Making Efficient Templates

If you’re creating custom animated captions, efficiency matters. Unlike flashy titles that appear once for maximum impact, captions run throughout a video—so if they aren’t optimized, they’ll slow everything down.

Why? - Captions are NOT Titles

Titles are short, bold, and easy to process. You tweak them until they look perfect, and playback performance isn’t a big concern.

Captions, on the other hand, appear constantly and need to be easy to preview. If they’re too complex, DaVinci Resolve has to cache every frame before playback, making the editing process frustratingly slow.

🔑 That’s why efficiency is key.

Why this relates to Snap Captions

Snap Captions unlocks full creative freedom with Fusion, letting you build visually stunning effects. But with great flexibility comes great responsibility— inefficient captions are easy to make.

This article covers THE MOST important concept I’ve learnt, from building over 50 caption templates… which is

👉 OBJECTS 👈

What is an Object?

In the context of this article, when we refer to an object, we mean “an individual thing that is animated”.

So an object can be a:

• Node
• Sentence
• Word
• Character
• Color Channels (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha)

The more objects you animate, the harder Resolve has to work.

How Resolve Divides a Text+ Node Into Multiple Objects

You can tell Resolve, how to break up a text+ into whatever objects, for example.

In a Text+ node:

• Go to transform settings.
• Choose from the transform dropdown.

If we choose the characters or words, Resolve will look at sentences and break them into objects.

Selecting Characters = 11 Objects

Words = 2 Objects

Remember ☝️

Every additional object increases the calculations Resolve must process per frame.

The Performance Impact of Objects

BAD Example: Animating by Character

Let’s say we want to have our words slide into screen like this:

Here you can see how I’ve animated the words to move up by key-framing the offset.

What’s wrong?

Because we’ve set the transform to ‘Characters’ (refer to above image), Fusion is treating each character as a single object.

Here you can see with “Hello World” there are 11 characters.

This means, Fusion is calculating the position for 11 characters, EVERY… SINGLE… FRAME

BUT, If we had changed just 1 setting. Characters → Word

Before

After

It’s the exact same looking effect.

By changing the Characters → Words, Resolve only calculates 2 objects per frame—the same effect, with far less processing power needed.

We go from:

• 11 (Characters) objects position per frame.
• 2 (Words) object positions per frame.

That’s a 5x performance boost!

The Hidden Cost of Extra Elements

Text templates often include extra effects like:

• Drop Shadows (each shadow is its own object)
• Opacity changes (each change counts as another object)
• Color animations (every color channel—Red, Green, Blue, Alpha—becomes an object)

This template I showed you had two elements enabled:

• A main text color
• A drop shadow

Each Element is treated as it’s own object

Which means I lied 🤥

There wasn’t 11 objects in that template. There was 22!!

Character amount x Elements = total objects

11 x 2 = 22

BUT THERE’S MORE AGAIN!!!

And it can get more extreme than this, and I’m talking about colors!

A color is actually comprised of 4 OBJECTS! Yes that’s right. 4!!!! 😱

AND, you may have noticed the example template had a fade in happening. Which is the Alpha Channel.

Which means I LIED AGAIN MWAHAHAH 😈 

This simply means I lied for a second time, there isn’t 22 objects in that template. There was 33!!

Resolve calculates the opacity change as an object as well.

AND I LIED AGAIN AGAIN MWAHAHAHAHAHA 😈 

(I’m not drawing the example image out because I can’t be f@#$ed.)

This simple Hello World animation with

• 11 characters (+11)
• Opacity fade-in on white word (+11)
• A drop shadow (+11)
• Opacity fade-in on Drop Shadow (+11)

is 44 objects!!

Now you can avoid some bad stuff….

So now you know objects, we can paint how BAD some people get this wrong when making templates.

Let’s say you wanted to create an animation where the text goes from:

Yellow → Green

Most people would click the main color keyframe, which turns each color channel into an object.

Which means, this 1 white text element, now has 44 objects BY ITSELF

That’s more objects in a SINGLE element, than anything we’ve just seen! And it doesn’t even look that good 🤦‍♂️…

If we add that drop shadow back in, we’re at 66!!!

BUT

If that person had simply:

• Animated the text position by word
• Animated the opacity itself
• Only keyframed the red channel (did you notice the Blue, Green and alpha didn’t need keyframes to go from yellow to green).

They would only have 10 Objects! That’s 52 LESS OBJECTS for Resolve to handle!

Smart Optimization: Use Fewer Objects

You don’t need to sacrifice creativity—just be purposeful.

If you’re changing the position of a word, animate the word as an object.

If you’re changing the transparency of an element, only use the alpha channel.

If you’re not using a drop shadow, make sure the element is disabled.

These small changes make a huge difference in:

• Playback speed
• Editing workflow
• Happy editors (and a happy me not answering questions about playback performance 😬)

Have Fun! Cheers, Orson