Graphics without a subscription

What the paid tool is for

Adobe After Effects is the name in every motion-graphics job advertisement, and it is genuinely the standard for complex compositing, expression-driven animation and a plug-in ecosystem nothing else matches.

For the graphics most video work actually needs — a lower third, an animated logo, a chart, a diagram, a simple 3D title, a masked reveal — there is a free route to every one of them. Here is the map.

Fusion, inside Resolve

Resolve's Fusion page is a full node-based compositor, included in the free version, and it is the closest free equivalent to After Effects for video work. Where After Effects is layer-based, Fusion is node-based — the same distinction as the colour page, and the same advantages.

What it does: text with full 3D transforms, particle systems, planar and point tracking, keying, rotoscoping, masks, paint, expressions, and a 3D compositing environment.

What it costs: a genuinely steep learning curve. Fusion's interface is unlike everything around it, and the documentation assumes a compositing background. Budget a weekend before it is useful.

The practical route in: learn four nodes — Text+, Transform, Merge, Background — which together build any lower third or title card. Add Tracker and Mask and you can do most of what a real job needs.

Blender, for anything three-dimensional

Free, open source, and the actual answer for 3D text, logo animation, product visualisation and camera moves through a scene.

It also has a video sequence editor and a compositor, neither of which you need if you have Resolve. What you want Blender for is the 3D: extruded text with real lighting and reflections, an object rotating, a camera flying through a title.

The workflow: build in Blender, render with a transparent background as a PNG image sequence or a ProRes 4444 / WebM file with alpha, then import into your edit and composite over the picture. Rendering to an image sequence rather than a video file is the safer route — if the render crashes at frame 800 you keep the first 799.

Inkscape, Krita, GIMP

For anything static that then gets animated in the editor.

Inkscape — vector, free, and the right place to make a diagram, a map, a logo or an icon set. Export as PNG at four times the size you need, or export the SVG and render it at any size.

Krita and GIMP — raster painting and image editing, free. Krita has frame-by-frame animation built in, which is the free route to hand-drawn animation.

The pattern: make the artwork properly in a design tool, export with transparency, animate in the editor. This is faster than trying to design inside a video editor, whose drawing tools are poor everywhere.

HTML and CSS, for data and repetition

An underused free route. If you can write a little HTML, you can build a graphic in a browser, animate it with CSS, and record or render it.

This is particularly good for anything repetitive or data-driven — twenty lower thirds from a spreadsheet, a chart that updates from a CSV, a table of results. Write it once, loop over the data, render twenty PNGs.

Rendering options: a headless browser screenshot per frame, or simply a screen recording if the animation is simple. For a batch of stills, Puppeteer or Playwright in a short script.

FFmpeg, for the mechanical jobs

Burning subtitles, overlaying a PNG, generating a colour background, making a slideshow from stills, adding a watermark. All one-liners:

# overlay a transparent PNG at 40px from the bottom left
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i logo.png \
  -filter_complex "overlay=40:H-h-40" -c:a copy out.mp4

Not animation, but it removes a class of fiddly manual work.

What you actually need

The honest hierarchy for somebody starting:

1. Title templates in your editor, duplicated and re-used. This covers 70% of real graphics needs.
2. Keyframed transforms on imported PNGs from Inkscape. Another 20%.
3. Fusion for the compositing jobs — a tracked mask, a screen replacement, a particle effect.
4. Blender when something genuinely has to be three-dimensional.

Most people reach for the complicated tool first and produce worse work more slowly than somebody with one well-made title template.

The trap of the template pack

Downloadable motion-graphics packs are everywhere, free and paid. Two honest cautions. Most are built for After Effects and do not import into anything else, whatever the listing says. And a piece assembled from somebody else's templates looks like a piece assembled from somebody else's templates, because everybody else is using the same ones.

One template you made, consistently applied, beats twenty you downloaded.

Today

Make one lower third in Fusion using Text+, Background, Transform and Merge, and save it to the Media Pool. That is the graphic you will use for the next year.