No matter what video project you are working on, there’s a good chance you’re going to need to add at least one DaVinci Resolve title to your project. Titles are great for opening or closing your video, credits, adding names and other information for the viewer. If you’re looking to add your first title in DaVinci Resolve, we’ve got you covered.
Here we will go over how to add titles to a Davinci Resolve Project, modify basic text titles, and some bonus tips on creating a background and simple animation. Follow these steps below and you’ll have titles in your video in no time!
Summary
Part 1: Add Titles to a DaVinci Resolve Project
For this tutorial, we’re assuming that you’ve already created a project and have footage in your timeline. If you need footage for your project, you can download some free video clips to use. When it comes to titles, think about where you might want to add them to your video. Maybe it’s right at the beginning of the video to help tell what it’s about. Or maybe you want to add a name at the bottom of the screen during an interview.
Step 1: Selecting a Title
Let’s get started and add our first title to the timeline.
- Open a Project.
- Place the playhead at the location in the timeline where you want the title to start.
- Open the Effects Library on the top left of the window.
- On the left-hand side of the screen, open Toolbox and select Titles.
- You’ll see standard basic text titles listed in the Titles section.
- Under Fusion Titles, you will find more advanced titles that contain some type of graphic element.
- Select the title you’d like to use, and simply drag and drop it onto the timeline at the playhead location. For this example, we are going to add the basic title called ‘L Lower 3rd’.

Step 2: How to Modify Basic Text Titles
Now that you have a title in the timeline, here’s how you can modify it.
- Click on the title you want to edit so the clip is highlighted.
- Open the Inspector at the top right of the window. This is where you can make changes to the text.
- Add the text for the title in the section called Rich Text. You can also adjust the size, font, position, color, alignment, angle, and more.
- Looking down the Inspector window, you will see that you can also add a drop shadow, stroke, or background. Let’s add a simple background next.
- Under background, use the Height slider to reveal a background that is slightly higher than the text in the viewer window.
- Once the height of the background is set, adjust the Width as necessary.
- Change the Opacity of the background to make it darker or lighter as necessary.

Step 3: Simple Text Animations
We’ve got our basic text set up, now let’s make it a little more interesting by adding a simple fade in and fade out.
- Open the timeline view options on the left and select Thumb under Video View Options.
- Go back to the timeline and select the title clip. You will now see two little handles appear at the top and bottom corners of the clip. Click on the handles and drag it to the right or left to create a fade. Do this at the beginning and end of the clip. The numbers that appear represent the number of seconds/frames over which the transition will occur. A setting around 10 frames works well.
- Now you have a nice title that will fade in and fade out! Great job!
- For more advanced animations, you’ll need to use keyframes in the Inspector and/or jump over into Fusion.

Part 2: Text Templates for DaVinci Resolve
If you are looking to create more advanced, eye-catching text sequences, there are resources available online to help you. Motion Array has lots of great title templates for Davinci Resolve that you can go check out. We’ve also curated some of our favorites here too!
Templates are a great way to help speed up your workflow and can offer creative ways to show or animate text. You can even create your own templates so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you need a title.
We hope you found this tutorial helpful! You’re ready to start adding basic titles to your DaVinci Resolve project and even create a simple fade in/out with your text. Now that you’ve got the tools you need, get out there and create something amazing!