode, pi (with pi-mcp-adapter) and Claude Desktop. It also adds two skills (takes-storyboard, takes-video-edit) to ~/.claude/skills and ~/.agents/skills. So you can ask from any of them too. Another agent, or one you installed later: Settings › Agents › Connect, or python3 /Applications/Takes.app/Contents/Resources/takes_mcp.py --setup.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.