cuttingfloor MCP server

cuttingfloor

A headless video editor for agents, as an MCP server. An agent imports footage, cuts it on a timeline with granular editing tools, looks at the result after every edit, checks it, and exports a file.

• Every edit returns a new timeline id, plus a preview image of the result. Timelines are immutable, so going back is just using an older id.
• Nothing is stored for you. Timelines, media and outputs live in a cache with a time limit (24 hours for timelines, 7 days for media and exports). Export to keep work.
• One Docker image runs locally (free) and hosted. Engines (FFmpeg, MLT) ship inside it; Docker is the only thing you install.

Status: Phase 3 in progress. Import, timelines, clip editing, timing (speed, ramps, reverse, freeze frames, roll/slip/slide, range extract, nested timelines), transitions, titles and captions, audio (gain, pan, fades, ducking, loudness), effects (colour, LUTs, blur, chroma key and more; EQ, compressor, denoise, pitch), analysis (transcripts, beats, faces, tracking), compositing (transforms, keyframes, masks, blend modes, animations), motion graphics and HTML stills (sandboxed), mattes, local voiceover with timed words, people cut-outs, previews, exact QA checks and H.264/ProRes export work end to end. Provider tools (ElevenLabs, OpenAI) and NLE interchange come next.

Run it

docker compose up -d          # local mode: one node on 127.0.0.1:8787, plus the motion sandbox

Compose starts two containers from the same image: cuttingfloor (the server) and cuttingfloor-motion, the sandbox where agent-written HTML for create.motion and create.still renders. The sandbox has no route out, no data volume, no capabilities, a read-only filesystem and fixed CPU, memory and process limits. Chromium's own sandbox stays on inside it, using the seccomp profile at tools/motion/seccomp.json (Docker's default plus namespace creation). Run compose from a checkout of this repository so that file is there.

Connect an MCP client over Streamable HTTP:

{ "mcpServers": { "cuttingfloor": { "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8787/mcp" } } }

Or over stdio, for clients that only launch commands. The stdio process forwards to the running container, so long exports keep going after the client exits:

{ "mcpServers": { "cuttingfloor": { "command": "docker", "args": ["exec", "-i", "cuttingfloor", "cuttingfloor", "mcp"] } } }

Folders (set them in a .env next to compose.yaml, see .env.example):

Provider keys are yours (bring your own) and go in the same .env, or in Docker secrets (/run/secrets/). They never pass through a tool, and video://server/health shows only whether each is set. create.lipsync needs SYNCAPIKEY from sync. labs (Settings → API keys); they bill your account for each second sent. Run docker compose up -d after adding one.

The image includes /samples/sample.mp4 (10 s test pattern with a tone) and /samples/card.png to try things with nothing mounted.

On Docker Desktop for Mac, raise the memory limit for long 4K timelines; bind-mounted footage reads go through VirtioFS. On Linux, create the exports folder before the first start so it belongs to you.

How an agent uses it

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.