How to Customize Your Subtitle Style in DaVinci Resolve
By Antonio Pennino · Updated September 2026 · 5 min read
Short answer: your caption look lives in Text+ templates in the Media Pool. SmartSubs Pro ships two, Sub_Simple and Sub_Hook. Edit those in the Fusion page, font, colour, size, outline, animation, and every caption the plugin generates comes out in your style. You design the look once, the plugin reuses it.
The two templates SmartSubs Pro uses
Rather than lock you into a preset look, SmartSubs Pro drives your own Text+ templates. It creates two of them in your Media Pool the first time you run it, and recreates them if they ever go missing:
| Template | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Sub_Simple | The standard subtitle style, your everyday caption look. |
| Sub_Hook | The highlighted or keyword style, used to make chosen words stand out. |
Editing the look in Fusion
A template is just a Text+ node, so you style it the same way you would any Text+:
- In the Media Pool, drag Sub_Simple onto a timeline, select it, and open the Fusion page.
- Click the Text+ node and use the Inspector to change the font, size, colour, tracking, outline, drop shadow and background.
- Add or adjust any animation you want, a pop-in scale, a fade, a slide.
- Save the change back to the Media Pool template, then delete the test clip.
From then on, SmartSubs Pro builds captions from the edited template, so whatever you set is preserved. Change your mind later? Edit the template again and re-generate, no need to touch individual captions.
Fonts, without the invisible-text trap
A classic DaVinci gotcha is picking a font weight the font does not actually have, say Bold on a font that only ships Regular, and the Text+ renders blank. SmartSubs Pro reads your real installed fonts and their real styles, so the style menu only offers weights that exist, and it falls back to a valid style rather than letting a caption disappear. If a caption ever comes out empty, it is almost always this, and picking a weight the font genuinely has fixes it.
Using your own template
Prefer to start from a template you already built, or one from a pack you bought? Save your Text+ based template into the Media Pool and point SmartSubs Pro at it in the General tab. As long as it is Text+ based, the plugin will drive it word by word just like the built-in ones. That is how you get the automation of the plugin with a look that is entirely yours.
Your style, on autopilot
SmartSubs Pro transcribes your audio and builds every caption from your own Text+ template. Design once, generate in minutes. One-time payment.
Get SmartSubs Pro for $39.9930-day money-back guarantee · Studio or free Resolve, any version