10:12Sightseeing Stan · Tutorial
I mixed AI with Real Footage and it's actually scary
Six concrete techniques for blending AI generation into real cinematography — from building collapses to impossible transitions to logo animation.
April 22ndThe argument in one line.
Third-party DaVinci Resolve plugins replace hours of manual keyframing and node-building with single-click controls for zooms, vintage lens looks, tracked text, highlights, and color grades.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You edit in DaVinci Resolve and want faster ways to do zoom-ins, tracked overlays, or color grading without hand-building Fusion nodes.
- You're comparing paid Resolve plugins and want to know what each one actually controls before buying.
- You want a vintage or cinematic look in your grade and are deciding between a LUT and a dedicated lens-simulation plugin.
SKIP IF…
- You edit in Premiere, Final Cut, or another NLE — none of these plugins are cross-compatible.
- You only do quick social cuts and don't touch color grading or Fusion at all.
The full version, fast.
The video walks through eight DaVinci Resolve plugins, alternating live screen demos with price/link callouts. Loupe Blaster Pro and Wipp Highlight handle zoom and highlight animations without manual keyframes. LensNode simulates specific vintage lenses (Petzval, Helios 44, Cooke) with adjustable distortion, bloom, and chromatic aberration. Film Titles is a Fusion template for cinematic text treatments. Master Tracker adds point-tracked text or image overlays plus stabilization. Array Merge auto-spaces multiple image assets across a clip. MagicGrade is the most developed tool — editable presets, 40 film stocks, and onboard mouse-drag controls for grading directly in the viewer. The throughline: plugins trade Fusion node-building and manual keyframing for direct, visual controls, at costs ranging from free to $70.
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00:00 – 00:22
01 · Intro
Cold open promising 8 plugins for speed, color grading, and effects.
00:22 – 03:38
02 · Loupe Blaster Pro
Zoom-in/punch-in/magnification plugin — full/circle/rectangle modes, keyframe-free zoom points, loupe glass effect, background treatments. ~$40 or free tier.
03:38 – 06:36
03 · LensNode
Vintage lens simulation with named lens models (Petzval, Helios 44, Cooke, Canon FD), master blend/overdrive/sensor size controls, and a mix-and-match panel. Code STAN20 for 20% off.
06:36 – 08:05
04 · Film Titles
Fusion template for cinematic title text — blur, glow, lens distortion, chromatic aberration, film grain. $15.
08:05 – 09:48
05 · Epidemic Sound plugin (sponsor)
In-app music/SFX search inside Resolve with AI assistant and search-by-video-frame matching. Code STAN for 50% off 2 months.
09:48 – 12:15
06 · Master Tracker
Point tracking and stabilization plugin — tracks text or image overlays onto moving footage, separate stabilize mode. $15.
12:15 – 14:05
07 · Wipp Highlight
Free animated highlight/zoom plugin with 4 styles (center focus, focus, scale, scale focus) and background exposure/saturation/blur controls.
14:05 – 15:09
08 · Array Merge
Free Fusion plugin that auto-spaces multiple PNG assets evenly across a clip.
15:09 – 19:09
09 · MagicGrade
Color grading plugin with editable presets, 40 film stocks, and onboard mouse-drag controls for offset/gain/saturation/grain/vignette/distortion. $69.99, 7-day trial.
19:09 – 19:30
10 · Sign-off
Recaps that all links are in the description, asks viewers which plugin they liked most.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Loupe Blaster Pro sets zoom-in and zoom-out points by just parking the playhead and clicking a button — no keyframes required.
- LensNode is a fully custom plugin that doesn't rely on Resolve's built-in tools, which is why it costs more than most other plugins on this list.
- MagicGrade's presets are editable, not baked in like a LUT — every slider that built the look stays adjustable after you apply it.
- MagicGrade puts grading controls directly on the viewer via modifier-key mouse drags (shift for offset, option for bloom, command for grain) instead of buried sliders.
- Master Tracker can point-track an image asset, not just text, onto moving footage — useful for logo placement on handheld shots.
- Array Merge automatically spaces multiple PNG assets evenly across a clip but does not normalize their sizes, so mismatched source assets still need manual resizing.
- Epidemic Sound's in-Resolve plugin can analyze the current timeline frame and suggest music matched to what's on screen.
- A $15 one-time plugin (Film Titles, Master Tracker) can replace a recurring template subscription for a single specific job like tracked text or cinematic titles.
Buy the plugin for the one control you'll actually use daily.
WHAT TO LEARN
Every plugin in this list trades a slow manual process (keyframing zooms, hand-tracking overlays, building Fusion nodes) for a direct one-click or one-drag control, and the ones worth paying for are the ones whose specific shortcut you'd use on nearly every edit.
- Setting zoom-in and zoom-out points by parking the playhead and clicking a button is faster and more precise than manually keyframing a scale parameter.
- A plugin built entirely custom (not wrapping existing built-in tools) tends to cost more, but can deliver effects the host software's native toolset can't replicate.
- Editable presets beat baked-in LUTs when you want a starting look you can still fine-tune per shot rather than accepting a fixed transform.
- Point-tracking tools that accept image assets (not just text) let you lock a logo or graphic to handheld or moving footage without manual frame-by-frame adjustment.
- Automatic spacing tools for multiple image assets save layout time but don't solve mismatched source sizes — budget time to normalize asset dimensions first.
- Software that can analyze the current frame and suggest matching audio removes the guesswork of manually auditioning music tracks against a rough cut.
- Mapping grading controls to mouse-drag gestures directly on the viewer (rather than a slider panel) speeds up repetitive grading decisions once you've memorized the modifier-key scheme.
Terms worth knowing.
- Fusion
- DaVinci Resolve's built-in node-based compositing page, used for effects and animations that go beyond simple clip edits or color grading.
- LUT
- Look-Up Table — a fixed color transform applied to footage; unlike an adjustable plugin preset, a LUT's settings are baked in and not independently editable afterward.
- Point tracking
- Software that follows a specific pixel or feature across video frames so an overlay (text, image, or effect) can move in sync with the footage.
- Chromatic aberration
- A color-fringing distortion, usually at the edges of frame, that real camera lenses produce and that grading plugins can simulate for a vintage look.
- F-stop sharpener (LensNode term)
- A LensNode control that reduces the simulated lens effect near the center of the image while keeping it strong toward the edges, mimicking how real lens softness falls off with aperture.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
10:01
“This is the most complete and easy to use zoom in plugin I've used so far.”
14:26
“So really awesome plugin that I'm definitely gonna be using a lot from now on.”
Word for word.
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metaphorstory
00:00Alright. After great success, we're back with another DaVinci Resolve plugins video. And this time, I want to share with you eight brand new plugins for Resolve.
00:09And these will not only help you edit faster, but also help you with color grading and creating certain effects. Some of these are free, some are paid, but believe me, every single one is worth checking out.
00:21So let's dive in. Kicking things off with a brand new plugin called Loop Blaster. This allows you to very easily create zoom ins, punch ins, highlights and magnifications of your footage.
00:35Here's how it works. Once you have it installed, will find Loop Blaster under the fusion effects. You drop it onto a clip and then you'll see all the controls in the inspector window right here.
00:47On the top here, you'll see three different zoom modes, full, circle, and rectangle. Full will create a clean zoom on the entire video. You can control the zoom position with these x and y parameters.
01:00The zoom amount can be adjusted here or with these presets. You can also adjust the zoom speed right here. You can also change the animation curve depending on whether you want a nice smooth zoom or a more aggressive zoom.
01:14You can also add a few other animations to make the shot feel a bit more dynamic like this rotation or a pan movement to switch between two areas on the video clip Or this q zoom, which can look great on certain screen recordings.
01:30The plugin also allows you to add sharpness once the image is zoomed in. So if you zoom in by a lot, this can be helpful to make the image look less soft. Right here you can also add motion blur to the zoom movement so things look a bit more natural.
01:44And down here is where you can set your zoom in point and your zoom out point. So let's say I want the zoom in to start around here. I'll make sure my playhead is in that position and then hit the set zoom in button.
01:56And if I wanted to zoom out around here, I'll set my playhead in that position and hit set zoom out. So without using keyframes or anything, it's really easy to adjust this. In the drop down menu here, you can select zoom in only, in and out, out only, or static.
02:13The second zoom option in this plugin is called circle. And instead of zooming into the entire video, this will focus on a specific part and create this loop effect. You can position it wherever you want.
02:25You can change the size, shape and angle, change the edge softness and so on. So a lot of customization options here to get what you want.
02:34There are also a few different effects you can add to the loop here. My favorite is loop glass. This will make the loop feel more like an actual magnifying glass by adding a kind of lens effect to the loop zoom.
02:47And also here, can customize that effect to get it exactly the way you want it so you're not stuck with one specific preset. Down here, we've got a bunch of background effects to make this loop effect look even more professional. You can darken the background, desaturate the background, blur the background, skew it, or even add grain to it.
03:08The last mode, rectangle, works exactly the same as circle mode but, you guessed it, here you get a rectangle to work with. And when you dial this in to fit your specific shot, this becomes a very slick animation which is super easy to make. And I honestly gotta say this is the most complete and easy to use zoom in plugin I've used so far.
03:28It's made by European filmmaker here on YouTube and he offers a free version as well as the pro version which we just looked at for around $40. Number two on the list is a very powerful plugin for simulating real world lens characteristic. This is lens node.
03:45To use it, we're gonna go to the color page in DaVinci and I've got a clip here that was shot on my Sony a seven four and you can see I've already color graded this, but let's head over to the effects panel here and search for lens node. I'm gonna drop that behind my last node right here.
04:04And in the menu here, we can choose between a very large selection of different lens manufacturers and models. You've got Cooke lenses, the Canon FD series, which are very popular vintage lenses.
04:17The famous Helios 44 is in here. We've got Leica, vintage Nikon, and another really popular vintage lens, the Petzval, .
04:28So let's go with that one for this example. With the master blend slider, we can basically adjust how strong the overall effect is going to be. The overdrive slider is going to exaggerate the characteristics specific to the lens you just chose.
04:43So you can see as I move the slider up, these blurry edges of the Petzville become even stronger. The next slider is the sensor size control.
04:52This basically increases and decreases the size of the emulated sensor relative to the lens that you're simulating. F stop sharpener will reduce the overall effect on the image from the center going outwards. So you'll see if I turn that up, the center of the image gets less affected by the lens simulation.
05:12Then we've got the individual controls and these will allow you to further adjust specific lens parameters like distortion, coma, aberration, fringe, bloom, vignette, and so on.
05:26You can see by default they're all set to one but there's a button at the bottom here that lets you extend the ranges. And then you can push these effects even further to get a more dramatic look from the lens you just chose. And if we go down here to settings and quality and then to creative settings, we can play around with the bokeh even more.
05:46So we can add some of that bokeh swirl for example which can look really cool. And if you want to get really specific with dialing in a look you want, you can go to the mix and match panel right here and you can select different characteristics from different lenses and mix those to kind of create your own unique vintage lens look, which really opens up the creative possibilities of this plugin even more.
06:11Now LensNode is probably one of the more expensive plugins on this list, but this is a fully custom plugin so it doesn't use any built in Resolve tools which makes it very unique. And honestly, if you're into vintage looks and adding some extra spice to your footage, there's really nothing quite like it out there, so it's well worth the investment.
06:31And luckily, the guys over at NodeMill were kind enough to offer you guys a 20% discount with code Stan 20 if you wanna check it out. Number three is a title effect plugin that transforms your regular text to cinematic looking titles that blend really nicely into your footage. This is a fusion composition template.
06:51So to use it, we'll first drag a fusion composition clip on top of our footage. With that fusion clip selected, we'll head over to the fusion page. In effects, go to templates and look for the film titles template here.
07:04Drag that into the nodes board and then connect it to the media out node. You'll see the text appear on a transparent background and to view your footage while working in the fusion tab, just select the media out node and then in color grade, select mix. Now you can change the font to whatever fonts you have installed on your system.
07:24You can change the size, the position, and right here is where things get interesting. You can, for example, change certain blur effects to the text, adjust the glow with these two sliders here.
07:35You can add lens distortion right here, and chromatic aberration can also be added right here. And in this tab, you can make film grain adjustments to make the text blend even better into your footage.
07:48So a pretty simple plugin or template, but it just makes a bunch of text modifying things really easy and quick to do, which would otherwise take up a lot more of your time. Film titles is a plugin made by Kirk Michalakos. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
08:03You can buy it for $15. Plug in number four is provided by today's video sponsor Epidemic Sound. So probably one of the most time consuming and annoying things when you're working on sound design for your videos is the constant switching between your editor and your sound platform.
08:22Well, with Epidemic's built in DaVinci Resolve plugin, you can actually add music tracks and sound effects right within your workflow. This also makes it way easier to see if any music track or effect actually matches your visuals before downloading it. And speaking of downloading, you can either drag tracks directly from the plugin to your timeline or download them straight into your media pool.
08:45So also no more copy pasting files which is yet another time saver. The plugin now also has Epidemic's AI assistant built in so you can just describe what kind of music you want and it will help you find the perfect match. And another really awesome feature is this search by video function here.
09:02This will actually analyze the current frame in your timeline and give you music suggestions based on what it sees. Besides that, all the other features Epidemic offers are also available in the plugin, like searching by reference track or even pasting in a Spotify link to find similar music to your favorite song.
09:20And Epidemic Sound have been my go to platform for music and sound effects for well over six years now. Their catalog consists of over 55,000 premium tracks and 250,000 sound effects made by real artists.
09:34Plus, all the music is restriction free, so no annoying copyright claims. If you want to start using Epidemic Sound in your own projects, make sure you check out the link in the description and use the code Stan at checkout to get 50% off for two months. Next up on the list is another brand new plugin.
09:51This is actually the updated and upgraded master tracker plugin by Patrick Sterling. Once you've installed it, you'll find it under the generators here but also under the effects. Let's check out the generator version first so we can just drag that on top of our clip as an individual clip.
10:08And in the controls here in the inspector window, you can select between tracking and stabilizing, and we'll look at tracking first. Make sure you turn on fusion overlay right here in this drop down menu underneath the viewer.
10:20This will reveal the tracking visuals on your viewer. So I can grab the tracker and then, for example, move it over here to the Osmo Pocket. And once that's in position, I'll open the tracking controls in the inspector window here.
10:33Then I'll hit the track forward and backward button here to start tracking. And once the tracking button becomes active again, you'll know that it's done tracking. You'll also see the tracking lines on the viewer here.
10:44And you can see right here now the text is actually following the movement of the Osmo Pocket. Now to move the text to a different position because I don't want to have it right here, I can use the source transform controls right here or I can just drag it on the viewer with this circle thing right here. And now it's gonna stay in that position during the tracking.
11:05Now besides text, we can actually also add images in this tracker. So right here under source, I can change it from text to image. And then I can simply select an image file here, for example, this DJI PNG logo, and it will use that for the tracking, which is pretty cool.
11:21There's also the option media pool here, then you can basically just drag anything from your media pool on top of here, and it will use that file for the tracking. Alright. Now for this other clip, let's use the effect version of this plugin and drag that onto our clip.
11:36And here, let's check out the stabilize function of the plugin. You'll see it has shifted the footage here in the viewer, so I'll just uncheck apply offset here and that'll get it back into position. Now I can pick a point on the clip to track.
11:50So for example his eye here will probably be a good point. Once I've got that dialed in, I'll run this track. And now I can tick the apply offset box again and I'll adjust my position and size parameters here to make sure it fits the frame nicely.
12:06And when I play that back, we get this cool stabilization effect. The master tracker plugin is available for download for $15 if you want to check it out. Okay.
12:16Moving on to number six, whip highlight. This is a free plugin, and it lets you do cool things like this. So let me show you how it works.
12:24Once you have it installed, you'll find it under effects and then generators. So to use it, you want to drag the whip highlight clip on top of your footage, then just make sure you've got fusion overlay turned on in the drop down menu here, and that will give you this overlay to see what you want to highlight. There are these handles here so you can just move them into position to select what it is you want to highlight.
12:47And now if you click preview mode off right here, you can see what the effect is gonna be doing. You can also make some adjustments to the animation right here and you can change the size and the position of the highlighted section right here. Also, the corner radius can be adjusted here which I think makes it look very nice.
13:06You can also add motion blur to the animation right here which makes it look even better. And if we head over to the focus settings right here in the top, we can change things like the shadow of the highlighted section, but also what happens to the background during this highlight animation, so exposure, saturation, and blur.
13:26Now if we go back to the controls here, you can see there is a drop down menu here called style. Here we've got a few different highlight options. So the one we just saw was center focus, but we've also got focus.
13:38Then the section will just stay as it was, but the rest of the image will just get blurred out and it adds that drop shadow. Scale is also really nice. This will just scale up the section we selected.
13:49Scale focus is kind of like center focus, but the section will just stay more in its original position. And center will do that center zoom in but without the background and drop shadow effects. So really awesome plugin that I'm definitely gonna be using a lot from now on.
14:05Alright. Number seven is called Array Merge. It's also free and it's great if you've got multiple assets like PNGs, for example, that you want to space out evenly across your clip.
14:15This is a fusion plugin, so with my background clip selected here, let's head over to the fusion page. And to add the plugin, just hit shift plus spacebar to open the select tool menu and then search for array merge and add it to your node tree. Now I'll just add all the PNGs I want to have on my clip to the node board and then I'll connect each one of them to the array merge node.
14:39And you can see it's already aligning them automatically. But in the inspector window here, we can make a few further adjustments. I can align them horizontally or vertically here.
14:49I can also reverse the order. I can adjust the spacing between each asset. I can scale the assets up or down to whatever size works best and position it here where I want it.
15:01Now one note here though, this plugin does not make the assets or PNGs equal in size. So if you're starting off with assets that are different sizes, you will need to adjust the size of the assets to make them fit together.
15:15Alright. Now the last plugin on this list is one that I've actually done a full video on before here on the channel, but I think it's such an incredible value that I wanted to add it in this list as well and it's magic grade by mister Alex Tech. If I head over to the effects tab and then to open effects, you can see right here we've got magic grade.
15:34I can just drop that onto a clip and that will open the plugin right here in the inspector window. So as you can see with this plugin, you can do all of your color grading on the edit page if you would want to. But it also works from the color page if that's more your thing.
15:48So you can then just look for magic rate in the effects right here and then drag that onto a node and work from there. The first thing we've got here in the plugin are presets. These are essentially ready made color grades, so kind of like LUTs.
16:02But the really cool thing about these presets is that it's not fully baked into your footage like with a LUT. So if I just select this preset, for example, Mad Max, and now if we have a look at the sliders here, like, for example, at the tone curve, I can see all the adjustments that were done in the tone curve section to create this preset and I can make my own adjustments here.
16:23And if I go to color palette, I can see all the adjustments that were made in this section to create this preset and I can also make any adjustments that I want to right here. So it's cool that you can go in and really dial in this look to perfectly match your own footage which is obviously a lot more flexible compared to your typical LUT workflow.
16:42The next thing we've got in this plugin are film stocks. So there are 40 different film stocks built into the MagicGray plugin, and they all generally look good.
16:50They're not like cheap LUTs or anything like that. And with these sliders, you can adjust the stock color, so how much of the color is being applied, and also the stock contrast, so how much contrast is being applied.
17:02And then probably the coolest thing about this plugin are the onboard controls. So if I turn on my open effects overlay right here, I will get this pop up in my viewer right here where I can see all of my different controls. So if I hold shift, you can see this now pops up on my screen.
17:17If I then click and hold my mouse anywhere on the screen, I can drag up or down to control my offset. And if I let go of my mouse and then click and hold again, I can drag left or right to control my gain. And you even get this small wave form on screen right here to show you what you're doing.
17:34There are other shortcuts for tone curve, saturation, film saturation, white balance, and so on.
17:41And now if I hit two on my keyboard, this will activate the color palette controls. You can see the little pop up screen has changed right here. So again, with these shortcuts, I can activate the on screen controls.
17:53If I now hit shift, I can change the saturation of a specific color in my image. So if I, for example, click on his hat here, you can see it's recognized that I'm targeting the blues and I can drag up or down to increase or decrease the saturation of that color. I can also change the density of a specific color, the hue, the warmth, and so on.
18:15We've also got a texture section here. When I hold shift, I can add halation to my image. You can see that especially around the highlights in the image.
18:24Holding option will let me add a bloom effect. Again, you'll see that in the highlights, it gives it a bit of a glow effect. Command will add grain to my footage.
18:33Shift command will let me add a vignette so I can adjust the amount of the vignette and the softness of the vignette. Option shift will open the distort effect so you can add some barrel distortion or pincushion distortion by moving the mouse up or down. And moving the mouse left or right will add chromatic aberration.
18:51You can see that appear in the corners of the image so it's really cool to get a stylized look. Then we've got option command. Here we can add blur to the edges of the image kind of to get a vintage lens look to the shot.
19:04So this is before adding all the texture adjustments and after. Before and after. If you wanna check it out for yourself, you can get a free seven day trial with the link in the description.
19:14And if you want to buy it, at the moment, it's only $69.99. Alright. That's it for this video.
19:19All these plugins are linked down in the video description, so definitely check them out and let me know in the comments which one you found most useful. Anyway, thanks a lot for watching, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Eight DaVinci Resolve plugins, back to back, each demoed live: a keyframe-free zoom tool, a vintage-lens simulator with a $40 to $70 price range, and a grading plugin whose onboard mouse-drag controls replace the whole slider panel.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:41list
Loupe Blaster Pro zoom modes
- Full
- Circle
- Rectangle
Three zoom presentation modes: full-frame clean zoom, a circular loupe/magnifying-glass style zoom, and a rectangular crop-style zoom.
Steal forany punch-in or magnification effect on a screen recording or interview clip
18:11list
MagicGrade onboard modifier controls
- Shift = offset/color/saturation
- Option = bloom/distort
- Command = grain
- Shift+Command = vignette
- Option+Command = edge blur
MagicGrade maps its grading controls to modifier-key + mouse-drag combos directly on the viewer instead of a slider panel.
Steal forany color-grading workflow where speed matters more than precise numeric control
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
19:09next-video
“All these plugins are linked down in the video description, so definitely check them out and let me know in the comments which one you found most useful.”
Soft CTA at the very end — no hard subscribe ask, just a comment prompt and a reminder that links are in the description. Sponsor CTA (Epidemic Sound discount code) is embedded mid-video instead.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
AFFILIATECommission earned if you click.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
- Loup Blaster ↗
- LensNode ↗
- Film Titles ↗
- Master Tracker ↗
- Wipp Highlights ↗
- Array Merge ↗
- MagicGrade ↗
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- Epidemic Sound - Get 30 Days FREE ↗
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- My Talking Head Mic ↗
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- Most Used/Underrated Lens ↗
- The BEAST Lens ↗
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Visual structure at a glance.
