The free version of Resolve does not stamp your render. That is why it is the standard answer for anyone who needs clean exports without paying. So the mark you are looking at came from somewhere else: a stock or preview clip with its own logo, a third-party plugin or transition still in demo mode, or footage that already carried a mark before you imported it.
This is good news, because it means two of the three causes have a clean fix — license the plugin, or swap the clip — and only one of them is a pixel problem. And for the pixel problem, Resolve has a tool that no web app can match: a tracker that follows a moving mark instead of covering the spot where it used to be.
| Source | How to confirm it | Clean fix? |
|---|---|---|
| Stock or preview media with its own logo | Open the source clip alone on the timeline and play it | Yes — replace the clip or license it |
| A plugin, title or transition in demo mode | Render with that effect bypassed; the mark disappears | Yes — license it, or use a stock effect |
| Footage that was already marked | The mark is in the camera original or the download | No — pixels |
| Resolve itself | — | Not the cause; the free version does not stamp exports |
Running down that list takes about two minutes and can save you an hour of patching. The three layers a video mark can live in →
All three change the picture. The difference is what you give up.
On the Color page, open the Window palette or use Input Sizing, and trim the edge that carries the mark. This is the cheapest option in effort and the most honest in cost: you lose a strip of the frame and keep untouched pixels everywhere else. On a 1080p timeline, trimming 90 pixels off the bottom is about 8 percent of the frame height, and your deliverable is no longer 1920x1080. If the mark sits in a strip you did not need, this is the right answer.
Draw a Power Window over the mark on the Color page, then open the Tracker and track the marked region forward. Now the window follows the mark instead of sitting still. Inside that window you can drop exposure, lift the blacks, or blur — the goal is not to restore the picture but to make the region unreadable at normal viewing distance.
This is the option that matters for a mark that moves, and it is worth understanding why a tracked window succeeds where a fixed box fails. Measured on this site with ffmpeg: a mark travelling across a test clip was still visible in 63 of 72 frames after a fixed delogo rectangle was placed over its starting position. The nine frames it handled were the ones where the mark had not moved yet. A fixed region cannot follow a moving target, and tracking is the entire difference.
Fusion can track the region and fill it from pixels sampled elsewhere in the frame, or from another frame where the same background is unmarked. This is real cleanup work rather than a filter, and it is what a moving mark over a detailed background needs. It is also still a reconstruction: the pixels underneath the mark were never stored, so what you get is a plausible patch, not the original.
None of them restores what was under the mark, because it is not in the file. When a logo was composited onto the frames, the original pixels in that region were replaced, and the replacement is what got compressed into your video. There is no metadata field holding the original, no hidden track, and no second layer to reveal. This is the same limit every tool in this category hits, including the ones that promise otherwise.
It is also why the ordering on this page matters. Licensing the plugin or swapping the clip gives you back the real frames. Patching gives you a repair. If the source is still available to you, the source is always the better fix.
One note on this site's own scope: the cleaner here handles text and still images. It does not process video, and there is no Resolve plugin or video tool being sold here. The four options for a logo, with what each costs →
The free version of Resolve does not add a watermark or a trial banner to your rendered file. That is the reason Resolve is the usual recommendation for anyone who needs clean exports without paying. So if you are looking at a mark in a file that came out of Resolve, Resolve did not put it there. Look at what went in instead: a stock or preview clip carrying its own logo, a third-party plugin or transition in demo mode that stamps its output until licensed, or footage that already had a mark before you imported it.
Three ways, in increasing order of effort. The fastest is to crop the frame on the Edit or Color page so the marked edge falls outside it, which costs you picture but no tracking work. The second is a Power Window on the Color page: draw a shape over the mark, and if the mark moves, attach a tracker to the window so the shape follows it frame by frame. The third is Fusion, where a tracked patch can be filled from surrounding pixels. All three change the picture; none of them restores what was underneath.
Better than a command line can, yes. A moving mark defeats any fixed rectangle, which is measurable: on this site's test clip a travelling mark was still visible in 63 of 72 frames after a fixed delogo box was placed over where it started. Resolve's tracker exists precisely to move a window with the subject, so a Power Window attached to a tracker follows the mark instead of sitting where the mark used to be. It is still a repair, and it still needs a render, but it is the right tool for a mark that travels.
If the mark sits in a strip you were willing to lose, cropping is cleaner, because the pixels you keep are untouched rather than interpolated. If the mark sits in the middle of the action, cropping costs you the shot. On a 1080p timeline, trimming 90 pixels off the bottom edge gives up roughly 8 percent of the frame height. Covering keeps the full frame and replaces one region with a guess built from the pixels around it, which reads as a smear on detailed backgrounds and as nothing at all on flat ones.
Because the viewer draws overlays on top of the picture and the render writes the picture itself. Interface guides, safe-area outlines, and any preview-state badge live in the viewer, not in the frames, so they never reach the exported file. The reverse is also true: a mark inside a source clip is in the frames, so it always reaches the export even if the viewer hid it behind an overlay. Always judge from a real render, not from what the viewer shows.