Setup
What is MCP, in plain English?
The one thing you need to understand before any of the setup steps make sense.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a small, open standard that lets an AI assistant call real tools on your computer — instead of just producing text. Think of it as a menu of actions ("cut this clip", "detect the beat", "render the timeline") that an AI like Claude Code can read and use, the same way a human would use a menu of buttons in an app.
Editz runs one of these tool servers locally on your machine, on http://127.0.0.1:9317/mcp. It never leaves your computer — no cloud account, no uploading your footage anywhere. When you connect an MCP-aware AI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Claude Desktop) to that address, the AI can see and call Editz's editing tools directly.
Why not just paste a prompt into ChatGPT?
A normal chat model can only produce text back. It can describe what an edit should look like, but it can't actually touch your video file. MCP closes that gap: the model decides what to do, then calls a real tool (like cut_filler or render_timeline) that does the actual work with ffmpeg and Whisper on your disk.
Do I need to understand JSON-RPC or servers to use this?
No. You run one command (npx @editz/editz), copy one line into your AI tool's settings, and from then on you just talk to it in plain English. The rest of the guides here walk through that one-time setup per tool.