Ignite: captions and polish in one pass

Ignite is Ember's full append. It takes the captions you approved, applies the Style you chose, and places everything you enabled around them in a single pass on the Resolve timeline. You do not build subtitle tracks, zoom clips or transitions by hand after the fact.

The pass is deliberate: every enabled feature is placed. A failed run reports what it could not do instead of quietly producing a different edit.

Each clip slot builds upward from its top video track: a gap lane where Flares and other cards sit, then B-roll, Transitions and Zooms, with subtitle tracks above them. Above Subs puts the zoom track above the subtitles instead. A feature left off keeps its place empty, so turning one on never moves the captions or another effect.

The Ignite page is not a tab. It opens when a pass reaches Ignite: press Start on the Generate page, or use the Ignite action on the Main page to place the captions already on the timeline.

• Done keeps the placed clips and returns to the Main page.
• Back asks first, then deletes everything Ignite appended to the timeline.
• To place a changed polish set after Done, use Ignite again on the Main page.

The caption part of Ignite is the text itself, its Style and its Sparks. Highlight accents travel with the captions you approved during Generate.

What follows at once. While the Ignite page is open, a Style change reaches the placed captions at once: the ones at the playhead first, then the rest of the run. A change to placed polish places that polish again and replaces the previous set. After Done, nothing follows until Ignite runs again.

Zooms add energy without touching the edit. Ember places them along caption phrases and pauses, and keeps every zoom inside the source clip's own cut points, so a zoom never invents a frame that was not there.

Scale

How much an automatic zoom grows the picture. Ten percent is a noticeable push without becoming a gimmick.

Variance

Seeded variation in how much each zoom grows. The result is stable if you run it again.

Pattern

How many zoom-in and zoom-out pairs reuse each amount before Ember draws a new one.

Placement

Above Subs zooms the whole picture including captions; Below Subs zooms the footage and leaves the captions crisp.

Hook

Starts each clip slot with a hook zoom and settles at the first phrase boundary or cut.

Jump Cuts

Punches in on every cut and back out on the next, keeping the speaker's eyes where they were. 1.00x is off.

Reframe

Tracks the speaker horizontally in Fill clips so the framing follows them instead of letting them drift out of frame.

Zooms are a Pro and Max feature. The Reframe toggle in Ignite is the automatic version; the Inspector's Reframe control is for one clip at a time.

Transitions place a visual plate and its sound over cuts. The cut gap is the shortest pause between two cuts for the later one to receive a transition, not the distance between transitions.

• The Accent swatch in the Transitions section tints the plates with the caption accent colour. Accent follows the caption Accent until you choose a colour, then keeps the one you picked. Accent Strength is how much of the hue is applied, not the plate's opacity.
• Motion transitions such as Shake, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Slide Left and Slide Right move the footage itself and have no plate to tint.
• A shorter cut gap makes the edit busier; a longer one reserves transitions for the moments that deserve them.

Transitions are included with Pro and Max. Ember ships nineteen transition looks: fourteen plate looks and five that move the picture itself.

Music adds a song under the voice and ducks it automatically when someone speaks, so dialogue stays intelligible. Ember's library is organised by mood: Aggressive, Chill, Classy, Dark, Energetic and Upbeat. Your own songs can live in a folder alongside them.

Folder

The mood or folder Ember picks from. All lets it choose across the library.

Song

The song under every clip in a local project. Auto picks a different one from the chosen folder each time; choose a song to pin it.

Local projects

Drop

Locks the song's beat drop to the first cut, the second cut, or neither.

Fallback Duration

Where the drop lands when the chosen cut is not available.

Track

The Resolve audio track that receives the music.

Level

Adds gain to each music bed after Normalize has levelled and ducked it. Zero is Normalize's own level.

Music rows and cut rows

Each clip lists its song, with last use, an audition and a filter; each cut picks its own transition. Shuffle fills either set for you.

A Flare replaces the captions for a few seconds with a graphic card that makes one idea land: a name, a number someone said, a line worth pulling out, or a small chart of what was said. The captions underneath go quiet for the card instead of competing with it.

• Flares choose their moments from the edit: a spoken number, a proper name, a line that stands on its own.
• The card's typography and accent follow the caption Style, so the break still belongs to the same design.
• Background Color and Background Opacity let the card sit on the brand palette while keeping the glass material intact.
• Sounds adds a soft landing and small ticks as the card's parts arrive. Ember makes them itself, and they vary per card.
• Rounded corners keeps the card, and the Splitscreen caption plate, on the Style's rounded corners; off makes them square.
• Flares are included with Pro and Max.

B-roll comes from the Ember/Furnace/B-roll bin in Resolve's Media Pool. Put your footage there before you press Start; it is the only place Ember looks. New or changed footage is scanned and classified automatically, and saved classifications are reused. Classification and placement use credits. The B-roll sits above the A-roll as ordinary video clips, and captions stay on top. B-roll is part of Pro and Max.

B-roll starts off each time you open Ember, and stays on once you turn it on. An empty bin turns it off with a warning and tells you to add footage, then turn B-roll on again.

Mode

Partial places B-roll after Burst endings for the span you set, at most once per cooldown; Full covers the whole clip. Each cut lasts up to a few seconds.

Span

How long each B-roll stretch runs after a Burst ending.

Cooldown

The shortest time from one B-roll stretch to the next.

Splitscreen

Slides the speaker into one half and the B-roll into the other, with a seam in the accent colour. Captions stay on top.

Swap

Puts the B-roll on top, or to the right in a landscape frame, instead of the speaker.

Hide Cuts bridges a cut with generated frames between the two shots, so a talking-head edit plays as one continuous take. It is best for talking heads, documentaries and footage without B-roll.

On a Resolve timeline, Hide Cuts needs DaVinci Resolve Studio, because it uses Resolve's native Smooth Cut. In an Ember project it bridges the cut with frames Ember makes instead. Either way it needs the Transitions pack (Pro and Max). No transition plates go on a hidden cut. With Jump Cut on, Hide Cuts takes every second cut and Jump Cut skips that cut. Check the bridged moment in the timeline before delivery, especially around hands, faces and moving backgrounds.

A LUT is a colour lookup file: a fixed colour transform applied to a picture. LUT applies one .cube LUT to source clips that carry no grade of their own. Turn it on, then pick the file in the Preset row that appears under it.

The included LUTs convert camera-log footage to Rec.709 for common camera formats, and your own .cube files in the LUTs folder join the list. The LUTs pack is included with every plan.

• Word SFX places a sound on words at the density you choose. If the bundled sound library is missing, the captions still land and Ember warns you rather than failing the run.

Enhance and Normalize are set on Generate: Enhance cleans the selected voice tracks from 0 to 100; Normalize levels the voice near -14 LUFS and music and sounds near -24 LUFS, with music ducking under speech.

1. Check the frames

   Check the placed captions and clips in the timeline, or in Resolve: cut points, the first and last caption of a run, and every Flare.

2. Change the look

   Restyle the placed captions without re-running Ignite. This is the normal way to iterate on typography and colour.

3. Change placed polish

   Zooms, transitions, music and sounds are clips on the timeline. Change their settings while the run is open and they are placed again; the previous set is replaced.

4. Undo the pass when it is wrong

   A Full Append is one run; undo it in Resolve if the edit went in the wrong direction, then change the plan rather than patching many individual clips.

• Styles and Sparks

  The look Ignite places, and the Sparks around it.

• Magic Shuffle: Waves and Formations

  The rhythm and motion the captions arrive with.

• Export: renders and social delivery

  Batch renders and posting from the timeline you just finished.