If you’re just getting started working in DaVinci Resolve, then chances are you probably want to start to bring in some text to your videos. The good news is, it’s really easy to do and in this tutorial, I’ll show you a couple of ways to do that. Some are a little bit more flashy than others, but it’s all really simple.
How to Add Text in DaVinci Resolve
Adding a Title With Text and Text+
I’ve just got this piece of footage from Envato Elements, a couple riding on a motorbike. Let’s say we want to put a title on it, something basic that just says ‘Motorcycle’ to start with.
Up in the Effects panel in the top left, under Toolbox and then Titles you can see some options, like left lower third, middle lower third, right lower third, and so on. As you hover the mouse over them you’ll get a bit of a preview on the right-hand side where your footage is. If you move the mouse back and forth over them, you’ll see the animation that fits the description, so scroll, will scroll, for example.
What we’re looking at here is text and text+.
You can drag that into your timeline and have it appear on the footage, like above. Text is basically a rich text editor and text+ is a Fusion version of the same. Fusion is the motion graphics, VFX compositing tool in DaVinci Resolve. Text+ titles are geared towards animation options and have a lot more properties that you can change versus just the basic text.
Text
Here’s a basic title through text and once it’s highlighted, over in the Video panel you can change things like the font, colour, sizing and so on.
To make things more interesting, we can add a stroke to that text, a background, and then an outline to the background. Some basic text, but it looks pretty cool with not very much effort.
Adding Animation
You can do little animations within this, too. Anything with a keyframe next to it, we can animate, so for instance, let’s say we can animate the position of our text.
With the timeline at the start of the play head, we go back up to the Video options and hit a key frame (where the mouse arrow is above) and then move the position of the text down, so that will animate from top to bottom.
It’s pretty basic. The other thing with text is that you can move things around on the screen with your mouse, resize and scale different elements, and move them left or right or change the angle, you can do that all on screen whereas with text+ you can’t do that.
Text+
If we do the same thing we had before, adding a ‘Motorcycle’ title, we can’t keyframe anything in terms of size and tracking, like we did with text, but you can see we now have key frames for a lot more elements, plus some other advanced controls along the top.
For example in Layout there are some choices and you can have your text in a circle, as above, and change where the text sits. This can also be animated, if you add a keyframe to the start and end then that will animate across.
We can also play with elements like the transform properties, transforming by character, word, or line. You’ve got different things for rotation, sheer, size… go through and play with all those options and see what they do.
Shading is really fun, you can add outlines, change the blending modes and all of those sorts of things, there really are a lot of options to try out.
Write On
You’ll find Write On at the bottom of the options you’ve been looking through. If you add a keyframe to the start and then one at the end, and pull the Write On slider all the way across, you’ll get a sort of typewriter effect, where the text types onto the screen.
So that’s how you use the text and text+ functions within DaVinci Resolve, but what happens if you don’t want to animate all this by yourself and you want to add some more flashy titles to your project? Let’s take a look.
Fusion Titles
Back up in Effects where we found our text and text+ options you’ll also see something called Fusion Titles. If you scroll through them you’ll see them play on the right hand side. These are animated, and you’ll see a whole variety of options.
This is one I’ve chosen and changed the title to ‘Motorcycle’ again and that will then do a nice simple animation.
Here’s another, this one has a very simple vibration style animation which you’ll see better in the video. So that’s two very different animated titles with barely any work.
Adding Text With a Template
What happens if we don’t like the ones in DaVinci Resolve? Well, that’s where our friends Envato Elements come into play. If you go to Elements and then look in video templates and select titles and DaVinci Resolve, then you’ll see hundreds of title options available to you.
Once you’ve done that, go to where you’ve saved your chosen file and unzip it. Most of the templates come with guides, and they’ll tell you exactly how to do this, but what we’re looking for are files that have .setting at the end.
You do need to put these files in a specific place on the boot drive on your computer. I’m running this through on a Mac.
Start at your main hard drive and then to Library > Application Support > Blackmagic Design > DaVinci Resolve > Fusion > Templates > Edit > Titles. Then make your own folder and drag your titles into that folder. It’s a little bit of a hassle, but once you’ve done this they all sit nice and snugly in DaVinci Resolve and you can just drag them, drop them onto your timeline, and it’s really simple.
They won’t automatically show up in DaVinci Resolve, you’ll need to restart the program.
When you’ve restarted Resolve you’ll then see your newly added title templates in Titles. If you mouse over them you’ll see they’re already loaded in and previewing so then you can just drag it onto your project.
Here’s one I’ve dragged on and you can see this has two options for text so I’ve changed that to ‘Very Cool’ and ‘Motorcycle’ and that will now animate on. There’s a gradient you can change the colours of, you can change the animation speed, the height, the width, and so on. There are lots of options there and someone else has made this for you so it’s super quick and easy to use right away.
DaVinci Resolve: How to Add Text ☑
That’s it! That’s how you add text in DaVinci Resolve in a few quick and simple ways. We looked at using the built-in text and text+ options to do some easy text with simple animation, and we explored grabbing some third-party creative assets from places like Envato Elements, so that you can use a template with more features, without any extra effort.
I hope that helped you in your journey with working in DaVinci Resolve, it’s a really accessible program, and the free version has everything you’ll need to make your edits – you can do everything I’ve shown you in this tutorial today in DaVinci Resolve free.
Find Professional Video Editing Assets at Envato Elements
Looking for more when it comes to your video editing in DaVinci Resolve? You’ll find thousands of templates, add-ons, LUTs and more, for Resolve at Envato Elements, where everything is included for a monthly subscription. Why not give some title templates a try using this tutorial.
DaVinci Resolve Resources – Keep Learning
Need more title templates or want to learn more about DaVinci resolve features? We’ve got hundreds of free tutorials and template recommendations for you to try. Here are a few to get you started.
10 Top Documentary Title Templates for DaVinci Resolve (2 Free)
- DaVinci Resolve Beginner Tutorial | Free Video Editing
- How to Use the Halation Effect on Background Lighting in Resolve
- 3 Top Live Commerce Video Templates for DaVinci Resolve
About the Authors
Tom Graham created this video lesson. Tom is a multi-skilled content creator with a background in commercial filmmaking. Marie Gardiner wrote the text version of this lesson. Marie is a writer, author, and photographer. It was edited by Gonzalo Angulo. Gonzalo is an editor, writer and illustrator.
