How to Fix Eye Contact in DaVinci Resolve
DaVinci Resolve has no eye contact correction. It has plenty of tools that touch eyes — Face Refinement in the Studio version tracks a face and can brighten and sharpen the eyes, Magic Mask can isolate a person, and Fusion can do almost anything given enough time — but none of them redirect where your pupils point. Users have been asking for it on the Blackmagic forum, and at the time of writing it isn't there.
That leaves Resolve editors with the same job as everyone else: correct the gaze in a dedicated tool and bring the result back without breaking an edit or a grade. This guide covers how to do that cleanly, including a timecode issue that's specific to Resolve.
Why Face Refinement and Fusion aren't the answer
Face Refinement is a retouching tool. It finds the face, tracks it, and lets you adjust skin, eyes and lips — but its eye controls change how the eyes look, not where they look. Magic Mask isolates subjects for grading. Fusion could, in theory, let a compositor reshape an eye frame by frame, but that's hours of work for seconds of footage and rarely looks natural.
What Resolve does well is help you hide mild drift: punch in and recentre, keep the takes where you were closest to the lens, and use Smooth Cut on jump cuts in a static talking head. For a script read from a monitor beside the camera, you need actual gaze correction.
The options that fit a Resolve workflow
- Correct the file before it enters Resolve — a browser tool like GazeFix takes your talking-head file and hands back a corrected MP4. No plugin, nothing to keep compatible across Resolve versions.
- Round-trip through another editor — Descript, VEED, Captions and CapCut all correct eye contact inside their own apps. It works, but it's a second editor and another round of compression.
- Live correction — NVIDIA Broadcast corrects a webcam feed in real time on RTX cards. It's for calls and streams, not footage already in a project.
Workflow 1: correct before you import
Correct the raw talking-head recording first and import only the corrected file. Nothing in the project references uncorrected media, so there's nothing to replace later, and your grade is built on the footage you'll actually deliver.
Use a Smart Bin or a clip colour to mark corrected media. Leave B-roll, screen captures and anything without a face alone — that's most of a typical edit, and it never needs correcting.
Workflow 2: already cut? Replace the clip
In the Media Pool, right-click the original clip and choose Replace Selected Clip, then pick the corrected file. Every use of that clip in your timelines updates, and edits, grades and effects stay attached.
Resolve lines clips up by their source timecode, which is where file-based correction can catch you out. If your camera embedded timecode, the corrected MP4 may start at 00:00:00:00 instead, and the replaced clip will appear to have the wrong content or go offline. Check the corrected clip's start timecode in the Metadata panel; if it differs, use Clip Attributes to set its start timecode to match the original before replacing.
A few other things change on the way through correction, and each affects whether a replacement stays in sync:
- Frame rate: constant-frame-rate camera footage keeps its rate. Phone footage recorded at a variable frame rate comes back at a constant rate of at most 60fps — check sync at the end of the clip.
- Resolution: output is watermark-free at up to 1080p, so a 4K source comes back at 1080p and will be scaled up on a 4K timeline. For 4K deliveries, patch only the talking segments.
- HDR: HDR sources, including iPhone HLG footage, come back in standard dynamic range (Rec. 709). In an HDR or wide-gamut colour-managed project, set the clip's input colour space accordingly.
- Codec: output is H.264 with AAC audio. If you shot BRAW or ProRes, grade after correction rather than before, because H.264 leaves less room. On Linux, the free version of Resolve doesn't decode H.264 or AAC, so you'll need Resolve Studio or a transcode first.
Workflow 3: patch only the segments that need it
Often only part of a video drifts. Mark In and Out around the section, render it from the Deliver page as H.264 at your timeline frame rate, correct it, then lay the corrected clip on the track above the original at the same frame. Disable the original's audio for that stretch, and toggle the top track to compare.
Every upload costs at least one credit, so render several short sections back to back as one file, correct it once, and cut the pieces back in. Five twenty-second patches cost two credits that way instead of five.
Render settings for correction
- H.264 in MP4 or MOV, at your timeline frame rate.
- 1080p or smaller — larger renders are scaled to 1080p anyway.
- Rec. 709 output. If your timeline is log or wide gamut, render with your output transform applied; flat footage is a harder input for correction. Test a short clip first.
- Under 500 MB, the upload limit — roughly four to six minutes of 1080p at 10–16 Mbps.
- A reasonably tight shot, so the eyes are large enough to correct convincingly.
What it costs for a regular publishing schedule
One credit corrects one minute, rounded up per upload. Correcting six minutes of talking head each week is 312 credits a year. The Pro pack is 200 credits for $79 (about $0.40 a minute) and the Studio pack 600 credits for $199 (about $0.33). Credits never expire and there's no subscription — you pay in the weeks you record and nothing in the weeks you don't.
If you correct hours of footage every month, a subscription tool can work out cheaper per minute; do the arithmetic on your real volume. The reason most Resolve editors prefer a file-based tool is simpler: it doesn't ask them to move their edit into another app.
Start with the recording
Correction works best on small angles and short glances. Put your script directly under or behind the lens, keep the text in a narrow column, and record in short chunks, and every later step gets easier. Our guide to reading a script on camera covers the setup in more detail.
Then test on the worst minute you have. GazeFix gives you one free credit when you sign up, with no card required — enough to correct a full minute. Render the section where you know you were reading, correct it, put it on the track above and compare.