Captain

Edit Resolve timelines like a document.

Captain turns a clip into a word-level transcript, lets you delete, reorder, and auto-trim like you’re editing text, then applies those cuts back into DaVinci Resolve — replace in place, ripple, or a new timeline. Transcription runs locally with Whisper. Works on Resolve Free and Studio.

Why Us?

Video editing still forces you to scrub waveforms and guess where words start. Captain flips that: speak once, read the transcript, cut with the keyboard. Silence markers and retake detection handle manual cleanup that would've taken hours in seconds. Powered by local, offline Whisper AI, so you know your data never leaves your machine.

Install (macOS)

Requirements: DaVinci Resolve Free or Studio (not the Mac App Store build), Python 3.11–3.13, FFmpeg on your PATH (brew install ffmpeg), ~2 GB for the Whisper model on first use.

curl -fsSL https://github.com/Flapjackpants/Captain/archive/refs/tags/v1.0.0.tar.gz | tar xz && bash Captain-1.0.0/setupfiles/install-mac.sh

Fully quit and reopen Resolve, open a project, then:

Workspace → Scripts → Captain

Leave the script running until you quit Captain.

From a local clone (development):

bash setupfiles/install-mac.sh

Usage

1. Workspace → Scripts → Captain
2. Pick a clip (or Use Playhead Clip) → Transcribe → edit → Apply
3. Optional: Import Script… (.txt / .fountain / .srt / .vtt) to color-compare against what was said

Edit: Delete toggles words remove/restore (and silence trim) · Cmd+X / Cmd+V cut-paste · Cmd+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z undo/redo · click jumps the playhead · Trim Silence / Remove Repeats for auto-trims · silence markers (…) show long gaps; struck = will be trimmed.

Script colors: white = match · blue = in script only · magenta = in video only · red = mismatch · gray strikethrough = removed.

Technical breakdown

Workspace → Scripts → Captain.lua   (Resolve Lua, live resolve handle)
        │
        ├─ JSON-RPC over files in
        │  ~/Library/Application Support/Captain/bridge/
        │
        └─ spawns Captain UI (venv + PySide6 + faster-whisper)

Layer	Role
Captain.lua	Resolve Scripts entry; owns the live resolve API and the bridge loop
Bridge	File-based JSON-RPC between Lua and the Python UI
faster-whisper	Offline transcription with word-level timestamps
Transcript model	Ordered words, removed set, silence cuts; keep_ranges() drives assembly
GUI	PySide6 transcript editor: lines, silence markers, search, script compare
Assemble	Maps keep ranges to Resolve timeline ops (replace / ripple / new timeline)

Apply modes: replace in place (default, non-ripple), replace with ripple, or new timeline ({clip} [Captain] {n}).

Config lives at ~/Library/Application Support/Captain/config.json (Whisper model/device, language, silence thresholds, repeat n-gram size).

Development

python3.12 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt -e ".[dev]"
.venv/bin/python -m pytest

Not affiliated with Blackmagic Design.