20:44Zane Hoyer · Tutorial
How to Edit Premium Documentaries | DaVinci Resolve
A 20-minute step-by-step Fusion tutorial that rebuilds Johnny Harris–style animated map graphics from scratch — free version of DaVinci Resolve, zero plugins.
May 22ndThe argument in one line.
Building a short-form animation as a duplicable Fusion node skeleton — not a one-off — lets an editor restyle it into a second, visually distinct animation in minutes, reserving manual craft for what AI tools can't yet match.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A freelance or agency video editor who wants to raise rates by adding motion-graphics animations to short-form client deliverables.
- Someone comfortable in DaVinci Resolve's Edit page who hasn't yet built node-based animations in the Fusion tab.
- An editor running high-volume content packages (20-30 reels a month) looking to cut animation build time with a reusable template.
SKIP IF…
- You've never opened DaVinci Resolve — this assumes basic timeline and clip familiarity, not Fusion literacy.
- You're looking for a beginner Fusion fundamentals course — this is a single-pattern speedrun, not a from-zero tutorial.
The full version, fast.
A short-form editor builds one Fusion node animation in DaVinci Resolve — Polaroid-style photo frames, letter-zoom and bouncy text, a vignette, and animated red connector lines using erode/dilate and drop-shadow nodes for depth — then stacks two camera-zoom transforms and applies a LUT-plus-film-grain color pass for a cinematic finish. Rather than rebuilding from scratch, he duplicates the full animation, strips the background elements in Fusion, and swaps in new assets — a film reel, camera, and dog photo — to produce a second, visually distinct animation from the same node skeleton in a fraction of the time. He closes by generating simpler alternate versions directly in an AI image-to-video tool instead of building them by hand.
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 – 00:30
01 · Cold open: the pitch
Talking-head hook over a phone-frame graphic promising a fast, repeatable DaVinci Resolve Fusion workflow plus updated AI motion-graphics prompts.
00:30 – 08:18
02 · Build the missing-poster animation
Full Fusion node build: photo frames pulled from Canva, letter-zoom and bouncy text nodes, a vignette, a red background block, animated connector lines built from a polygon plus erode/dilate, quick bevel, and drop-shadow nodes, stacked keyframed camera zooms smoothed with motion blur and the spline editor, then a LUT plus manual color pass and film grain.
08:18 – 09:24
03 · Add the spinning-gear accent
Drops in a rotating gear graphic with a drop shadow in the corner, keyframes its spin from first to last frame, and duplicates the layer for a second gear at a different angle to finish animation one.
09:24 – 13:20
04 · Duplicate into a second animation
Option-drags the whole finished clip, strips it down to background and vignette in Fusion, then rebuilds a different-looking animation from the same skeleton: a downloaded overlay animation, film reel, dog photo with a side-pivot rotation, green terminal-style text that writes on, a lost-dog poster layout, and a desaturated ripped-paper texture, finished with the same camera-zoom and color pass.
13:20 – 14:52
05 · AI shortcut for simple concepts
Switches to OpenArt: generates a still with GPT Image, animates it with an image-to-video model at 9:16 and 4K, and pitches this as the fast path for client reels that don't need advanced motion graphics, closing with an affiliate CTA and subscribe ask.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Building one animation as a duplicable Fusion node skeleton lets an editor swap assets and text to produce a second, visually distinct result in a fraction of the original build time.
- Stacking two separate transform nodes, each keyframed to zoom from a different starting frame, produces smoother, more layered camera motion than animating a single transform alone.
- Erode/dilate and quick-bevel nodes turn a flat polygon line into a shape with visible thickness and dimension, making a hand-drawn connector line read as three-dimensional.
- Rotating an element from a shifted pivot point, by dragging the pivot to its edge, makes it swing in from the side instead of spinning in place around its center.
- A LUT pass followed by manual gain, temperature, saturation, and contrast tweaks plus film grain is what converts a flat screen-recorded animation into a cinematic-looking one.
- Applying the identical color-and-grain adjustment clip across every animation in a video is what makes multiple different-looking clips read as one consistent visual style.
- For simple concepts, feeding a still image plus a text prompt into an AI image-to-video model can replace manual Fusion animation entirely, at the cost of creative control.
- An editing agency selling volume packages of 20-30 reels a month reserves AI shortcuts for clients who don't need advanced motion graphics, saving manual build time for higher-tier work.
One node skeleton can become two different animations.
EDITING WORKFLOW
Building a short-form animation as a reusable Fusion skeleton, not a one-off, is what makes a second, different-looking result possible in minutes instead of hours.
- Keeping a consistent visual system, the same photo-frame shape, text animations, and camera-move pattern, across a whole video is what makes hand-built motion graphics look professional rather than random.
- Stacking two keyframed transforms, each starting its zoom at a different frame, creates layered camera motion that reads as more cinematic than a single zoom.
- A flat line or shape gains real dimension once you erode/dilate its edges, bevel it, and add a drop shadow, since thickness and shadow are what sell depth on a 2D compositing layer.
- Applying one shared color-and-grain adjustment clip across every clip in a video is a cheap way to make visually different assets feel like they belong to the same piece.
- Once a template exists, restyling it for a new topic is largely an asset-swap exercise, a new photo, new text, new color, not a rebuild from zero.
- AI image-to-video tools are a legitimate substitute for manual animation on simple concepts, freeing hand-built craft for the higher-value, more complex requests.
Terms worth knowing.
- Fusion
- DaVinci Resolve's node-based compositing tool, used to build animations by connecting visual and effect nodes rather than stacking layers.
- Node
- A single processing step in Fusion — a shape, transform, text, or effect — connected to other nodes to build up an image or animation.
- Merge node
- A Fusion node that combines two connected elements, such as a photo and text, into one layer so they can be transformed together.
- Erode/Dilate
- A Fusion effect node that shrinks or grows the edges of a shape, used to add thickness and rounded depth to a thin line or mask.
- Spline (graph editor)
- DaVinci Resolve's keyframe curve editor, used to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of an animated move.
- LUT (Look-Up Table)
- A preset color transform applied to footage to quickly shift its overall tone toward a target look.
- Image-to-video model
- An AI tool that generates a short video clip from a still image and a text prompt, used here to auto-animate simple concepts.
Things they pointed at.
14:18toolGPT Image 2
14:26toolVidu ("seedance") image-to-video model
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“High quality short form editing is in high demand.”
13:35
“I don't know if you guys know, but I run an editing agency, and we have now fully integrated AI into our clients' projects.”
14:30
“This works super good for simple concepts, and then for the more advanced high quality animations, you can do them yourself.”
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.
00:00High quality short form editing is in high demand. Everyone wants better looking content, and these DaVinci Resolve animations are super easy and fast to make, perfect for editing client videos. The key here is to keep the same style across the entire video.
00:12Now I'm also constantly trying to improve my AI motion graphics to save time on client projects. So I'm gonna end up sharing my best updated prompts with you guys in this video as well. All of the assets are below.
00:22Grab your caffeine of choice, and let's dive in. So I usually start with generating a photo. Now this photo is gonna be our base for all of our animations.
00:30Now for the photo frames, just a super quick easy thing to do is to hop inside Canva, click this photo frame, and now we can just select whatever photo we want and drag it into the frame, and then we can download this with a transparent background. So I generated four picture frames, so we can drag all four of those in. Now I'm gonna connect the first one here.
00:47I'm gonna hit shift space and add in a transform, and we can just size this down and kinda position it where we want it. I'm just gonna position mine kinda right here. Now I'm gonna hit shift space and add an emerge node, and now we can connect whatever text we want to this merge node.
01:00This is so that we can have letters writing out on the photo as it animates in. So I'm just gonna hit shift space and add in a letter zoom in text animation. It just looks like this.
01:09If you want access to a bunch of text animations like this, it's in the description. I'm gonna connect that to the merge. I'm gonna add in a transform to this one and place it on the photo frame.
01:17Select the text and change it to kind of a gray color. I'm just gonna write a random number. You can write whatever you want.
01:23And I'm gonna change the font to something called snake. So now that we have everything built out on one of the frames here, we can just copy all this, hit command copy, click over here and paste it, holding down shift, bring it into our timeline, and drag it down to where we want it, and readjust the angle. Now we can delete the media in and replace it with the next one.
01:41Select the text and change the number. Now we can just repeat this process for the other two. So now we have our four pictures laid out.
01:48Something we're gonna do is hit shift space and add in a vignette, add that in. And now it's gonna darken all the edges and create focus in the center of the image, and then you can adjust the softness. Now for the context of the image, we can add some text up here and hit shift space search super bouncy, add that in.
02:02This one creates kind of a bouncy text effect like that. Again, all of them are in the description. I'm gonna connect this to the merge here.
02:08Hit shift space, add in a transform so we can drag this up here. I'm gonna rotate the angle slightly. I'm gonna click the text and increase the size.
02:15And I'm gonna make the font a little bit more bold, something like that. Now we're gonna add in a little red block here just for some style. So we can drag in a background, connect it here, select the background, hit the rectangle, the height and width of our shape, hit shift space, add in a transform so we can position it where we want it.
02:31Change the color to kind of a red like this. Underneath the background, I'm gonna add in a merge and I'm gonna copy this text here, paste it, and connect it to this merge.
02:40I'm gonna add in another transform that only controls the text, rotate the angle this way, and size it down. Now we can write whatever we want, dogs. And now because we created it on this merge node, this transform controls all of it like this.
02:54So we're gonna animate this bouncing in because if we go to the start frame, then it will all come in together. Just like the transform on frame one, drag the size all the way down, keyframe it, and go over 10 frames, increase the size really big, and then go over nine frames, drag it down a little bit, and then eight frames, drag it up seven frames, and drag it down.
03:14Now, if we play that back, it looks like that, and it looks pretty good. I'm gonna add one more text in, a letter zoom in.
03:22I'm gonna connect this to the merge. I'm gonna take the words missing, size it down, and then a transform, rotate it, and size it down, and just place it here. Now on the first frame, I actually want to animate these photos coming into the center here.
03:34So that's pretty easy. Select our first photo and keyframe the center x and y position up here. And I want this to be a long animation, so I'm gonna come to, like, frame 70, and I'm just going to drag it in now.
03:45I'm gonna click settings and turn on motion blur, and I'm gonna come to the spline, check the boxes, select all of this, and press s, and I'm gonna drag this one up like this.
03:54That way it starts fast and then ends really slow. So now if we watch that back, it animates in just like that. So now we can just repeat that process for the other three.
04:04And so as these are animating in, I also want red thread to connect them all and animate at the same time. We only have to animate one of them, and then the rest is just duplicated. I'm just gonna drag in a background, connect it here, hit shift space, and add in a polygon.
04:18We can click the point where we want it to start. So I'm gonna kinda click like right here, and then I'm going to click over here because that's where I want it to end up, and I can increase the border width. I'm gonna select the background and change the color to this dark red, and I'm gonna select the polygon, select the edges, and I'm going to drag the edges this way so we don't.
04:37And I'm gonna select this one and drag it this way. Now, I'm gonna hit shift space and search something called erode dilate, and I'm going to hold down shift and bring it in between these two.
04:48Now, if I click this checkbox, we can play around with the x and y. So if we drag up the x, it makes the center bigger, and if we drag down the y, it makes the edges smaller, kinda like this. And now we can hit shift space and add in a quick bevel, and I can drag the spread down, and it's gonna kinda make it look three d like this.
05:04This quick bevel node comes with the text pack in the description. So now we can animate this line. I don't want the animation to start till probably frame 30.
05:11I'm gonna keyframe the length and drag it all the way down, and then come over to maybe frame 80 or 85 and drag the length all the way up. Come to settings and turn on motion blur, spline, and smooth out the animation.
05:25So now starting on frame 30, the line animates connecting to the photo. So now I can just select everything, hit command copy, paste it, holding down shift, bring it in, and connect everything again. Now I can select the polygon, and I can select the edge of it and drag it to this one now.
05:39And then sometimes you have to select these and readjust them so that it makes sense. Again, select everything, paste it, and reconnect everything. Select the polygon, and bring it to this one.
05:50And if you ever don't like the look of your lines, we can just come back to the erode and dilate and play around with these settings just until you get something you like. Now, it still looks a little bit flat, so we're gonna add some shadows to these lines.
06:01And so to do that, hit shift space and add in a drop shadow. As you can see, here it is. So we can just drag down the blur a little bit, and you can play around with the strength.
06:09I think that looks good. So I'm gonna select my drop shadow, hit command copy, paste it, and hold down shift, paste, and bring it in.
06:18Now all of our lines have shadows and they all animate at the same time like this. So now we can add some smooth camera movements. So I'm gonna hit shift space and add in a transform, and we can go to the first frame.
06:28I'm just going to keyframe the size, and we wanna slow zoom in to about frame 70, and that's when all the frames are here. And now we can just zoom in a little bit like this. And now we can go to settings, add in motion blur, spline, and make sure that this is all smoothed out.
06:45I'm gonna drag this one up a little bit so it starts a little bit faster. And now we can stack these transform nodes to get really smooth camera motion. So I can add in another transform and we can come to like frame 55.
06:56I'm gonna key from the size and the center x and y position, and I'm gonna come over to like the end of the clip here. I'm going to zoom in and position the camera where I want it. And so these two transforms are gonna give us that really smooth motion because there's multiple angles of motion.
07:11So when you play it, it's kind of a slow zoom in, and then it transitions into a slow zoom on this photo. And so now we have a pretty solid animation, but to make it even more cinematic, we can come to effects, drag on an adjustment clip, and I'm going to come to the color page here. I'm gonna add a corrector node.
07:29I'm gonna drag on this LUT, and I'm just gonna turn it down a little bit. So I'm gonna come to this tab here and drag the gain down.
07:35Come to this one here now and drag up the temperature so it balances it out a little bit. Drag up the saturation, the detail, and the contrast.
07:44And so you can see how much that did if we look at before and then after. It gives it that really cinematic look. And then on top of that, we can come to effects and search grain resolve f x and drag on film grain, drag up the opacity, the texture, drag down the grain size, drag down the softness a little bit, grain strength up.
08:04Now the last thing I forgot to add to this is we're gonna come to the start here and we're gonna drag on a gear just like this and connect it here. I'm gonna add in a transform so that we can drag this in the corner here. I'm gonna add in a drop shadow.
08:18Now with the transform selected, we can come to the first frame, keyframe the angle, and then come to the last frame and spin the angle. And then if you wanna add another layer, you can just copy it, paste it, select the transform, and drag it over just like this. Come to the last frame and just change it a little bit so they're not the exact same.
08:35If we watch that back, it looks really good and high quality like that. And so now in the matter of, like, ten minutes, you have something that looks like this. And so now because we want everything to be the same style, we can just hold down option, click, and drag, and now we've duplicated our clip.
08:49So now we can come into the fusion tab. We can delete our camera movements. I'm gonna keep the vignette, and we can essentially delete everything else just like that.
08:57And now we have our background, and we can make our second animation really quick. First thing I'm gonna add for this one is this animation I downloaded. It's in the asset pack for free.
09:06And we can just connect this here. I'm gonna hit shift space, add in a transform, rotate the angle, and then zoom in so that it covers everything. And I'm gonna hit shift space and add in a luma here.
09:17I'm gonna select transform and increase the size. And so now if we play that, the animation starts like that and it's really cinematic. So here I can just drag in my first element, connect it, hit shift space, add in a transform, and we can just slightly put this at an angle.
09:32I like to put things at an angle so it looks real. Can hit shift space, add a drop shadow, drag down the drop distance and the blur so it looks a little bit more real. Now I'm gonna add a film reel into here and connect it like this.
09:45Add in a transform, size it up, and we're just gonna place this in the corner like this. I'm gonna add in a drop shadow and increase the drop distance a little bit and strength. I'm gonna add in a blur node and increase the blur size a little bit, and I'm gonna select the transform, come to the first frame, angle, come to the last frame, and just rotate the angle.
10:05So now if we watch that back, it looks like that. Pretty cinematic. Now we can drag in this film tape of a dog and place it here.
10:14I'm going to hit shift space, add in a transform, and we just size this down, and I'm gonna place it here. Now I wanna rotate the angle so it kinda animates in like that, but I don't want it to animate from the center.
10:25I want it to animate from the side here. So we're going to drag the x pivot just like this until that little x is here. Now when we rotate the angle, it pivots from the side.
10:36So I come to the first frame, keyframe the angle, come to like frame 50, and rotate the angle up. Settings, motion blur, spline, and drag this side up.
10:47Now when we play that back, it looks like that. Pretty nice. I downloaded a picture of a camera so we can just drag this and connect it here, add in a transform, and rotate it and size it down, and then place it off to the side.
11:00Now to make anything look instantly more real, we can add in a drop shadow, change the angle so it's kinda facing this way, drop distance, and strength.
11:09I'm also going to add a drop shadow to this dog image. Now we can add some green text rating out on the screen. So to do that, we're just gonna add in a merge node, add in a normal text just like this, and change it to green.
11:23So I just wrote something random here, and I'm going to drag down the size, and then we can place this here and hit enter so that it goes like that.
11:34And we can add in a transform, place this where we want it. Now we can come to the point where we want the text to stop writing out. So maybe frame 70, keyframe right on, just right here, come to the first frame and drag this all the way off like that.
11:48And so when we press play, it writes out on the screen like that. To make it look a little bit better, I'm gonna hit shift space and add in a glow and increase the glow size. So now it looks a little bit more like a screen.
11:59I'm also going to change the font to to o c r a, which looks a little bit better. We just have to adjust the size. So again, you can really add whatever you want here.
12:08I just added text. So because I want the text to be behind everything, I'm going to drag these back and then I can just search like letter, zoom in, and connect it here. Add in a transform, rotate it.
12:20You can write a word or a number. We just come through these and try and find a font we like. I like tactic sans.
12:25We just size it down, and then I'm gonna switch the color to a dark red. I'm gonna select this animation and just make it bigger. And I'm gonna copy this text, add it in right here, and then we can just drag this down with the transform selected and write something like lost dog, size it down, change this to kind of a dark gray.
12:44And then one more element I think I added was just this ripped paper I downloaded so we can connect that here. Like I said, all of this is in the asset pack so you can follow along. Hit shift space, add in a transform, rotate this angle, make it pretty big, and just bring this in the corner.
12:58I'm gonna add in a color corrector, and I'm gonna turn the saturation all the way down so that it matches just like that. Again, I'm gonna add a blur to that too just like that.
13:08And then again for the camera movements, we can just add in a transform node, come to the first frame, keyframe the size, come to, like, frame a 100, and zoom in. Settings, motion blur, and adjust the camera movement with the spline by selecting everything and press s.
13:26So now again, because we want it to look relatively the same, we can just copy this adjustment clip right over top, and instantly, it just looks a lot better and cinematic. I don't know if you guys know, but I run an editing agency, and we have now fully integrated AI into our clients' projects. We still edit a lot of the animations ourselves like I just showed you.
13:44But if you're selling editing packages of, like, 20 or 30 reels a month and the client doesn't need super advanced motion graphics, this will save you a ton of time. And so here we are in Open Art. I have an affiliate link in the description.
13:55And so here, I'm just gonna select image. So 99% of the time, I use GPT image two, and I can either describe what I want or feed it a reference. So here's the exact prompt I use.
14:03I'll put these in the description, and it's gonna give me an output like this. I'm gonna select c dance two point o. We're gonna select our aspect ratio, nine by 16 most likely, and then make sure you select four k.
14:14This is what's gonna give you those really realistic results. By the way, c dance 2.5 is gonna be dropping pretty soon, which is gonna make this even better. It might already be out by the time this video goes live.
14:24So it'll be the same process, just probably look even better, which is crazy. So we're gonna upload the start frame here, and then I'm going to type in this prompt. Once I hit generate, we get something that looks like this.
14:36Like I said, this works super good for simple concepts, and then for the more advanced high quality animations, you can do them yourself. Make sure you subscribe. Let me know in the comments what you wanna learn next.
Named ideas worth stealing.
09:24concept
Duplicate-and-restyle animation build
Instead of building each in-video animation from scratch, copy the finished node tree, delete the unique foreground layers while keeping the background, vignette, and camera-move keyframes, then swap in new photo, text, and prop assets.
Steal forany repeatable short-form template — build the skeleton once, restyle per clip
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
14:42product
“Get advanced plan or above before July 31 and get up to 40% off — click my affiliate link so me and my pup can eat tonight.”
Delivered as an on-screen text card during the OpenArt walkthrough rather than a hard verbal pitch, paired with a separate spoken subscribe-and-comment ask right before it.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
AFFILIATECommission earned if you click.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
