Key Points
- DaVinci Resolve offers powerful video editing capabilities for free, making it a tempting choice for many.
- There are many free plugins available for DaVinci Resolve, including effects, transitions, titles, and LUTs.
- The availability of high-quality free plugins has reduced the need to spend money on expensive paid plugins.
- Some of the best free plugins for DaVinci Resolve include Reactor, Magic Animator V2, Locked-On Stabilizer Plugin, mCam Rig, FixThePhoto’s Free LUT Pack, and ResolveX Transition Pack.
Everyone knows that the best price for anything is “free.” The fact that DaVinci Resolve offers much of the same power that products like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier Pro for the low price of “free” is one of the most tempting and compelling parts of making the switch. However, with any piece of creative software, there is also the factor of plugins. The good news is that there are many free plugins for DaVinci Resolve.
Plugins for creative software are a must. They allow you to quickly create beautiful effects and transitions that will up your video editing game. Whether you’re looking for plugins that make motion effects, transitions, or LUTs, you’ll need to get your hands on some plugins. This will improve your workflow and do some of the hard work for you.
Traditionally, people working with digital video workspaces had to shell out thousands of dollars to bring their workspaces to the industry standard. However, the advent of the internet allowed people to share their plugins with the world for free. They could collect donations or subscriptions through services like Patreon from people with more money to throw around.
Free Plug-Ins for Workspaces
The advent of free plugins for digital video and audio workspaces has changed the game. People producing high-quality free plugins create competition in the market. This gives the companies producing paid plugins a run for their money. With so many high-quality free plugins, there’s much less reason to spend money on expensive plugins. It’s possible to rely solely on the free plugins available for DaVinci Resolve and never spend a penny on paid plugins.
If you’re looking for some game-changing free plugins for DaVinci Resolve to get your video editing game started, we’ve collected the best free plugins you can get for DaVinci Resolve. Let’s look at what you can get completely free of charge!
Types of Plugins for DaVinci Resolve
Before we get into the best plugins you can get, let’s start with a crash course on the different types of plugins available. Once you understand what each plugin type does, you can better choose which plugins suit your particular needs.
DaVinci Resolve has four main types of video plugins: effects, transitions, titles, and LUTs. Most professional video editors consider combining these three plugin types essential to the craft. Each provides different alterations to the video, allowing you to create the perfect scene with whatever available clips.
Effects
The most apparent type of plugin is the effect plugin. These plugins alter the video footage in some way, such as creating a split between a clip’s red, green, and blue channels. These are some of the most aggressive plugins and will be crucial in making your desired scene.
We often use effects to provide additional information to a scene, allowing specific clips to have a more significant impact. We also use effects to reinforce and improve clips in the storyboard. This adds more impact to the clips’ storytelling capabilities by creating a consistent mood or look within the clips. Conservative effects include color correction and grading, while more aggressive effects include motion blur, digital camera shaking, and digital lens flares.
©DC Studio/Shutterstock.com
Transitions
Transitions are motion effects between two clips to create a seamless shift, rather than a jump cut. A jump cut is often a perfectly acceptable choice for transitioning between clips. However, sometimes, a video editor might want to use a transition to create more impact between the two clips or add some additional “oomph” to the transition between the clips.
Typically, the primary transition between clips in raw storytelling videos will be jump cuts and crossfades. These very conservative transitions don’t affect the clips too much and allow for a smoother storyboard without creating too much visual chaos.
You may see less conservative transitions in music videos, such as motion blurs, slides, and zooms. These transitions are considered too flashy for storytelling, as they distract from the clips and can sometimes ruin the film’s mood.
Titles
Titles are what’s written on the box. These are text effects that provide more engaging text animations and styles than are typically achievable without superior technical knowledge. Title effects refer to pre-animated titles that give users simple drag-and-drop title animations that can be altered and customized using simple slider bars and wheels.
DaVinci Resolve comes preloaded with an array of customizable titles and title animations. However, the pickings are admittedly rather slim compared to some other video editor suites. While users can add effects and whatnot to the basic text presets, creating custom text effects can require some superior technical knowledge that many users may not have. Thus, finding presets that do what you want them to do out of the box can be more than invaluable.
Title effects also usually take more work to find for free. Although a few title suites are floating around the internet for free, such as MrAlexTech’s MrBeast suite, most title suites are paid products. Even if they’re cheap suites such as the suite from Patrick Stirling. Thus, we won’t include any text suites in this article. The free ones available are primarily designed to clone existing creators’ text effects, rather than suites designed to provide customizable text effects.
LUTs
LUT stands for “Look Up Table.” Succinctly, a LUT is a large cluster of numbers that change the color grading of a clip to a predetermined color scheme. LUTs are typically used to create a consistent mood between clips by altering their color schemes to be the same.
Video editors typically use LUTs with typical color correction and grading effects to ensure the clips are altered to the correct feel and mood. Since most video editors work with raw live footage, there will be slight differences in each clip. This is due to the differences in lighting and other environmental factors. Thus, typical color correction and color grading will bring all the clips together before applying the LUTs to create a mood.
6 Best Free Plugins for Davinci Resolve 18
Now that we understand the main types of plugins you can use with DaVinci Resolve, we can look at the different free plugins available for DaVinci Resolve 18. We’ve included the best animations, camera effects, and LUTs you can download and use for free today!
- Professional video editing program
- Perfect for colorists
- Compatible with Mac or Windows
- NLE editing tools
Reactor
Reactor is widely regarded as the most comprehensive free effect suite for DaVinci Resolve. The suite is made and produced by We Suck Less. It contains hundreds of effect presets you can access and use from the Fusion window in Resolve 18.
Reactor comes jam-packed with hundreds of presets from the Fusion window, including blurs, 3D effects, and more. They’re all presets, meaning they come with easy-to-use parameters you can change and customize within the Fusion window without any superior technical knowledge.
We Suck Less works hard to produce and update the Reactor suite as often as possible. This suite is more than just a pet project for them. They put the hours in to ensure it works as best as it can out of the box. If you’re wondering if your version of Reactor is up-to-date, you can pop over to their GitHub to ensure you have the latest version with all the Fusion effects you could ever want!
Magic Animator V2
Magic Animator V2 is the second version of MrAlexTech’s Magic Animator effect. Using this effect, you can create beautiful animations with a simple button click. Magic Animator V2 has tons of preloaded animations that you can apply to your text or videos using a simple drag-and-drop.
Once you’ve applied the Magic Animator effect to an asset, you can alter the effects in the Edit window. This allows you to determine what animations are used. Once you’ve decided on the animations you want to be applied to the asset, you can alter and customize the animations with the sliders and wheels that MrAlexTech has provided to allow for further customization of the animations.
Magic Animator V2 is free from MrAlexTech’s Ko-Fi account, but if you’ve found it helpful, we recommend tossing a few dollars to show him how much you appreciate him!
Locked-On Stabilizer Plugin
Patrick Stirling is an up-and-coming preset producer who uses the company name Stirling Supply Co. Stirling has many free presets on his website. However, his locked-on camera stabilizer preset is unique and valuable. This preset allows you to lock onto part of your video. Then, the stabilizer will then track that portion of pixels to keep that portion of the video in the center of the video frame.
This effect is an excellent dynamic camera effect that can be used to keep focus on certain parts of your video. Often you’ll want to keep certain parts of the video in-frame. Stirling’s locked-on stabilizer allows you to do that easily rather than manually keyframe the video movement. This may not even be possible in some cases, depending on how shaky and destabilized the video is.
mCam Rig
mCam Rig by Motion VFX is an excellent choice for a free digital camera rigging plugin. While big studios typically do camera rigging manually rather than digitally, a smaller studio or home editor won’t have the space and equipment to do manual camera rigging. So, a digital camera rigger will be what they have at their disposal to create those camera rigging effects.
The power of mCam Rig isn’t just in the plugin itself. It’s also that the plugin is free to download and use with DaVinci Resolve 18. The free plugin includes positions, rotations, depth-of-field, and more effects that you can apply to your videos to create the illusion of more expansive camera rigs. It won’t even cost you a penny to get started!
©Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com
FixThePhoto’s Free LUT Pack
This free LUT pack from FixThePhoto is an excellent place to start with LUTs. They offer over thirty free LUTs that you can download for free and start applying to your videos today. LUTs are an excellent way to improve the mood and feel of your videos.
As mentioned above, LUTs are a series of numbers that tell the video editor what color changes to make to a video. Using LUTs, you can quickly and uniformly adjust the color to create a cohesive mood between clips, assuming they have roughly the same color values. This LUT pack includes beautiful chocolate tones and vibrant brights to make your footage pop.
The only downside to this pack is that you have to download each LUT individually if you want all of them. It makes it easy to pick and choose if you don’t like them. However, if you want the option to have all of the LUTs just in case you ever need them, you will have to download and install them all individually.
ResolveX Transition Pack
If you need extra transitions to add something more flashy to your video, the ResolveX transition pack is one of the best free transition packs you can get. It comes with ten transitions not provided by the base DaVinci Resolve suite. You can drag and drop them into your videos to make them more engaging and entertaining.
This pack comes with ten different transitions, which include single editions of the Camera Shake, Whip, Lens Distortion, Pan, Push, Spin, Swirl, Zoom, and ZigZag. These give you access to superior transition presets that are sure to wow even the snootiest of video snobs.
The Resolve Store makes this, as well as several other excellent packs for DaVinci Resolve. Unfortunately, the other preset packs are paid-only. However, if you end up liking the ResolveX transitions, it might be worth the cash to buy some of their other packs if you want what they offer!
Final Thoughts
DaVinci Resolve is slowly gaining steam and making its mark as one of the powerhouse video editing suites. With more editors shifting to using DaVinci Resolve as their primary editor, it’s making its way into the professional sphere and carving out a space for itself. These free plugins are a great way to start with DaVinci Resolve and add some flair to your editing you wouldn’t get from the base installation. So, check them out! After all, there’s nothing to lose. They’re free!
- Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Studio
- Professional video editing program
- Perfect for colorists
- Compatible with Mac or Windows
- NLE editing tools
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