Letting AI drive Premiere directly: notes on setting up the Premiere MCP

I connected the Claude desktop app and a Premiere MCP so AI could operate my PC and Premiere directly, and worked through the installation traps and port fights one by one.

This connection is what made the work in parts 1 and 2 possible.

What I connected, and how

If the AI could only give instructions and I had to do everything by hand, I couldn't have handled this volume.

Connection	What the AI does
Claude desktop app + remote access	Even when I chat from my phone or the office, the work runs on my home PC
Files and command line	Lists drives, checks copy results, pulls capture times and audio with ffmpeg, runs Python scripts
Screen control	Clicks through 7-Zip, Premiere and Media Encoder
Premiere MCP	Builds sequences and caption tracks and saves the project through a bridge panel inside Premiere
Media Encoder	Exports the per-day sequences as MP3 for transcription

Screen control had its limits. In File Explorer it could click, but copy, paste and drag-and-drop were blocked, so devices without a drive letter, like my phone, I had to move myself.

The Premiere MCP

MCP is a way of connecting AI to other programs so it can use them as tools. For Premiere I use Adobe-Premiere-Pro-MCP, published on GitHub. An "MCP Bridge" extension panel attaches to Premiere, and a small server runs on the PC (port 8097) passing the AI's commands to Premiere as scripts (ExtendScript).

The MCP Bridge panel. The green Connected has to show before AI commands reach Premiere.

I first installed it in early September, while working on the video shown before our wedding ceremony. I thought running the installer would be enough, but there were plenty of traps. In October I put the same thing on my work PC, and the company network added one more problem.

Symptom	Cause	Fix
The Claude app never starts the server	The Microsoft Store version of the app reads its config file from a different path	Register it at the real path (under LocalCache)
Settings silently ignored	The install script puts a BOM (an invisible character) at the start of the config file	Save it again without the BOM
Server fails to start	The config just says node, and the app can't find it	Use the full path to node.exe
Panel says Connected but commands do nothing	Each chat window starts its own server, and they fight over the one port	Clean up leftover server processes and reconnect
Keyboard dead in Premiere	The bridge panel grabs keyboard input	Close the panel when editing by hand
Install fails on the work PC	Node doesn't trust the certificate of the company's security appliance	An option that makes Node use the Windows certificate store

Installation steps

This is the order I settled on after getting stuck several times. It works for installing on another PC too.

Step	Where	What to do
1	PowerShell	Check Node.js is installed. If not, install it and open a new window
2	Browser	Download Adobe-Premiere-Pro-MCP from GitHub as a ZIP and unzip it into Documents. Moving it later breaks the Premiere extension link, so put it in its final location from the start
3	Notepad	Open install.bat and read it first. If it does anything unfamiliar beyond registry settings, linking the extension folder, installing and building packages, and writing settings, stop
4	PowerShell	Run install.bat and check the server file (dist\server.js) was created
5	Premiere	Quit completely, restart, open Window > Extensions > MCP Bridge
6	Claude app	Launch once and quit, so it creates its settings folder
7	PowerShell	Register the server in the real config file path. Save without a BOM, use the full path for node
8	PowerShell	Quit the Claude app completely and launch it again. It reads settings only once, at startup
9	Premiere	Check the panel shows Connected
10	Claude app	In a new chat, check the connection status, and verify by having it only read the track layout without changing anything

I also settled on a startup routine for everyday use.

Order	What to do
1	Close other MCP programs and other Claude chat windows
2	If a leftover server is holding port 8097, clean it up
3	Launch Premiere, open the project and sequence
4	Launch the Claude app (the server starts automatically)
5	Check the bridge panel shows Connected, then work
6	Close the panel when editing by hand. The server stays up, so it reconnects as soon as you reopen it

This weekend: the port fight and a bridge fix

The port fight broke out again this weekend. Every time I moved to a new chat window, the old window's server was still holding the port, so the panel said Connected while the commands vanished into thin air. At first I got by with a one-line PowerShell command that cleaned up leftover servers. But I had to repeat it every time I switched windows, which got tedious. So this time the AI changed the bridge code itself. A newly started server asks the old one to hand over the port, and the old one steps aside. It tested this with a local simulation before applying it. A new server asks for the port only during its first 15 seconds, and a server that has stepped aside waits quietly instead of trying to take it back. So normally the most recent chat window wins. The change went into both the build output and the original source, so it survives a rebuild. Even so, in the first session the connection never came up, so the sequences were made as XML files and imported through screen control. From the next session on, it used the MCP to add caption tracks and save the project.

In the next post I cover how I made subtitles for 62 hours of footage, and what I learned about running AI work efficiently.