The argument in one line.
DaVinci Resolve's AI subtitle tool is most powerful when used as a free word-timing ruler — generate single-word subtitles for their cut marks, then delete the layer and animate your own styled text to those marks.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You edit talking-head, real estate, or social media videos in DaVinci Resolve and want animated word-synced captions without a separate caption tool.
- You know your way around the DaVinci Edit page but have never used Fusion's camera tracker or the Color page magic mask.
- You want a step-by-step method for placing text behind a subject or locking text into a 3D scene without a motion-graphics background.
SKIP IF…
- You edit in Premiere Pro, CapCut, or any other NLE — almost nothing here transfers directly.
- You only need static or auto-generated captions and have no interest in per-word animation.
The full version, fast.
The core insight is that DaVinci's AI subtitle generator is a better timing tool than a caption tool — set it to one character per word, let it cut the timeline, then hide the layer and use those cuts as rails for your own animated text. From there, per-word animation direction is set clip by clip in the animation tab, with a universal 5-frame leftward offset to ensure animations resolve before the spoken word lands. Compositing text behind a subject runs through the Color page magic mask with an alpha output, requiring no Fusion work. For 3D scene tracking, the workflow is: compound clip → Fusion clip → camera tracker solve → image plane transform → mask-inverted drop shadow → magic mask subject back in front.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 00:27
01 · Intro
Host introduces the three techniques: timing, text-behind-subject, and 3D tracking.
00:27 – 01:45
02 · Timing Subtitles
AI subtitle tool set to 1 char/word max → generates cut marks → layer disabled, marks used as timing rails.
01:45 – 04:40
03 · Building the Visuals
One clip per word, mixed fonts/sizes, Lux Slide and Shine effects, positional layout.
04:40 – 08:17
04 · Fixing Animation Directions
Per-clip animation tab: uncheck mirror-out, set directional in/out, Fix Animation button to auto-recalculate duration.
08:17 – 09:18
05 · Fine Tuning Timing
Select all text, shift 5 frames left using comma key, extend clip ends to compensate.
09:18 – 10:50
06 · The Best Text Pack for Resolve
Launch pitch for Lux pack — fix animation, customization depth, launch sale.
10:50 – 18:50
07 · Placing Text Behind a Subject
Cut footage, unlink audio, drag footage above text, Color page magic mask → alpha output → slight blur, shift all text up by Y to partially hide behind subject.
18:50 – 26:43
08 · Bringing Subtitles into a 3D Scene
Compound clip → Fusion clip → magic mask as garbage mat → camera tracker solve → export → image plane in 3D space → apply mode screen → mask-inverted drop shadow → magic mask subject back in front.
26:43 – 39:19
09 · Lux Title Pack Overview
Full walkthrough: Slide (position/size/blur/opacity/motion blur/apply mode/glow), Count (prefix/append/easing), Flicker (strength/duration), Follower (order/delay), Shine (offset/length/angle/width), Tracking, Write-On.
39:19 – 39:50
10 · Outro
Sign-off and Jesus sign-off.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- DaVinci's AI subtitle tool generates the most value not as captions but as a one-click word-cut-mark generator — use it for timing, then disable it.
- Animated text that starts at the exact moment a word is spoken will always feel late — pre-roll by 5 frames minimum to sync perception with audio.
- A 'Fix Animation' button that auto-truncates animation length to clip duration eliminates the most common caption-timing error with one click.
- You can composite text behind a subject entirely in DaVinci's Color page using magic mask plus an alpha output — no Fusion required for this use case.
- The DaVinci camera tracker's garbage-mat input accepts a magic mask directly — use it to exclude the moving subject from the track solve and get cleaner point clouds.
- Drop shadows break in screen-blend mode; the fix is to pipe the text layer into the shadow merge as an inverted mask so the shadow appears only where text edges are.
- Converting multiple text clips into a compound clip before entering Fusion keeps the text editable in the Edit page after the Fusion composition is built — edits propagate automatically.
- Setting subtitle max characters per line to 1 in DaVinci forces single-word cuts — this is the precision timing trick the whole workflow depends on.
- A text pack that goes from 7 presets to 200+ effective variations through combinatorial customization (position, size, blur, opacity, motion blur, apply mode, glow) has higher ROI than one with more preset slots.
- The follower animation's out-delay should be set to zero if you want all letters to exit simultaneously — leaving it non-zero makes individual letters stagger out, which rarely looks intentional.
The three layers of professional caption timing.
WHAT TO LEARN
Getting word-synced captions to look professional in DaVinci Resolve is not one problem — it's three separate problems that must be solved in order: mark the timing, control the animation direction, and then fix the perceptual lag.
02Timing Subtitles
- DaVinci's AI subtitle tool can generate word-precise cut marks in seconds by setting max characters per line to 1 — use those marks as timing rails, then hide the subtitle layer entirely.
03Building the Visuals
- Building per-word text stacks means one clip per word on the timeline — the word's cut mark sets the in-point, the next word's cut mark sets the out-point.
04Fixing Animation Directions
- Animation direction is set per clip in the animation tab; the key control is mirror-out, which defaults on and forces the exit to mirror the entry — turn it off to assign independent exit directions.
- The Fix Animation button auto-truncates animation length to fit any clip duration — it eliminates the single most common timing error without manual adjustment.
05Fine Tuning Timing
- All text clips should be shifted 5 frames earlier than the word's cut mark so that the animation resolves at the moment of speech, not after it — viewers perceive text that arrives late as out of sync.
07Placing Text Behind a Subject
- Placing text behind a subject can be done entirely in the Color page: magic mask the subject, add an alpha output node, drag the footage clip above the text in the timeline, and the subject composites over the text without touching Fusion.
08Bringing Subtitles into a 3D Scene
- For 3D-tracked text, converting all text clips to a compound clip before entering Fusion keeps them editable in the Edit page after the Fusion composition is built — changes propagate automatically.
- A drop shadow breaks when the merge node is set to screen mode; route the text layer as an inverted mask into the shadow merge so the shadow renders only at text edges without making the text opaque.
- The garbage mat input on the camera tracker accepts a magic mask as a bitmap — erode the mask edge slightly to prevent imprecise subject selections from corrupting the 3D solve point cloud.
Terms worth knowing.
- Magic mask
- A DaVinci Resolve Color page tool that uses AI to automatically select and track a subject in a clip. When an alpha output node is added, it outputs a matte usable for compositing.
- Alpha output
- A node connection in DaVinci's Color page node graph that exports a clip's transparency mask as its output, allowing the masked subject to be composited over other layers.
- Camera tracker (Fusion)
- A Fusion node that analyzes a clip's motion to reconstruct a 3D camera path, enabling 2D text or graphics to be placed on image planes that follow the original camera move.
- Image plane
- A Fusion node that maps a 2D media input onto a flat surface in 3D space, allowing it to be positioned, rotated, and scaled relative to a tracked 3D scene.
- Compound clip
- A DaVinci Resolve container that collapses multiple timeline clips into a single clip without flattening them — contents remain editable by opening the compound clip in its own timeline.
- Fusion clip
- A clip type in DaVinci Resolve that opens in the Fusion compositing page, allowing node-based effects to be applied to the contained clips as a single unit.
- Mirror out
- An animation control in some DaVinci title presets that automatically creates the exit animation as a mirror of the entry animation — turning it off allows independent exit direction control.
- Garbage mat / garbage matte
- A mask input fed to a tracker to exclude regions of the frame from analysis — here used to prevent the moving subject from corrupting the 3D camera solve point cloud.
- Apply mode
- A blending mode control in some DaVinci title tools (and Fusion merge nodes) analogous to layer blend modes in Photoshop — screen, multiply, color dodge, etc. Screen makes text semi-transparent over footage.
Things they pointed at.
18:50channelVanBeek Films 3D Camera Tracking tutorial
Lines you could clip.
00:55
“I don't actually use these subtitles. I just use the cut marks for my timing.”
08:30
“By the time the viewer actually sees the text, it's already past the word, and it's a little bit too late.”
15:20
“All of the animations are synced up with the audio really nicely.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
00:00So, I've got [music] a ton of requests to show exactly how I build my captions inside of DaVinci Resolve. And today, I'm going to break down my entire [music] workflow and show you how to time the captions, place them behind subjects, as well as how to track [music] them to 3D scenes. And I don't start these captions from scratch every single time, but I'm going to show you how I actually use them in my real estate edit workflow.
00:21But really, these types of subtitles would work in any niche. All right, so the first things first is to sort out the timing. Now, you could do this a couple of different ways.
00:29The most manual way would be to listen to the audio and place a marker by pressing M every time a new word is spoken, and then aligning up your subtitles to match those markers. Now, that's going to be a little bit time-consuming. So, something that I do instead for almost every single project is I go up to timeline, I go to AI tools, and create subtitles from audio.
00:48I set the maximum characters per line to one so that it does single words, and then I let it generate the subtitles for this audio. Now, I don't actually use these subtitles, so you can completely ignore this step, but I just use the cut marks for my timing, and it saves a whole bunch of my time. So, now you can see we've got all the individual words, and I can time my actual animated subtitles to these words instead of doing that from scratch.
01:12Now, we'll just disable the view of these because we don't actually need them. Again, we just need the cut marks that we can see right there.
01:19Now, let's start adding these titles to our timeline. Now, for these captions, you can literally use any text pack that you'd like, but I'm going to be using my new Lux pack that I'm just launching today. And if you guys want some detailed tutorials on how to make the individual text elements, let me know down below in the comments.
01:35But we're going to go over to effects, then we're going to go down to titles, we're going to go to VanBeek Films, and we're going to grab some of these Lux titles right here. Or you can use your own pre-made text or any other title pack you might have.
01:47So, let's drag our Lux slide onto the timeline, and this is what we're going to be using for the base of the text, just like so. So, we're just going to work on this section right here. And to start, we're only going to worry about making like the actual visual appearance of the text.
02:00We're not actually going to worry about the animation just quite yet. We'll work on that in a second because it's easier to just focus on one thing at one time. So, let's first just copy over our text and bring it into these text notes.
02:11So, it starts with the word you've, so we're just going to type that in right there. So, you've never seen a character home this striking. Let's move that over to the side so that we have some room for the next word.
02:21The next word is never, and this is sort of a bold word. So, we're going to make that actually bold and move that over just like so. So, you've never and then we'll write the word seen, and we'll change this back to regular, and move that over to the side right there.
02:35And then, you've never seen a, so we'll type the next word a, just like so. And then, the next word is really sort of like a statement piece of this line, so character because it's a character home.
02:45So, we're going to change that up and make that look a little bit fancier. So, we're going to drag the Lux shine effect down just like so, and drag that over and type in the word character, and we're going to increase the size quite dramatically, something just like so, and drag that down into place, and maybe just move that slightly over.
03:02So, you've never seen a character, and then home, so we'll go back to the slide effect, which is just down below, and we'll hold alt and drag that over top just like so. We'll type the word character home, and we'll drop that down and move it over to the left. And now, so that everything matches the same Y value for this bottom row of text, we're going to keep copying that text we just duplicated.
03:22So, then we'll type in the word this, and this could also be bold because it's sort of an emphasis word in this line. You've never seen a character home this striking. So, we'll duplicate that one more time.
03:33We'll type in the word striking, put that to regular, and slide that over to the side. So, now we've just finished the actual visual portion of the text part, and now we need to work on the timing and the actual animation.
03:44Now, I'm going to disable all the top text. You don't need to do this. I'm just going to show you the bottom text and how this title pack actually sort of works.
03:52So, to start, the slide effect is obviously just going to slide up, and then at the end, it's going to automatically slide back down. And those animations are going to be automatically timed and work without you having to do anything. So, the first one can actually move up, but the second one I want to move sort of out of that text, so I want it move to the right and out of that text.
04:10And we also need to time this. So, let's take you've and time that to the word. Then, we'll take all the rest of the text and we'll actually work on the timing already.
04:17So, the next word is never, so we'll move that to never, and then seen, then we'll drag this over to a, and then this is the character home, this is the shine text, then we'll go to home, this striking. And we can extend this just to the actual next word, just like so. We'll drag this down so we can see it a little bit better.
04:34But now, you can see that the actual subtitles are lined up timing-wise, and that's going to look really good. But this next word, again, needs to move to the right. But I want all the text to animate down at the end, so I don't want it to move back to the right at the very end.
04:48So, we are going to have to change one extra control. So, on this title right here, we're going to go to the animation tab. We're going to go into position, and we're going to disable mirror out because right now it's moving up at the start, and it's going to mirror that out and move down.
05:01And if we change it to move right at the start by pressing the right arrow, it's going to move left at the end to animate out. So, we're going to uncheck mirror out, and at the start of the animation, I want it to move to the right as it is. And then, at the end, I want it to move down.
05:15So, now if we disable the rest, you can see we've got you've never, and you can see that the first one moves up, and then the second one moves to the right. So, we'll enable the rest of the text, and we'll just animate this piece one by one.
05:26So, I'm going to go right over where I can see pretty much all of the text so that it's easier to work with, which is right there. And so, we did never, so now we're doing the word seen. We'll go to animation, go to position, we'll uncheck mirror out, and then we'll set the in animation to move to the right because never seen should also be moving to the right.
05:45And then, same thing for the word a. We'll go to animation, position, uncheck mirror out, and move that to the right. Now, for the character home, I actually want that to drop down out of the other text, just like so.
05:55So, we'll go to animation, we'll go to position, again, uncheck mirror out, and we'll move down. And now, if we just play back what we've got so far, the text animates in, and the shine effect has this nice sort of sheen that goes over the actual text, and that's automatically animated as well. So, if we play this back again, it looks really, really smooth, it looks really, really awesome.
06:14But we need to work on this bottom row here because that currently is still moving up. So, we're after the shine effect, again, the next text is home, so that should be moving down just like so.
06:24So, let's uncheck mirror out, move down at the start, then go to the next one, go to animation, position, uncheck mirror out. This one can move right to start because I don't need it to move down anymore. It can move to the right.
06:37And then, the very last one, go to the animation, position, mirror out, and then move to the right. So, we've got all of the directions for the animations done, but we still need to do a little bit more customization. And specifically, a thing that you're going to run into is your title lengths are all a different length.
06:53So, obviously, this clip length versus this clip length are completely different, and the animations need to be different if you want to maximize sort of that smoothness potential. So, if we look at this text right here, you can see that the animation looks really smooth.
07:07There's nothing that we need to change, but the top ones are not going to actually have enough time to do the full animation, and that's going to break any type of animation, and it's obviously not going to work. But where my title pack fixes that problem so incredibly easily is by showing you the error. So, obviously, there's an error, your animation is too long.
07:25And instead of having to manually retime the length of the animation until that error disappears, what you can actually do is you can just press this button, it's automatically going to configure to the amount of time it can actually animate for, and fix that problem for you. So, same thing with this next text, I have the in and out animation currently set to 0.7 seconds, but that's too long for this text.
07:45So, we'll just press fix animation, and you can see that it reduced it to 0.56 seconds. Now, this next one should be close to working, and it looks like it does work. But you can see if we were to extend that past the allotted time it could actually go, it's going to show up with that error, and we can press fix animations.
08:02And now, if we play this back, we've already got an incredible intro sequence with these titles right here. They slide in really, really nicely, and all slide out right at the exact same time. But before we actually moved onto the next subject and placing this text behind our character in the scene, we need to talk about the timing because even though the timing looks pretty correct right now, it's actually not.
08:24So, currently, the animation is starting at the start of each word, and the animation is 0.7 seconds too long. So, by the time the viewer actually sees the text, it's already past the word, and it's a little bit too late.
08:35And specifically for 0.7 seconds of an animation, or roughly a second animation, it's going to work anywhere in between, you actually want to slide over the text about five frames to the left so that the animation sort of start a little bit sooner, and actually line up with whatever the character is saying. So, if we select all of our text just like so, we can use the comma and the period key to move them to the side, as you can see.
08:58And we're going to just move them all five frames to the left. So, we're going to go 1 2 3 4 5, and then we can extend the end just like so.
09:05And then, the start, we can't move over five frames so because there's not enough room. So, we're just going to drag that over all the way to the start of the clip. And now, the animation is going to line up a whole lot better with the subject actually speaking.
09:17So, we'll get back to editing in a second, but let me just explain why this text pack might be the best text pack that DaVinci Resolve has ever seen. Now, one of the first things that I want to note, which is probably the best time-saver of the actual text tool, is the fix animation button.
09:31Just like before, if you change your animation and it's too long, you can simply just press one button, it's automatically going to configure and make the animation fit into the actual clip length, and it works seamlessly. And these text tools have literally the best customization in the game. Not only can you set the color to whatever you'd like, you can set the font to whatever you'd like, but you can change the color to a gradient, and also a really cool feature is the apply mode.
09:56So, the apply mode lets you place it back over top of the original footage, but it also lets you change the actual composition of the footage behind the text. So, if you need to make it more legible and add the contrast or add a tint or anything like that, you can do that all just with one text tool. And now the animations are already set up to be super smooth, but I've actually handmade four custom curves to make it look as good as possible.
10:18So, there's a fast shoot, a slow shoot, a back shoot which sort of overshoots the original position, and then also the elastic curve which a lot of people are after. You also have customization for the animation when it comes to size, position, blur, opacity, and even some more controls including motion blur. So, really this text pack goes from a seven text text pack to something that can serve over 200 texts if you really wanted to.
10:41So, if you want to try this text pack for yourself, there's not a better time to get it than the right now because there's a launch sale for 3 days. So, go check it out.
10:49It's just a double click install, super super simple. But now, let's get back to editing. Now, let's start on the next section here where we talk about where modern elegance meets jaw-dropping charm.
10:59So, we'll add in the titles right here and do that really really quickly. So, because we've already built this animation right here, we can honestly use most of it and just repurpose it for the next text effect just like so. Now, we are going to just have to move the play head over to here to actually see all of the text because that's where they appear, but we can type in where modern elegance meets jaw-dropping charm.
11:21So, we'll type in the word and instead of using another slide for modern, we're actually going to change that to the follower animation which is going to animate it on letter by letter. So, we'll type in the word modern just like so and we'll move that into place. And now it's going to get a little bit messy.
11:37You could you could definitely move stuff around so that you can see it a little bit easier, but I'm just going to place this modern right into place just like so. Where modern and then the next word is elegance and we'll move that over to the side and there might not actually be enough room in the top line and we are actually going to disable the rest right now so that we have more room to work with.
11:56So, we have where modern elegance meets. And now these words are going to be a little bit too big, so we're actually going to delete the elegance and we'll drop that down to the next line.
12:05The word A is also on the top line, so we're going to delete that for now and we'll just fix the modern there cuz it's a little bit high just like so. And we'll fix the positioning so that's re-centered with the screen. So, it's going to be where modern and we'll line that up just like so.
12:20And the next word could be elegance because that's sort of a fun word as well. So, we'll type in the word elegance and we'll center that up right there, move it down a little bit. Where modern elegance and we can drop that down.
12:32Next word is meets and we'll drop that down to there. And for this word, jaw-dropping is also one of those things that is just like that's a just an emphasis word that we want to emphasize. So, we're going to use the flicker title right here and drag that on and customize it a little bit.
12:48And that's just going to flicker, it's just a different type of animation to make it even more engaging. So, we'll type in the word jaw-dropping just like so and we'll increase the size and I might actually drop this down to two lines and put the alignment to the side and we'll decrease the size a bit. And we'll move meets, we're actually going to move meets right into that gap to just fill it up, maybe something like that.
13:11And then we'll move jaw-dropping over to the side right there, something like so. So, where modern elegance meets jaw-dropping and then the next word is charm.
13:19So, we'll use this bottom one right here, type in the word charm and we're going to bring that right to the bottom. And we'll offset that so that it feels a little bit more organic. Now, let's first worry about the timing.
13:31So, we're going to go where modern, so we'll type that in right there. Elegance should be right there, meets jaw-dropping charm. And just like that, we've got everything timed up and it looks really good.
13:42Let's just fix some of our positioning so meets can be a little bit lower and then jaw-dropping the flicker, I just want the dropping to sit out a little bit more to the left. And if we play back exactly what we've got, we've got a pretty nice animation here but we do need to fix just a couple problems here. Charm needs to be animating down at the start and since we've copied it, the mirror out is already unselected.
14:04So, now that's moving down, that looks good. And currently for this flicker animation here, I don't want it to flicker out at the end. I want it to sort of move at the end.
14:12So, we're going to disable the out for the flicker animation. We're going to enable a position animation for the out, disable the mirror out just like so. We're going to turn off the start distance so that it's not moving at the start at all and then at the end, make sure that it's moving down.
14:27So, now if we play this back, it should flicker on at the start, but at the end it's going to move down with the rest of the text. And one more thing that we need to fix just with the follower text right there is it goes up letter by letter, but I want it to animate out as a whole.
14:43I don't want it to animate out letter by letter as it is right now because I want the entire out animation to be consistent. So, with the Lux follower text selected, we're going to go to the animation, we're going to go into the follower tab and we're going to turn the out delay off and turn it down to zero. And now all of the letters will just animate down at the exact same time right at the end there.
15:02And if we play this back, you can see that our animation looks really really smooth. Now, we do need to re-time this because this is currently way too long. So, let's select all of the text just like so.
15:12This top one is going to be way too short. So, if we play this back, it might not even appear because it's just going to be glitching out. So, we'll go and click fix animations.
15:20It's automatically going to re-time that animation. Same thing with the jaw-dropping, we'll fix that animation. And Lux slide the meets, we'll see if that one's too long.
15:29It's slightly too long. And now the rest should be plenty long enough so the animation works really well. But now we actually need to place this behind the subject.
15:37Now, there's two different ways we can do this. We can bring the entire text composition inside of Fusion, which I'm going to show you for the 3D text tracking, but in this case just a fast and dirty method to get this done is we'll cut the clip right there so that we don't need to track the entire clip. We're going to unlink the footage from the audio and we're going to take this footage, drag it up and we'll place it right over top of the text just like so.
16:00And now you could do this in the color page or the Fusion page. I'll just show it in the color page for example and we'll magic mask the character and place him back in front of the text. So, we're going to go over to the magic mask tool right here and we're going to select our subject.
16:16And then we can press this button right here to just see the overlay to see how good of a selection we're grabbing. We're doing a great job so let's uncheck that and track forwards and reverse. Okay, and once that's done, we need to right click here in the node graph and add an alpha output and put this blue mask and place it to the alpha output.
16:33And now that's going to cut out just the subject out of the shot. And once we've done that, you can see that our subject is placed in front of the text, but right now it's hiding too much of the text, so we are going to fix that, but we are going to add a slight blur radius to our person right here so that the edges are just slightly blurred.
16:50Now, we'll go back to the text tools and just re-align those texts. Now, we really need to just focus on the bottom one to start because that's the one that's going to be the most hidden. So, we're actually going to switch from the title tab and go over to the settings tab because now we can make a universal control that's going to affect all of these texts right here.
17:08So, let's go to this last one which is the word charm and we'll raise the Y value just so it's hidden behind his head, but still sort of legible or at least enough so that someone could make out what the word says. So, at this point you can see that the A is missing, but the rest of the letters are there. So, we could really keep the rest there.
17:25So, now we'll take this text effect, we're going to hit control C and then we're going to select all of these other text effects just like so and we're going to press alt V. This is going to let us copy over some clip or video attributes and the only one that we need to worry about is we can turn off clip color.
17:41We only need position because that's the only modification we're making. So, we'll press apply and now everything is going to be moved up by the exact same amount. And if we play it back, it looks really really good and we have sort of that behind the subject effect.
17:54Now, we don't have the main words behind the subject right now and we'll do that in the next shot and that's going to make this effect look even better. But you can see as the effects all slide down right at the end, it's all going to slide down behind them so that we're not obstructing the realtor view at all. Now, the only thing that we haven't done with this clip right now is we haven't moved them all over five frames to the left.
18:16But you can see if we move them over five frames to the left right now, we'd be cutting into the original text we made on the left side. So, we're going to press alt and we're going to move this all above our previous text and then move them over 1 2 3 4 5 just like so.
18:31Let's make sure that we don't move that top clip there because we don't need to move that over. And then let's just drag this out to the end just like so. So, now you can see that our old animation fades out and as the old animation fades out, the new one pops in without any delay.
18:46And now all of these animations are synced up with the audio really nicely. And now let me show you how to actually track this to a 3D scene because it's pretty simple.
18:54So, I'm going to work on this text. We're going to skip ahead because you don't need to see it from scratch again and then we'll show you how to build that in a 3D scene. Okay, so I've gone ahead and made the text animations right here just like before.
19:07In this case, I've used the count title right here which just lets you put in a number and then it will animate that number which is just a little bit more dynamic. But in this case at the very end of the clip because we're cutting to a new shot, I don't even need these animations to animate out. So, on each title, I'm just going to go to the animation tab and turn off the out animation.
19:26And now that we have that done, let's bring it all into a 3D scene. And there's just one little thing that I need to talk about. Now, all of the texts are completely opaque other than the price.
19:36So, I have this set to a screen mode which just allows for a little bit of transparency, but we need to change this before we bring it into a 3D scene, otherwise it's going to completely break and then we can bring it back in the 3D scene. So, we'll keep everything the same. So, we're going to take all of the text above which is and all of that for just all of that text right there, and we'll select all of that text and we're going to turn that into a new compound clip.
19:59That's going to bring that all into one clip, then we're going to bring this all the way down just like so, and we're going to change it from the apply mode to the solid, and we're also going to go down to the drop shadow and turn off the shadow just for the meantime. And again, we'll add that back in in a second.
20:15Now we are going to have these three clips right here. We're going to right click this and turn it into a new fusion clip. Now let's head into the fusion page, and we can do our 3D tracking.
20:25So it's going to bring all of our stuff in just like so. We'll delete all of the merges and the background and then the top clip right here will be the background layer, which is our subject talking. And to start, we need to run a magic mask to select just the subject.
20:38So we'll type in magic mask by hitting shift space. That's going to load up, and we'll select just our subject just like so. And then we'll hit track forwards and reverse.
20:47And now this magic mask we're actually going to use for both to place the subject back in front of the text, but we're also going to use it as a garbage mat, which just says don't track this part of the image for the 3D camera tracker. So we'll take our magic mask and we'll disconnect it from the output. Then we'll hit shift space and add a camera tracker just like so.
21:06We'll place that right there. We'll connect our background footage to the camera tracker and that to the media out so that we can actually see what we're doing. Then with the magic mask afterwards, we're going to add a bitmap node, take our magic mask, plug it into the bitmap, and if we view our bitmap in the top left, you can just see that it's creating a mat of what to track and what not to track.
21:25And we actually want to invert that. And with the magic mask, we're going to go over to the mat controls, and we're going to erode that edge, which is just going to make that edge grow in case the magic mask messed up slightly.
21:36Now we're going to take this bitmap and plug it into the camera tracker. With the camera tracker selected, we don't need to change anything else, and we can just press auto track. Once that footage is tracked, we'll go over to the solve tab and solve that.
21:49And it's a pretty short clip, so it solved really quickly. And I have a full video on 3D camera tracking and placing text inside of a 3D scene, so you can watch that if you're confused at any step right here. But now we have our 3D scene tracked.
22:01We can go over to the export tab and export it. Now generally, you can set your sort of ground plane and your background plane and everything like that.
22:08In this case, we're just going to skip that process because it's going to be simple enough to place our elements in 3D space. So we'll export this and drag that up there. And now we're going to disable the camera tracker because we don't need that anymore.
22:21We can take the lens distort, delete that, take the ground plane, delete that, and we can disconnect our fusion clip from the camera tracker because if we don't if we take a look at our 3D scene output right here, it's going to have our footage as part of the output, but we want only the text so that we can do some opacity controls to that.
22:38So we're going to disconnect that. Now there's nothing because we haven't placed anything inside of our 3D scene. So let's look at our media out again.
22:46We can take a merge, drag that over top of our pipeline, and put the output of the camera tracker into that merge. Now the next clip, which is the second one, should be all of our white text. So we'll take this, we'll press image plane to connect that to an image plane.
22:59With the image plane, we'll connect that to the merge 3D. And now if we view this merge 3D in the left view right here, you can see that we have our animated text in 3D space.
23:07And if we take a look at the scene here just by looking at the point clouds, you can see that this right here is the ground, and this would sort of signify where the actual house is starting or where this flower bed is starting. So we want the text to be in front of that flower bed. So we're going to go to our image plane, and you can use the on-screen controls, or you can go over to the transform and change the Z value and bring that all the way forward just like so so that it's sort of in front of the house.
23:32And it's already placed in a pretty good location, but we could move that over to the side just like so a little bit. And if you play this back, you can see we're already tracked into 3D space.
23:42But we actually moved it quite a bit too far forward, so we're actually going to move this back so that we can see all of the text as it's animating on because we want to be able to see the end. So let's move it a little bit further back, and that's good. So it's and all of that for just and then the price will come in after that.
23:59And we'll move this all over to the side just like so. And now let's select everything other than our fusion clip, which is our text, hit control C and control V, and we'll copy that over to the side, and we'll re-merge that over top of the background.
24:12We'll take our fusion clip, which now this is our price, and plug that into the image plane so that's in the exact same location. Now it's a little bit too low, so let's take our transform and move our Y value for our price up, and we'll place it right there so that it is still behind our subject, but it's mostly legible.
24:28Then we'll take our other image plane and move that up as well so that it matches again just like so. And now this is where we can change some opacity modes.
24:35So we can take our merge right here and select the apply mode and select screen so that it's slightly transparent and sort of gives that cool effect. But I still want to add a drop shadow because just to make this a little bit more legible, especially on the brighter areas of the screen. But right now after the camera tracker, if I added a shadow and increased the softness, that wouldn't work at all because the merge is set to screen mode.
24:58So what we need to do is we need to merge this back over top just like so, and then we'll add a shadow node, plug that into the pipeline by holding shift, dragging it over, and increasing that soft edge. And now you can see the drop shadow, but unfortunately, it's also made our text completely opaque again. So what we need to do is we need to take the camera tracker output, which is just the number text, and plug that into the mask input of this merge.
25:22And now the shadow is only appearing where the text is showing. But to do the inverse of that, we can go to the merge, go up to settings, and apply the mask inverted. And now you can see we have a drop shadow just around the text and not actually behind it.
25:36And now lastly, we need to place the subject back in front of the text. So let's take our magic mask because we've already tracked the subject. We'll turn down the erode back to zero and place that in front of the text just like so.
25:48And now we'll take our magic mask and we'll just add a little bit of blurring to it so that it looks more natural. And now if we go back to the edit page, we can watch our text track to 3D scene, but completely animated and timed to the actual words of the video, and it looks absolutely awesome.
26:03Now this process might seem a little bit lengthy the first time you do it, but once you do it a couple times, it's really just a breeze and it all comes pretty naturally. The nice thing about doing a fusion clip is let's say you know what, I misspelled one of the words. We can actually right click this fusion clip.
26:19We can open that in a timeline, and we can still fully customize all of our clips, and that's still going to update in the fusion page. So we can even go in this compound clip, right click, and open that in its own timeline. If the word all was wrong and maybe it was the word this, we could change that, and that's still going to update inside of our fusion animation, and we don't have to change any of our timing, we don't have to change anything of our layout.
26:40It's just going to automatically update in that fusion composition. Okay, so you've made it to the end of the video, and now I can actually highlight and show you all of these titles right here. Okay, so let's first start with the bonus of the pack, which is the Lux slide.
26:52We'll drag that onto the timeline just like so. It's just a simple animation in and out as it stands right now. We can go through all of these controls one by one.
27:00So the first one, obviously we can change whatever we want the title to be. So if we want to change the title to a different word, we can of course do that.
27:08Now we can change the size, tracking, we can change the line spacing, everything like that. Just the standard text controls as well as the actual position, and also change the align mode. Now let's get into this text shading or sort of customization section here because we could change the color.
27:23So if we want the text to be red, the text could be red. We can also jump over to gradients, which is just going to make the bottom darker than the top, which is just going to add a bit of a shadow, and it looks like it's not working right now, but before I release the pack, I will make sure that that's working. But what you're seeing on screen right now is just an example of what that would actually look like.
27:43And then lastly, we also have this apply mode, which is not going to show up super well on a white background just like so. Let's So let's actually grab some footage and drag that down below our title right now so we can actually see what we're doing.
27:55So we have the title on top of the footage, and currently it's set to apply mode and screen. Now if we change the color, that's where it's really going to shine. You can see that we have some transparency going through the edge, and we have a bunch of different apply modes selected here that look the best for text effects.
28:11There's multiply, there's color dodge, there's a whole bunch of different ones. There's exclusion, and if you turn that down to white, now it's going to be inverted colors only. So there's a whole bunch of options for you to choose from, but I generally like to use screen the most.
28:25But then on top of that, we can also change the brightness of the background. So we can even enhance that screen effect even more.
28:31We can change the contrast of the background, and we can even change the blur of the background, which gives you a really really good looking effect. And now lastly, we can even offset the background. Now the reason there's so many controls for this is this gives you endless opportunities to change this exactly to what you want.
28:49So for example, at the very top, we have the pass through mode, so which pretty much just removes any type of apply mode being selected. So this is we're just seeing the background.
28:58But now because we have the offset controls, we could completely offset that. We could maybe blur it, and now we have a completely like sort of glass effect. Again, there's just so much customization.
29:08We can turn down the contrast so it's a little bit more legible. You can literally do whatever you want with these texts. But let's change it back to solid, and let's change the color to maybe sort of a lime just like so.
29:20Now obviously, we have some drop shadow controls to add a drop shadow. That's pretty self-explanatory.
29:25But we also have some glow controls for every single title, which also looks really really good. This isn't just one simple glow node. This is actually a couple stacked nodes to make it look even better.
29:35And now let's jump over to the animation tab. So starting from the top, we have our in animation, so we can turn off the So let's actually hide this here. We can turn off the in animation so that it only animates out just like so, and we can turn that back in and now just like I said before if we increase the length of the animation too much to the point that the time is too long for the clip to handle for example this is a 5 second clip right now so 2.6 seconds for each animation is going to be over 5 seconds so it's too long so if we hit fix animations it's going to go just before 2.5 seconds just to be on the safe side and now the animation is always going to work and it's going to take up the full clip duration and then animate down again at the end now let's reset the length to 0.7 seconds and we can actually go into a custom mode as well for each so if we don't want the out animation to be the same as the in animation we could set the in animation as 7 seconds and the out animation could be longer at maybe 1.7 seconds so it's a little bit smoother now we can also customize the animation curves for each so if we want to let's say do an elastic animation in which again is pre-built and a back animation out now if we play this back it's going to elastic in just like so and then sort of overshoot out
30:50and then go down now the way that this is probably going to look the best is if we increase the length of the elastic animation and we'll change the slow animation at the end and maybe turn the time down so you can fully customize it and now you can see we have this elastic animation that looks really good and then at the end of the text we've got a little animation out now the slide text is currently only animating the position but it can also animate the size so if you want it to start small and go up just like so you can completely do that you can uncheck mirror out and change the end size and again like I said it's only affecting the position right now and it's mirroring out and you can set the directions to whatever you'd want so you can uncheck mirror out and let's say if we want it to move in from the bottom left so it's going to move up to the top right and then at the end maybe we want it to shoot off to the top left if we play this back now it's going to come from that bottom left moving up to the top right and now it's going to shoot up to the top left so you can fully change
31:48the position animations as well as well as the actual distance that it's pushing from that distance so if we really increase that distance we're going to get a whole lot more movement out of that text now we can go down to rotate so we also have some rotate controls just like everything else so we can rotate the rotate the text in we can change the opacity so that's the other thing that is being animated right now is it's starting from zero opacity and going up to maximum opacity so we can turn that off or on and then we also have a blur animation so if we want the text to start blurred and then deblur pretty much as it's coming in we could 100% do that we could increase the start blur so that it's a little bit more dramatic and now we've got a nice little blur text and it looks really really good so you can see that the possibilities for these text packs are literally pretty much endless this is honestly one of the best text packs that I've ever seen let's go down to the very bottom and we have a motion blur option
32:46as well so if we do want some motion blur for this animation we could 100% turn that on let's disable the blur so that we can actually see the motion blur and if we take a look at that here and if we turn the quality up you can see that we have some real motion blur we can also change up the shutter angle to sort of increase that motion blur and make it a little bit more dramatic the motion blur is going to be a little bit more computer intensive so it's going to slow down the text pack ever so slightly but it's actually optimized to only run when there's actual animation happening so in between the animations there's no motion blur being applied which does make the text pack as light as possible now I think that pretty much goes over every feature of sort of the base of the tool there's probably a couple more that I'm still missing and I'll probably be making future videos about this text pack as well but for now let's go over to the next title we can go over to the Lux count which you've briefly seen earlier in this video but it's just a counting effect and it looks really really good now a couple features that this title has is you can set the start number to whatever you want so if you
33:44want it to start counting from 400 and go up to maybe 650 just like so it's going to start at 400 and go up to 650 now you can change the precision so if you want more decimals or less after you can completely change that and now the prefix you can completely change to whatever you want so if you want let's say to put in three cash values to sort of signify the price even more you could do that you can also just completely delete it you can change the append value to whatever you'd like so if you want this to be a percentage you could put percentage at the end you can change the count animation length so you can change it to be a longer animation just like so so it takes longer to get to that actual animation and you can also change the offset so it takes longer to actually start the animation just like so you can change the easing which I would leave as is and this tool has every customization that you could think of that all of the other tools also would have so flicker is another one of my favorite ones so if we play this back you can see it's going to flicker on at the start and it's going to flicker out
34:42right at the end now we can completely change this as you've seen before all of these controls here are the exact same aside from glow being turned on automatically but if we go into the animation you can see that the only new tab here is the flicker animation so we can turn off the flicker in or we can turn off the flicker out just like so we can change for how long it's going to be flickering so if we change it to a value of one you can see it's going to flicker a little bit longer and if we turn the strength down what it's pretty much going to do is now it's not going to flicker from an opacity of zero to one it's going to have some slightly half transparent values as you can see right there if we go all the way up to one now it's just going to flicker mostly just on and off completely but if you turn that down to a really low value there's just sort of more range of brightness that it's going to be flickering and if we play that back again that looks pretty good let's turn the flicker duration down a little bit so that it's
35:39a little bit faster but you have all of those controls and just like before you have your size position all of the other controls that you might need now it's important to note that the flicker animation doesn't follow this easing curve it just has its own pre-built easing curve built in that looks the best for a flicker effect now let's go over to the follower which is probably one of the most sought after animations which is just going to be a letter by letter animation again same controls as before we go to the animation tab the difference is we have a start order so we can completely change the order of how the follower animation happens so if we want it to randomly appear one by one we can do that and we have the in delay and the out delay which is just going to be the number of frames of a delay between each letter so if we want there to be more delay or less delay we can do that and if we completely want to change the out animation and not have it be this follower effect then you just turn that delay down to zero and now at the out animation it's just going to
36:36automatically animate out completely as one text now the shine effect is a really neat one as well because if we take a look at this it's going to slide up just like so to start and then it's going to have the sheen or the shine that goes over the title now let's go to the animation and let me show you the custom controls so if we drop down shine you can see that we have a whole bunch of controls so the very first one is the offset and that's saying when is the shine going to start so we can increase the offset so that the shine happens a little bit later while the text is already in place or if we want the shine to sort of halfway be started we could turn it to a negative value and now the shine is already going to be starting as the text is moving up so that's maybe too much if we play that back you can see the shine just happens a whole lot faster we can change the length or the duration of the shine so that it's a slower moving shine we can change the offset of the shine so if we want it to start further away from the side if we want to change what direction or angle it's coming from we can change that we can change the width of the shine the
37:36softness so if we want it to be sort of a hard edge we could do that but I'd suggest leaving the softness where it is and we can also change the glow intensity and these are things that you can all combine so let me just reset all of this so that it's back to square one these are things you can all combine with the regular glow on the customization page so if I turn on this glow now you can see the entire text pack is glowing but also the shine so it's going to go a little overboard on the shine so you could customize that more to your liking but I already like how that's looking just as is now the tracking is one of the simpler ones but it just adds some variety to the tools so the tracking animation is just going to start it's just going to animate the tracking values of the text so it's going to start wider as you can see right there so we could even start more dramatically it's going to track down into place and then at the end same thing track out but we could mirror out and leave the tracking as the same value as this so if the tracking values there
38:34we could copy that there and now the animation is not going to do anything on the outside but we can still animate the position at the end so that we still have an animation at the end so again all of the controls you have complete control over the inside and the outside and then lastly just another one that adds more variety is the right on which is just a really simple animation it just writes on the text from left to right or right to left so if we go to the animation we have left to right or right to left or none animation because this is one that usually you'd animate on just like so and then animate the position or the size on the out so if we animate the size out it's going to disappear at the end just like so because we don't need the words to write off at the end of the animation all right and there you have it there is some of the best caption presets for DaVinci Resolve and actually how to use them in an actual workflow I promise you these are this is probably one of the best text packs that I've ever seen we spent a lot of time building this text
39:32pack and it's going to ideally save a whole bunch of people a whole lot of time now again if you want to get it from my store there's a limited time sale for the launch which is just going to be 3 days after this video. So if you want to get it, make sure that you head to the store right now. Thank you guys so much for watching and as always, Jesus loves you.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Every editor who has tried to build word-synced animated captions in DaVinci Resolve knows the pain: placing markers by hand, wrestling with animation timing, and then figuring out how to get the text behind the subject without breaking anything. This tutorial dismantles that friction step by step — starting with a timing trick buried inside DaVinci's AI subtitle tool that most editors overlook entirely.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:27concept
AI Subtitle Timing Trick
- Set max chars per line to 1
- Generate subtitles from audio
- Disable subtitle visibility
- Use cut marks as word-timing rails
- Build your own animated text to those marks
Repurposes DaVinci's free AI subtitle tool as a precision timing ruler rather than a caption generator.
Steal forany word-synced caption workflow in DaVinci Resolve
08:17concept
5-Frame Pre-Roll Offset
- Select all text clips
- Shift left 5 frames (comma key)
- Extend clip ends to fill gap
- Animation completes at the word, not after it
A universal timing correction: animated text needs to start before the word is spoken so the motion resolves by the time the viewer hears it.
Steal forany NLE caption timing workflow
10:50model
Text-Behind-Subject (Color Page Method)
- Cut footage clip at subject entry/exit
- Unlink audio
- Drag footage above text on timeline
- Color page: magic mask the subject
- Add alpha output node
- Right-click node graph → add alpha output
- Connect blue mask to alpha output
- Subject now composites over text
A Color-page-only approach to text-behind-subject that avoids Fusion entirely, suitable for clips that don't need 3D tracking.
Steal forfast text-behind-subject compositing without Fusion
18:50model
3D Text Tracking Pipeline (Fusion)
- Convert text to compound clip
- Right-click → New Fusion Clip
- Magic mask subject → disconnect from output
- Add Bitmap node (garbage mat, inverted, eroded edge)
- Connect footage + bitmap to Camera Tracker
- Auto track → Solve → Export
- Image plane for text, connect to Merge3D
- Set Z/Y position in 3D space
- Apply screen mode to price text
- Add shadow node, connect camera tracker output as inverted mask
- Magic mask subject back in front
Full pipeline for locking animated caption text to a tracked 3D scene in DaVinci Fusion, with transparent blending and drop shadow.
Steal forcinematic text placement in moving-camera real estate or travel video
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
09:18product
“Go check it out. It's just a double click install, super super simple. There's a launch sale for 3 days.”
Embedded mid-video after the core workflow is demonstrated, before the 3D tracking section. The product (Lux pack) is the tool used throughout, so the pitch lands as a natural extension rather than an interruption.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Visual structure at a glance.
