Assistant
Describe the edit. Merlin plans it, shows you the plan, then does it.
- “cut at 12 seconds”
- “split every clip in half”
- “trim a second off the head of each shot”
- Frame-exact cutting, not nearest-clip approximation
Merlin VA is a native macOS assistant that drives DaVinci Resolve Studio from plain language — cuts, grades, ingest, beat-matched music videos. Every model runs on your own machine. Your footage never leaves it.
One-time payment. Permanent licence, one seat. First 100 supporters only — then €59.95, €89.95, and €189.95.
Pulling every pause out of an hour of talking, one cut at a time. Lining up six performance takes against the track by eye and ear. Then cutting between those synced angles, on the beat, for four minutes of song.
None of that is craft — it's typing. Merlin VA does the mechanical part inside Resolve itself, on your timeline, with your grades. Which take plays where, which angle carries the chorus, where the cut lands: still yours. It proposes, you approve.
Merlin VA plans before it acts, shows you the plan, and lands every edit on a new timeline version. Nothing you made is ever overwritten.
Describe the edit. Merlin plans it, shows you the plan, then does it.
Read what was said, click the lines you want, in the order you want them.
Find a shot by describing it, or by what somebody said in it.
Reshape the cut for where it is going, then render it.
Get footage off a card safely — and know it arrived intact.
Sync every performance take by ear, then cut to the beat.
Your own grades, applied by name across a whole timeline.
Separate dialogue from the room it was recorded in.
What Merlin did, in plain language, kept between sessions.
No plug-in to install into Resolve, no project format to convert, no cloud account. Merlin VA talks to Resolve's own scripting API on your machine.
Drag the app across. In Resolve, set External Scripting to Local. Merlin finds your running project on its own.
Type it the way you'd say it to an assistant. Scope chips let you point at these clips, so nothing is left to a guess.
Merlin shows exactly what it will change — and what a change would cost you — before anything is touched. The result lands as a new version.
Planning, vision and transcription all run locally through Ollama and Whisper. After the one-time model download, Merlin VA works with the Wi-Fi off — on a plane, in a basement grade suite, under an NDA that forbids cloud tools.
That's also why the licence can be permanent: there's no per-request bill behind it to fund. You're not renting someone's GPU. You're running your own.
Want more muscle? Drop in your own Claude or GPT API key and Merlin's planning gets far stronger on long, unusual and heavily chained requests. Entirely optional and off unless you add one — your key, your account, read from the environment and never written to disk. Everything else keeps running locally either way.
You would find this out in week one anyway. Better to hear it now, from us. Most of these are limits in Resolve's scripting API rather than in Merlin, and we keep hunting for ways around them — frame-exact trimming and splitting were both on a list like this until we found the route. Where there genuinely isn't one, you'll know before you pay rather than after.
Merlin is an assistant, not an editor. It reads your instruction, looks at your footage and proposes operations — and the models doing that reading are not deterministic. The same instruction can land differently on different footage, a shot can be described wrongly, and a phrasing that works on one take can miss on another. It shows you the plan before it touches anything precisely because you are the one who should approve it. The editorial judgement stays yours.
The API can neither read nor create them, so a precise cut can't carry one across. Merlin spots every transition before it edits and names the clips affected, so you place them after instead of finding them gone. Still on our list.
There is no levels API at all — no volume, no ducking, no loudness, no EQ. Nothing external can touch them. Voice Isolation is the one audio process Merlin can drive, and it drives it properly. Mixing stays a Fairlight job.
Not exposed to scripting. Music Video builds its own sync map instead, which turned out to be the better answer anyway: you keep a say over which angle plays where, rather than handing it to a group.
Merlin doesn't update itself. When a new version ships you get an email and download a new disk image — your licence carries over untouched, and nothing is re-purchased. An in-app updater is on the list; until it exists we would rather say so than let you assume.
Built and tested on Apple Silicon. Windows is planned but not shipped, and we won't sell it as though it were. When it lands, your licence already covers it.
The free edition ships without the scripting API, so nothing external can drive it — Merlin or anything else. Studio 18.5 or newer, and one preference switched on. That's the whole setup.
When a limit is Resolve's rather than ours, we keep looking for the way through — and when we find one it reaches you as an update you already own.
Merlin VA is sold in four stages, and every stage is the same permanent licence. Founders pay the least because they back it earliest, when there is the most still to prove — and because they are the group whose use shapes what gets built next. What you pay is what you pay: the price you buy at never changes for you afterwards.
The foundation group. Permanent licence, one seat, every update — and a direct say in what gets built next. The lowest price Merlin VA will ever carry.
The same permanent licence, once the founder's run has sold out.
The last stage before the settled price. Still one payment, still permanent.
The settled price, for everyone who waits. Still bought once, still yours.
A permanent licence for Merlin VA. No renewal, no seat fee, no feature held back behind a higher tier.
Secure checkout. Licence key by email, straight away.
Then €89.95 for the public beta, and €189.95 at release. Same app, same permanent licence — the difference is only when you got here.
Founder's licences are numbered and issued in the order they are claimed.
Yes. You pay €39.95 once and the app keeps working — offline, indefinitely, with no renewal and no expiry. You are always entitled to update to the newest version at no further cost. Permanent licensing is the model we want to keep, not a launch promotion. There is exactly one exception, and it is written out in full in the terms above: a ground-up rebuild forced on us from outside would carry a one-off developer fee, always smaller than what a new buyer pays.
The price moves to €59.95 for a private beta run of 250 licences, then €89.95 for a public beta run of 650, and then €189.95 at public release. All four are the same permanent licence — the only difference is when you arrived. Nothing changes for the first 100: your licence stays permanent at the price you paid. That is the whole point of a founder's edition. Early supporters carry the risk, so they get the better deal, and they are a small enough group that what they ask for actually gets built.
Studio, version 18.5 or newer. The free edition of Resolve ships without the scripting API, so no external tool — Merlin or anything else — can drive it. You'll also flip one preference: External scripting using → Local.
No. The planner, the vision model and the transcription all run on your machine through Ollama and Whisper. After the one-time model download of about 11 GB, Merlin works with no internet connection at all. A hosted fallback exists but is switched off unless you set your own API key.
Every edit lands on a new timeline version rather than modifying yours in place, and reverting never deletes anything. Merlin shows the plan before it acts, names what a rebuild cannot carry — transitions, Fusion comps, takes — up front, and checks that every clip is still online afterwards.
Core functionality having to change, or the application having to be rebuilt from the ground up — because Blackmagic fundamentally changed Resolve's scripting API, or because a local service Merlin relies on had to be replaced for reasons outside our control. New features, new tabs, performance work, bug fixes and version bumps are not revamps; they are ordinary updates and they are free. If a revamp ever does happen, existing holders pay a reduced one-off developer fee — less than a new buyer pays at that time, and less than a founder's licence costs today.
No. The price is deliberately low so that more editors can afford it, and instalment plans cost more to run than that margin allows. It is one payment.
Every licence covers one seat — one computer at a time, and you can move it to a replacement machine whenever you need to. Merlin VA is macOS on Apple Silicon today, and it isn't being sold as though Windows were finished. Buy it for what it does on a Mac now, not for a date we haven't given you. If a Windows build ships, your existing licence covers it at no extra cost.
Find that out during the trial, not after. Merlin runs free for fourteen days with every feature switched on, against your Resolve version, your Mac and your own footage — which is a far better test than any refund window, because you learn it before any money moves. It is opinionated software: it refuses rather than approximates, and that suits some editors much better than others.
There are no refunds once you buy. Your licence key is issued the moment the payment clears, and at checkout you consent to that immediate delivery and waive the 14-day withdrawal right that would otherwise apply to digital content. That is the trade for getting a working key in seconds instead of a fortnight — and it is exactly why the trial comes first and costs nothing.
The app itself is a 77 MB disk image. The local models are about 11 GB, downloaded once on first run. Plan on 16 GB of RAM and roughly 15 GB of free space — 16 GB is the floor, not a recommendation, and the trial is there to prove it on your own machine before you pay.
After the 100th supporter the same permanent licence costs €59.95, then €89.95, then €189.95. The app doesn't change. Only the price does.
Claim your licence — €39.95