How to Add a Circle to a Highlight Video in DaVinci Resolve

Both Resolve routes are below: the Fusion node build, and the Color page shortcut that skips it.

What "free" covers, and where Studio starts

Start here, because the free-versus-paid line decides which techniques on this page are even open to you. The free download is a complete application rather than a trial: editing, the Color page, Fusion and the Fairlight audio suite are all in it, exports carry no watermark, and there is no time limit waiting to catch you out. Delivery tops out at 4K UHD at 60 frames per second, which is comfortably above anything a recruiting reel needs.

DaVinci Resolve Studio is a one-time $295 license rather than a subscription, and it stays bought — point updates and the next major version arrive without another payment. What it adds is mostly the Neural Engine work: Magic Mask, which isolates a person automatically, along with face refinement, the stronger noise reduction, multi-GPU support and delivery above that 4K ceiling.

The practical consequence for this job is one line long. Magic Mask sits on the Studio side, so the click-a-person-and-let-the-machine-do-it route is not part of the free download. Everything else described below — the Fusion tracker, the ellipse, the power windows, the Color page tracker — is in the free version, and those are the tools that matter here. Version 21 is the current line as of mid-2026, announced at NAB in April and finished in early June.

Two routes to a marker that follows you

Resolve offers two genuinely different ways to single out a player, and they produce different-looking results for very different amounts of effort. Read both before you sign an evening away to either.

The Fusion route: a ring that rides the player

Set aside fifteen to twenty minutes for the first one and expect to be confused twice. After that it drops to five or six minutes per clip, because the node tree you build here can be copied onto the next play.

1. 1

   Cut the clip on the Edit page first

   Trim the play down before you go anywhere near Fusion. Compositing is applied per clip, so a clip carrying thirty seconds of footage means thirty seconds of tracking you did not need. Get it to the six or eight seconds that matter, then select that clip.

   • One play per clip. Fusion compositions belong to individual clips, which makes this a structural requirement rather than advice.
2. 2

   Open the Fusion page and read the two nodes you start with

   Click Fusion at the bottom of the window. You land in a node editor holding a MediaIn node — your footage arriving — and a MediaOut node, which is what goes back to the timeline. Everything you build gets inserted between those two. That sentence is most of what makes Fusion comprehensible.

   • Nodes flow left to right along the wires. The wire is the picture being handed along.
3. 3

   Add a Background node to carry the color

   A mask by itself has no color, so the ring needs something to tint. Add a Background node and set its color to whatever the marker should be: bright enough to survive compression, and absent from both jerseys. On its own this fills the whole frame, which is expected at this stage.

   • Yellow and cyan hold up against most uniform colors and most field surfaces.
4. 4

   Attach an Ellipse mask and switch off its fill

   Add an Ellipse node and connect it to the Background node's mask input, which turns that flat color into a filled disc. Now open the Ellipse in the Inspector and clear the Solid checkbox. With Solid off, the mask is drawn as an outline instead of a filled shape, and the Border Width slider controls how thick that outline is — start around 0.02 and adjust once you can see it over the footage.

   • This is the whole trick. Premiere reaches an outlined ring about as directly, by clearing its own Fill checkbox — the difference is that this one costs nothing and sits next to a tracker.
   • Scale the ellipse so it surrounds one player with a little daylight to spare, and aim it at the torso — a head on its own tells a coach nothing about your stance.
5. 5

   Merge the ring over your footage

   Add a Merge node. Connect your footage into its background input and the ring into its foreground input, then run the Merge into MediaOut. You should now see the outline sitting on top of the play. Nothing moves yet, which the next two steps fix.

   • If the ring vanishes, the inputs are the wrong way round — the footage is the background, the graphic is the foreground.
6. 6

   Track the player with a Tracker node

   Add a Tracker node into the footage stream and place its tracking box over a high-contrast detail that stays with you through the play — a jersey number, a helmet, a shoe against grass. Set the playhead at the start and run the analysis forward. Resolve follows that pattern frame by frame and stores the path.

   • Pick the detail that changes least. A number on a back stays recognizable longer than a whole body does.
   • Track only the seconds that need marking, and re-track a short stretch rather than the whole clip when it slips.
7. 7

   Wire the tracked path into the ring's center

   This is the step that feels wrong and is correct. Right-click the ellipse's Center parameter and choose Modify With, then Offset Position. Switch to the Modifier tab, right-click the Offset control, and follow Connect To through to your tracker's Unsteady Position output. The ring is now driven by the track rather than sitting at a fixed point, and the offset lets you nudge it off the tracked detail and onto the middle of the body.

   • Unsteady Position is the output that moves. The steady outputs exist for stabilizing a shot, which is the opposite of what you want here.
8. 8

   Return to Edit, then export and watch it

   Go back to the Edit page and scrub the clip to confirm the marker behaves. When the reel is finished, deliver a 1080p H.264 file — then judge that file rather than the timeline, playing it right through at normal speed.

   • Copy the finished clip and paste its attributes onto the next play instead of rebuilding the node tree from scratch.

The gentler route: a power window on the Color page

If the node graph is not where you want to spend your evening, Resolve has a second answer that takes a few minutes and needs nothing you do not already know. It lives on the Color page, which sounds like the wrong department until you remember what a power window actually is: a shape that limits where a correction applies.

Open the Color page, make a new node, then open the Window palette and pick the circle. Size and position it over yourself and soften the edge with the feather controls. Invert it so the adjustment lands on everything outside the circle instead of inside it, then pull Gain or Offset down in the color wheels until the surroundings darken. One athlete stays lit while the field around them drops back.

The tracking is the part that makes this worth knowing. Open the tracker palette from the crosshair in the toolbar, set the options to match how the camera is behaving, put the playhead at the start of the shot and click to track forward. Resolve analyzes the footage and animates the window along the motion by itself. Give it a high-contrast subject and keep the window shape simple and it holds up well.

What you end up with is the spotlight rather than the outline — the same effect Hudl made familiar, and the one our page on the spotlight effect coaches already recognize covers in detail. Weigh that against a ring before you choose. Pulling the surroundings down also pulls down everyone you are reacting to, and your spacing and your decisions get read against those players, so save the spotlight for the plays where the drama is the point rather than using it on all twelve.

Holding a frame

Two documented routes, both on the Edit page. Right-clicking a clip and choosing Change Clip Speed opens a dialog with a Freeze Frame checkbox — tick it with the playhead sitting on the frame you mean to hold, then confirm. Alternatively, Retime Controls, which is Command-R on a Mac and Control-R on Windows, puts speed handles across the clip; the small arrow at the bottom of the clip opens a menu where Freeze Frame is one of the options.

Whichever you use, split the clip either side of the pause first if you want the action to resume afterward, because a freeze applied to a whole clip does exactly what it says. Aim for about a second of held picture. That is long enough for the marker to register and short enough that nobody files the pause under effects.

It is also fine — arguably better — to skip the tracking altogether and pair a static ring with that held second. The pause does more of the work than the movement does, for reasons our guide to why the stop matters more than the motion lays out clip by clip.

Where this stops being worth it

Resolve earns its evening when the marker genuinely has to travel: a long run, a moving camera, a play where you are one of several bodies in the same area. It also earns it when you want the reel to look properly made rather than merely marked. If either of those is true, the hours above are well spent and they cost you nothing but time.

The case against is volume. Twelve plays, each needing a trim, a track, a repair pass and a check, is a real evening of work for an outcome usually asked to settle one thing: which of these players am I watching. CircleOn settles exactly that and nothing else. Point it at your film's link, click yourself once per play, and the file it sends back already holds the picture and draws the ring at each of those points — same size every time, same timing every time, no node tree and no tracker to repair. Our overview of the three ways to mark a player sets both approaches beside Hudl so you can see which one your situation calls for. And if a phone is the only machine you have, CapCut is the easier free route by a wide margin.