10x Your Social Media Production - Live Workshop

Hello, everyone. I think I'm live. I'm always. Let's see if my audio. Okay, yep, there we go. So let me share my screen here and I'm going to need to set up a thing to show that. So let's do application cap. No, not that one. Okay, here we go. All right, let me just adjust my windows here. So hang on, I'm gonna adjust my obs windows here. Okay, there we go. And you know what? I'm gonna get rid of my. My self view for now. Okay. So welcome to the social media production 10 x ing your social media production, I'm gonna show you how to use descript to quickly make shorts out of your long stuff and just generally social media content, mostly using the AI features that descript has, but also using it to generate get ideas and to generate content. So I have this little PowerPoint here and the first question I have is, should you even be using shorts? And I know that sounds like. And when I say shorts, I'm referring to short content in general, whether that's for Instagram and Facebook reels, TikTok, YouTube shorts, etc. Because personally, you may notice I don't use it on this channel. And that's very intentional. I've used them in the past and they get tons of views, but it's not the right type of audience for me. So that's what I would ask is, should you be using shorts based on your goals? And what it comes down to is, well, okay, first of all, clips versus original content. So what I'm going to show you with descript is a feature that will pull clips, meaning short, you know, 30 to 60 second pieces out of your long videos. So that's a clip. And they tend to not do as well as original shorts. That is content that's made first and foremost to be a short. So the exception is if there's somebody famous in the clip. So if it's like an interview on the Joe Rogan podcast with some famous comedian or some famous politician, like, that's inherently going to get a lot of views because people see Donald Trump's face or whatever and they're going to click on it. But if, if you're a small podcaster, it's probably not going to mean as much if they see whoever your guest is, not saying you're not important, not saying your guest isn't important. But that's the reality is people click on, on faces they recognize. So personally, clips are, in my experience, if you're not a big time podcaster, it's probably not a strategy worth pursuing as opposed to original content. So this is something that's made from the start to be a short. It's something that tells a complete story in that timeframe, 30 to 60 seconds. And those do really, really well. There's a lot of examples of people who have short only channels, short content only channels. And, and they do very well. So, so keep those in mind as you're deciding if you should even be using shorts. And then also the reality of having platform specific content. So if one thing that might work well on YouTube, shorts won't work on TikTok and it won't work on your. On Instagram reels, there's a certain look, a certain style, a certain tone that each of those platforms that tend to perform well on those platforms. And it could be as simple as on TikTok, for example, there's people put a cert, use a certain font and then it has a white background behind it. That's a very TikTok specific look. And so you wouldn't want to post that on, on an Instagram reel. It just wouldn't work as well there. So if you're just blasting these out, if you're just putting it onto something like hootsuite, which is a service that you can upload to different platforms all at once, so you can take one video, upload it to a platform like hootsuite and then blast it out to a bunch of different platforms all at once. You can do that, but you're not going to get, it's not going to be as optimized as if you make content for those specific platforms from the start. And then I have this note here. The value of a YouTube sub versus other. I think I'm, I'm all in on YouTube. I'm a YouTube maximalist, if you will. So it's my belief that, that a YouTube subscriber is worth a lot more than a subscriber on any other platform. Like you can have millions of subscribers on TikTok. And TikTok, the, the virality is just so much greater. But it's much harder to build a business, for example on TikTok than through YouTube. YouTube, you can make a great living off of a few hundred subscribers. A lot of people are doing it. So that's just my two cents that the value of a YouTube subscriber and specifically a YouTube long form subscriber is a lot higher than any other platform. And then lastly, a note on just the uncertain future of TikTok. TikTok was banned for a few hours on Sunday. So we don't know what's going to happen, if it's going to go away in 90 days, which is what the current administration has given it. And so we'll see what happens. I think there's a strong chance that it's going to stick around. It's going to get probably acquired by an American company and it'll probably be fine, but it's something to consider that it's not a definite thing, that it's going to be there. Okay, so that's it. That's my little preamble. If anyone has any commentary or questions as we go, feel free to stop me at any point. So the first thing that I want to show you is Underlord, an introduction to Underlord. So I'm going to switch my screen here to Descript, and I think there's a slight lag in the. Okay, there we go. There is a lag in the stream, but I'm going to do a new project and let me change the size here so you can see. So, new project in the top right. And we're going to do a video project. So this is what it looks like inside of a blank project. And up here in the top right corner is Underlord. And Underlord is all of the AI features that Descript has. So if I click on that right now, all this stuff is grayed out because I don't have any content in here yet. But if I scroll to the very bottom, there is this right section and let me turn on my screen cursor for you. This is a tool I use that puts that, that circle around my. My cursor to make it a little easier to see. So there's this right section and you can use. There's a Brainstorm. Write a script, write an outline. So if you're. If you just need ideas in the first place, like you're just making a video from scratch, you don't know what to talk about. You can hit this Brainstorm section and put in a starting point. So you could say, my channel is about Bonnie. Thank you for joining. I saw you're here. Let's make it. Let's do it. Let's talk about travel. My channel is about travel. Make an episode about a trip to Europe, whatever. You can type in anything you want. And this uses Chat GPT, which hopefully everyone is familiar with, where you can, you can prompt it, anything in plain English and it'll give you, in this case, ideas. So here it is. It's spitting it out. Welcome to your channel name. In today's episode, we're embarking on an unforgettable journey across Europe. So you could use this as your script and you could add to script, click that button right there and that puts it into your Descript project. So that is the brainstorming section. That was again under write and close that the, the brainstorm button right there below that is write a script. And this one is more in depth than what we saw with the brainstorm part. So you, you have a lot more prompt options here. You can give it a length, so it defaults to 500 words, but you could make it longer or shorter based on whatever you're looking for. You can give it a starting point, any notes, topics and ideas to adapt into the script. You can give it a tone. So you could say, make it funny, make it serious, make it 14th century Shakespearean style, English, whatever you want, you can put that in there. Audience, who is this for? That's a super important point to address. And then examples. If you have some of your own writing, you want it to match your own style of writing. You could paste in an example and that'll help train the AI on how to, how to write this and then any other custom instructions that you can give it there. So, and you can see some of these have in parentheses, optional next to it, meaning you don't have to put anything in there. But it's not going to let me hit submit because this first one is required. So let's continue on with our travel theme. Let's say make a script about a recent trip to Europe and some funny observations from the perspective of an American seeing Europe for the first time. Something like that. And then tone, I'll make it funny, witty, sarcastic, put in something like that. Audience, let's say you could, you could put in a demographic here. Like you could say Americans age 30 to 40. And you know what, I'll do that. Americans age 30 to 40. And then if you had any examples, you put that in here. And any custom instructions say, don't make it too verbose, keep it concise. That's one of my biggest problems with AI writing is that it tends to just drone on. It uses a lot of adjectives. So sometimes just telling it to be a little more concise goes a long ways. I'll hit submit, and here is our script. So if I want to use it, I can say add to script. If I want to refine it, I can say follow up. And this will allow me to say the script Is great, but can you make it even more concise? Make it shorter or make it longer? You can, you can give it prompts like that and it'll do it. I'm just gonna say add to script and there we go. That is now the script for my video. And you can also have it just write an outline. Very similar here. So to explain what I'm doing back to Underlord. At the very bottom, in the right section, under the one that we just did, write a script, there is write an outline. And that will just create bullet points, an outline of a potential script. So once again, you can give it a starting point, make a video about traveling to Europe, something like that, and hit submit. And this is actually creating a full script. It's supposed to be just bullet points of an outline, but that's what that is. And. Oh, did I tell it? No, I said make a video about. Okay, so. And then there's a rewrite section. So if you have an existing script like we have here, then you can tell it an editing style. So you could say improve and rewrite this. And it'll go through. It'll look for, you know, issue things that don't make sense, like logical problems. It'll look for incomplete sentences. It'll look for just anything that it needs to improve and rewrite. And since it was already written by AI, it's probably not going to find very many. But if it was written by a human, it would probably find a lot more. Or you can just say tighten it up. And that's just going to make it shorter. And as before, you can give it a tone. You can describe an audience that you want this to appeal for. Appeal to. And any examples of the writing style to match and custom instructions, I'm going to leave those blank and see what it comes up with. So I'm just quickly looking at. So that first sentence I see you got rid of the word. So it's kind of just tightening it up a little bit. Locals, it's kind of. It's made it a little bit less conversational. Pretty similar, but slightly, slightly tightened up. So that's how that works. That is the right section. So that was my first bullet point here, was just getting help ideating and writing. Now the bulk of what we're going to look at today is the repurposed section. And what I opened this live stream by talking about was the idea of clips versus original content. So the repurposing that we're going to see from Underlord is clipping. It's going to take clips from longer content. So if I. Let me. Let me turn this into actual audio, I'm going to do browse AI speakers. And to explain what I'm doing here, let me move this over at the top of this. This text is blue. That tells me that it's just text. It hasn't been turned into audio. But. But we can do that. We can do text audio by clicking on this thing that says add speaker. And these top ones are voices that I've trained. So these three are myself and. And then I've labeled different microphones that I trained it with as well as where I trained it. That's just so that I can keep it consistent. If I record a video using one of these three mics, then I'll want to match that when I go to apply this voice. Um, and then I have a client voice as well on there, but there's also a bunch of stock voices. So if I say browse stock AI speakers, I can click on that. And I have this big, big, long list of different stock voices. So, for example, there's this one called Alex, and it describes it as conversational, adult, inspiring, masculine. So if I click this little play button. Life is like a camera. Just focus on what's important. Capture the good times, develop from the negative. It sounds like that. And so I can go through here. I could find one that I like. Life is like a camera. Just focus on what's important. Scottish vine.

Life is like a camera. Just focus on what's important.

So I just select that one. Piper. Whatever. And now what's going to happen is you see this little spinning circle as well as that blue text is now pulsing. That's letting me know that it's processing this into an AI voice. And I just got a. A failed error at the bottom. That's not good. This one got a check mark. So it's doing it a paragraph at a time. As you can tell, there's the error. I'm not sure why that happened, but if it does happen, you get this little triangle, this little red triangle, you can hover over it and then click on that recycle button. For some reason, it's not liking that paragraph, but that's okay. So now that it's been turned into AI speech, it's a dark blue. And if you see down here, if you open up your timeline, click Show Timeline in the bottom left corner. Then let me just resize this a bit, then you can see that you have this. If you hover over a part of the speech it says convert to audio. So right now it's kind of in draft mode. It's not. You can play it.

Hey everyone, it's your favorite American traveler.

Here and let me know if you're not able to hear that through the stream. But I'm, I'm playing the AI voice and it's, it's reading it out loud.

So I just got back from my first trip to Europe and wow. Do I have some observations that's actually.

Really good that I don't know if you again, if you can hear it, but the emphasis on the wow was, was good. It wasn't robotic. So they've recently improved this. They've switched to. Okay, thanks for letting me know. They recently switched to 11 labs as their, their voice source, which is the gold standard as far as I know, with the text to speech. So it's gotten a lot better just in the recent couple of weeks here. And if you see down here, there's this convert to audio button. And so now as of now, I cannot edit this in the way that I normally can edit from the timeline. So normally I could grab a word like this word so and I could delete the empty space before it. Right now I can't do that. I'm clicking and nothing's happening until I click this convert to audio button. As soon as I click that. Now this is like any other sound file, like a sound file that you would have made yourself and brought into Descript. So now I can click on the word so and drag it and it's going to delete that gap before it. So let's, let's see how it sounds.

Hey everyone, it's your favorite American traveler here. So I just got back, so it's.

A little, little too fast with it when I took out that, that gap. But hopefully you can kind of see how that works. And it's probably hard to see through the live stream, but this next paragraph I have not converted yet. So it's still a dark blue, while this one appears as black text on the transcript. And if I want to make this into normal editable audio, I click on once again, convert to audio. And now I can start editing that. Okay, so that is how you. We take our transcript that was generated by ChatGPT, by Underlord and then turned it into actual text. And then I'm going to add some video over this. I'll go to stock. Oops. Add some video, let me type in Europe. And if you don't know, I'm always amazed when people don't don't realize this, but with your Descript subscription you get access to their entire library at B roll. So you have Giphy GIFs, bunch of stock video, stock images, Giphy stickers, backgrounds, all this kind of good stuff and just thousands and thousands of options. So if I type in Europe and then I say show all, then I have all these different views of Europe and I can click on one like say that and that's going to add it to my video. You can see it says importing video. And now that we have a actual video, going to go back to Underlord and we're going to start to repurpose. So again, that was Underlord in the top right you get your underlord menu. Should look familiar by now. And then down here you have the repurpose section. So this is what we're looking for. Create clips. Or this is where we're going to start anyways. So create clips. You can choose a number of clips and I have five typed in there right now. That's fine, let's leave it. Well, actually this is a 2 minute and 29 second video. So let's do three, let's do a couple less and then I'll say clip duration 20 seconds. So I just type it in there and then. Layout. So I recently did a video about layouts. If you, if you haven't used layouts before, highly, highly recommend you start. It's. It'll save you so much time on your editing. And these are actually layouts that I, I've made for a client that I use for client shorts and so I'm not going to use those right now. But you get the idea. You can make your own layouts and then you can automatically put the clips that Underload comes up with into a layout. But if I don't want to use ones that I've made, I can say see more layouts. And, and this view right here, this one that says gallery, this tab that says Gallery. These are descripts built in templates. Layouts. They use the word layouts now. Sorry, layouts. And they got. A lot of. These are in portrait mode you can see. And they say like presentation. So those are more for like a PowerPoint or slides type of thing. These are titles. So those don't do as much good. Verticals. These ones you could use. So you could, you could put your video into these formats. In this case it would put in that text that particular font with these little colorful animations. This one would put that box in there. So these are just different layouts that are available to you. If I click back, there's also this one at the very top that says captioned clips. So if I click on that it'll. If you hover over it, you can get a little preview. So you can see this one has this particular style of text. And again that's. This is the captions that would be put over your video. The, the image that you see is a placeholder. And so if you had multiple speakers, like if this was coming from a remote interview, where in this case you had three speakers, that is what would show up or that is what would happen. The format that this layout would apply to your video, you can even have ones with 4 speakers, etc. As many layers as you have, that gets quite a bit more complicated. It goes into sequences. So I'm going to start with more simple examples. These top ones are just single camera. So these are, these are good to start with. And if I select one and it might, it might actually put that background into our video since I don't have video spanning this entire project. But we'll see what happens here. So that, so you can apply that layout using that whole flow I just showed you. If you wanted to turn it off and completely customize each clip from scratch, you can just toggle that layout option off and you won't even have to worry about all that. And then topic. So if this was a two hour long podcast about Europe, talking about travel stories from Europe, you could for the topic, say, find good standalone stories that would make entertaining shorts, something like that. That's what I often find myself prompting is find stories or points, facts and figures that stand alone on their own. And it'll usually do a pretty good job of pulling those out. So I'll leave that prompt in. Let's see what it does. Let's see what it comes up with. So I'll hit submit and again we're asking it to look for three clips of 20 seconds each and it gives you this kind of loading. Oh, failed to apply layout. That's not good. Let's see what happened with that. But these three boxes are the clips that it came up with. So the way that you read these is this top one in bold is the title that is given it. So it said A taste of France, Butter Air and Pure Delight. That's the name that it gave this clip and it gives you a summary. So this summary is not going to go into the clip, it's just letting you know what it pulled out. This clip captures the speaker's Humorous and vivid reaction to experiencing French culture. It's 22 seconds long and this five star is how good AI thinks this clip is. So we'll, we'll look in a moment if it how good that rating is that self rating and it puts the best one at the top and then in descending order from there. So the next one it calls the the rocket blast of Italian espresso. A first Timer's experience and 18 seconds and 4.7 stars. So notice these aren't exactly 22 second or 20 seconds like I prompted it. It's plus or minus 10 seconds and so that's how you read that moving on Europe's whirlwind and world class roads. This one's 29 seconds and, and gave it 4.5 stars as well. You can give it a layout here. So we gave it a layout in the previous step but if you wanted to change that layout you could click on that and it pulls up this view once again where you can select in the gallery view you can select an existing layout from, from what descripts built in or if you have your own that you put into your drive or into your private then you can find those. These are different categories, different places to store layouts. Then you could go into there and select your, your pre made layouts to actually see these clips. If I just click on it again this is the one called A Taste of France and this is it. So as it that that little notification we got that said it failed to apply the layout. What should have happened is of course this happens while I'm streaming. It fails is it should have put this into a vertical format. It did not do that. So what we can do is manually apply a layout. Well actually let me, let me show you from scratch how to do this manually. So up here in the top left is aspect ratio. So you can see here this top one is landscape. That's the default and that's what is used on YouTube. That's what you're watching me in right now. Below that you have portrait. Portrait is 9 by 16. That is the aspect ratio and that's suitable for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts, et cetera. Below that is square which is good for Instagram Reels, Facebook, LinkedIn, LinkedIn. You can use any of these. But yeah, it just kind of tells you below what, what platform it's best for and then other is where you can set your own. So first of all you can set your resolution 720p all the way up to 4K which will be Your highest resolution. And then you can set a custom height and width here if you want, it defaulted to a 1080p, which is also known as full HD 1080p. And then you can set a frame rate. So depending on what frame rate you're shooting your videos in, you can set that here. Okay, so back to this, this aspect ratio button. We want to change this to portrait. And again, this should have happened automatically with the layout, but for some reason the layout failed on me. So that's why I'm doing this manually. So you can select your image and you can grab the blue edges and just drag it up like so. And let me put in some more stock stuff. Go to stock, say Paris, and there's an Eiffel Tower. Let's put that in there. To zoom in on your timeline, you can hold command on a Mac keyboard while scrolling up, like using a scroll wheel on a computer or control on a Windows. And that's how I was zooming in and out on my timeline like so. Okay, so now I just added some more video to fill out my. My project here. I can drag the corners, drag the edges to resize it, make sure it fits. And if I double click, I enter crop mode and I can actually reposition the image inside of my canvas here. What's showing will actually show in my video. So let's center up the Eiffel Tower so it's a good focal point. I'll hit done. And it looks like that. Okay, and then I can add some captions to this. If I go to captions over here on the right side, click on that. These are different starting points, different layouts of different styles of captions. So I could click on this one, for example, applying captions.

And I walked into a.

Let me get rid of all these notifications here. There's my captions right there. And I can, I can click them, I can move them around.

I walked into a bakery, pointed at a croissant, and I must have looked like a cartoon.

And it's kind of small, so I'm going to click on it. I'm going to type in a number there that's bigger. Let's try 125. So something like that.

I walked into a bakery, pointed at.

A crowd, and we have a. That's kind of the elements of a very, very basic clip. Now I would, I would do a lot more than this. And this goes back to why I was saying, let me pull up my PowerPoint again. A clip versus original content is. It's hard to take this clip and make it really interesting for the low attention span audience, you could add a lot of B roll. If you have like a lot of interesting B roll, then that's, that's one technique you could use to make this more interesting. If you added some really well timed music where if she's telling a story, it's kind of starting slow and then crescendoing right to the, the key moment in the story. If you can do that kind of stuff, that's really helpful. It takes a lot of, a lot of time to, to finesse all that. But that's a really powerful technique. And then captions are kind of universal now on clips. So you'll definitely want to add captions. You'll want to add, you can, you can add different animations to your captions. So if I click on the caption layer right there, I say animation. And then this animation box down here in the bottom right, hit the plus button. You can change how it comes in. So like scale.

For example, I walked into a bakery.

You see that how it pops into the frame, it starts from the background and then just pops in. So little things like that, that make.

It a lot more pointed at, across.

Interesting to look at. And you can also space the, the captions out because sometimes there's too many words on in one place and it might give away the punchline of a joke, for example, or so. So you want to space it out. And the way that you do that is by coming into your transcript. So right now it says the lady just handed it. If I want it to be just the lady showing on that line, I can add a return and notice how it. Let me back up a second. So if I, if I put my cursor right here, click right before the word the lady and hit return. Now it isolates it by changing it here in the transcript, it changes how it shows up here in the clip. So that could be really important in controlling the effect of. The main example I can think of is what I just said about, you know, not revealing a punchline too soon in the caption. So you could space your, your transcript out in that way. Okay, so what else? Let's see, let's take a look at our other ones. So now notice on these ones, our layout did in fact work. So on our previous one, I had to do all of that changing the aspect ratio and finessing it to make it work this time on this second clip. And by the way, let me explain how I got here. So right here if. Let Me make sure this is in the. In the stream. Let me adjust my window. So right here there's this thing that says Untitled Project. I'm not sure that's. Still not sure that's in it. Okay. Untitled Project is the name of the. Our project. And the project is like a folder inside of this project. I'm inside of a composition called the Rocket Blast of Italian Espresso. A first timer's experience. If I click on that, I get this dropdown. And these are all of the compositions inside of the project called Untitled Project. The first one that I just clicked on, called Untitled, is our source video. This was the one that we pulled the clip from. This was the one I generated with AI and put stock video over. So then when I generated the clips with Underlord, it created a folder called Clips from Untitled. And it has this little toggle. So you can. You can toggle it open or closed. And then inside of there are the three clips that we generated. We looked at the first one called A Taste of France, Butter Air and Pure Delight. And then back to Compositions, we go to the next one, the Rocket Blast of Italian Espresso. A first timer's experience. So again, remember, Underlord made that title. Okay, so this one, the layout actually worked correctly. It put it into portrait mode, which is this taller version, tall and short on the sides. And if we look in the timeline, you can see the layers that were included as part of this layout. So there's a title. A title layer. That's what's down here that's currently says Show Name. And with all of these with layouts, they're placeholders. So I could click in there and I could change it to Descript Mastery show, for example. And I could also change the font. I could change the weight, the size, the color, all that normal stuff that you could do in other editing softwares. And so that was the title layer. There's a captions layer above it. And the captions are what will read our transcript. So there we go. This one currently has. Is putting an orange background behind the words. It's got that karaoke effect where the currently. The current. The word currently being spoken has that orange background so that the viewer can track along with what's being said. Um, it's in the middle of the thing, which I don't love. I'd probably put it more at the bottom. And one note on that, on positioning of text is be careful with social media. There's what's called the danger zone, which is, if you think about this as Your phone screen. Like, let's pretend you're watching this clip on your phone. You're going to have stuff across the bottom and stuff right here. If you can see where my mouse is, you're going to have like the share button, the comment button, the description button. So it's called the danger zone because you don't want to put any key elements of your video in those areas. So if I put my text way down here, it might look fine in the editing process and it might even look normal. Like you would see, you know, closed Captions on a YouTube video on the bottom of the screen. But when someone's watching this on their mobile device, those buttons are going to be covering up the text and they're not gonna be able to see it. So just be mindful of that. Don't put anything on the very bottom or on the bottom right corner. Bottom right. Let's call it about half to a third over here. And you'll get a lot better results now. So for that reason, I would. I would delete this. That it doesn't add anything to, say, Descript Mastery Show. So I'm just going to delete that layer. I just selected it and pressed delete. Now, notice there is this black gradient. That is our next layer. So that was part of the layout it came in. It's called gradient_01.png. That's the file. And this throws a lot of people off because. Let me show you. Okay, actually, before I get into that, let me go into what's behind that. This image of like a photo and a play button. So that is what's called the placeholder layer. This is something that descript just added recently and it's changed how layouts work. So what I can do with this is because this got added as part of my layout, I can right click on it, say replace media, and I can add a file of my own. I can insert a project file, which is if I've already brought in files into this project, like off of my computer, or even the stock media that I've already used, then I'll be able to select that using this. I can record something original with this record button. I can add stock media. I can generate an image using Dolly, or I could add a video from YouTube using a link. I'm going to just do stock media. Why not? Let's do stock media and let's type in podcast guest, something like that. And let's find one that we like. Like, let's do this. I just clicked on it to add it. And what this is doing. Notice that that placeholder layer is pulsing blue. So it just got replaced by the video that I chose. So I know that's it's kind of a complicated thing and I don't expect that after seeing it once, it probably make any sense. But anyways, check out my course if you want to go deeper into that or if you have any specific questions, you can ask it in the chat. But anyways, I just wanted to expose you to that for now. That was the placeholder layer. So now that we have that, that in here, young female radio host, recording podcast with guests and Bright Studio, what I see a lot of people try to do is they apply these layouts and, and they're like, okay, I need to slide her to the right, but what the heck, it's only moving the gradient layer. I want to move her, not the gradient layer. So what's happening is if I come to scene, I click on scene down here in the layers, you see that I have my gradient layer. Well, these are in order from top to bottom. So my captions are showing above everything else. Behind that is my gradient layer, which is this layer that has, has the black gradient at the bottom and it fades up to, to no, no darkness at the top. And then the video is underneath. So when I'm trying to slide it around, I'm actually grabbing the layer above it, which is the gradient layer. So to fix that, there's this little lock right here, so I can click on that. And now when I try to select something, I'm actually selecting her. The gradient layer is locked, so I can no longer select it. It's fixed in place and if I want to later move it, I can simply unlock it. And now I can move the gradient once again. So super important concept to understand, especially when you're using descripts built in layouts, because I've seen that throw a lot of people off. So now that it's locked, I can double click on her to enter crop and pan mode and I can slide her over so that she's the center focal point of my video. I click done, and there she is. Now we could pretend like she's the one telling this story, narrating this whole thing.

Yeah, let's talk about Italy. Yes, the land of pizza and hand gestures. I had my first espresso shot right there.

That's actually perfect that she's taking a sip of coffee while she's telling a story about an espresso shot. So yeah, now we have a 80% solution for our clip. You know, the basic elements of working with the layers of replacing the placeholder layer and navigating this whole file structure. Okay. And please let me know if there's any questions as we go so far. No question. So I've. I've just been running my mouth. Okay. I guess we can talk about audio real quick. So we, as you. We know we converted this or we made this from text to speech. So it's generated by AI. I need to hit this, convert to audio, and that will make it so that I can actually edit this audio. And then from there, with this layer selected, my audio layer, I know it's selected because it's blue. I come over and click this layer button and I can change the audio levels here. So I could make it. It defaults to 100%, by the way. This is another recent change. Descript used to have decibels here, so you would type in like a positive number of decibels or a negative number. Now it starts at 100% and then you can either raise it above 100% to make it louder. And you can see when I did that, it also made the sound waves bigger down here. Or you can make it a number below 100%, but you can no longer go negative. It just goes to zero percent. So it's a lot more intuitive for people who aren't used to working in decibels. And if I want to mute it, like, maybe I just want the captions, but I don't want her voice. I just want some music playing. I can mute that layer by by clicking on that little speaker. And that applies for all audio layers. So most things that I'm talking about today are universally applicable. It's not just for social media clips. Okay. So the next thing I would do to really make this a lot better as a. As a clip is coming back to stock media. Come to audio. So everything we've used so far has been under visual, but there is another tab right here that says audio. And this is where all of descripts sound effects and Music Live. So you can click on. And I've had so many people ask me where. What do you recommend for stock media? Like, what do you subscribe to? The answer is I don't. I subscribe to descript. It's all here. They got thousands and thousands of tracks, thousands and thousands of sound effects. And if you didn't know that, it's probably because you didn't know. There's a show all button right here. And you can scroll through and see all sorts of stuff in their library. So highly recommend it. You're already paying for it. It's all there. And so you can search by tags. So let me just type in. Talking about Italy. I'll type in Italian. And here is some stuff it came up with. It's got a name. So Old Piano. In the name of this top line, it tells you how long it is. 2 minutes and 3 seconds. And our whole project, this whole clip is only 23 and a half seconds. But that's no problem because if I insert anything that's longer, it'll just cut off as soon as the clip ends. So let's just. Let's see how these sound. I can hit this play button and I could preview it. Love it. That's super Italian. So I'm going to hit this plus button importing audio that's going to put it into my project. And there it is. So it's called Old Piano and it's this green sound layer. Sound is always green. Other layers, like video and captions are green gray like this. And so let's. Let's check this out with our music added. Awesome. So that, that goes a long ways for helping the. The ambiance of this whole clip. And then since I muted the. I won't show you that because I already muted the audio. I could add sound effects. I'm doing an episode or a YouTube video about sound effects because they're so important. Like when they're talking about when she's taking a sip of her coffee, for example, you could add. Let's see if there's a sipping sound effect. Sipping hot tea from mug, something like that. And then you can add it and it just adds a little bit more texture to your video. So highly recommend, where possible, adding sound effects to just make your videos that much more interesting. And you can add that as part of your layout. So I also covered this in my recent video about layouts. But the easiest way to make a layout, like let's say that everything I've just made in this clip is something that I want to use for all of my clips going forward then. Or it doesn't even have to be for all of my clips, but I just want to use it again. Then what I can do is right click on the scene thumbnail up here in the top left and I can say save layout, create new template. And then I could save this so that I could use it at the. Let me go back to it when I go back to Underlord right here I could select my layout that I just saved and then my future clips will already be done. The music will be added, the, the gradient will be added, the. It'll add everything that I need in order to make this a workable clip. Okay, so what else can I do with that from there? I mean I would, I would tighten it up. This is actually probably what I would have done first is just tighten it up. So clips tend to be very fast paced. So you want to get rid of, aggressively get rid of filler words. You want to get rid of gaps. Like if there's a long gap in her thinking, you'd want to cover that up by just grabbing words, shortening it up. And yeah, you just want to make it as interesting as possible. Get rid of all the fluff I'm talking about editorially here and just make it, make it very interesting. Oh, one thing with the music is I mentioned how this is a two minute track on a 23 second clip. So it's going to abruptly cut off. If you see the sound wave. It kind of just hits a wall right there where it ends. That's not going to sound very good. So what we could do is we could fade it out. There's this little white dot right here. I could grab that, drag it to the left and that'll create a. It'll gradually fade out the audio over the course of two seconds. Sounds much better, much more natural. You could add some sort of end screen like so you could add a slash right here, forward slash. And I now have a scene two, scene two. And it's just a blank five seconds. And I could do something like going to Elements Text. And if I was trying to get somebody to subscribe to my newsletter, I could say um, click the link in the description to subscribe to the Europe newsletter. That's super wordy, but you get the idea. You could have a call to action in your video or at the end and so it, it cuts out of the main part of the clip and then goes into this. And by the way, in something like YouTube shorts there is a bridge, there's a link that you can place in YouTube studio that links your short video to the long video. So you could say something like to see the rest of this conversation if it's a podcast, then click the link in the at the bottom of the page to go see the full video. And I was mentioning at the very top whether or not shorts should be part of your strategy is those have a very low click through rate. It's very hard to get people from short videos to long videos. They're just different audiences, different tastes. And so it's very difficult to do that in a natural and high converting way. The click through rates are very low even on very successful channels. So take that for what it's worth. Experiment with it, with everything, question everything, experiment with it all, try it all. But. And your audience can be very different than my audience. So there is no universal advice which makes us all, you know, makes it hard to give prescriptive advice on anything. But. But that is my. My personal findings after running Shorts for quite a while. Okay, any questions in the last few minutes here about anything that I've covered? I think we got through. Oh, I didn't even get to publish. I was all mostly on Repurpose. We can talk about publish real quick. Also want to shout out. I have my Descript Mastery course. There's a QR code there you can point your. Your phone at and learn more about that. It's. I also do group coaching. So this call calls like this I do twice a week and you can get on a zoom call with me and I can answer questions about Descript, about gear. We had a call right before this one for my community and we talked about cameras and teleprompters and stuff like that. And so yeah, highly recommend if that is of interest. Check out the Descript Mastery school. Okay. The publish section. So back to Underlord. You can have it draft a title, which it already did for us. When we put these into the clips. It made a title for us. This one was called the Rocket Blast of Italian Espresso. But I can say draft a title and. And as before, I can leave more specific instructions to tell the AI what I'm looking for. Or it's an op. It's optional, so I can hit submit without putting anything in there. And here's what it came up with. I don't like. Whenever I see something with colons like that, like somebody's YouTube title, I'm like, oh, they use AI. That's obviously AI. Cause they always do this. So you could. What I sometimes do is get inspiration from these. Like my caffeinated awakening in Rome. That sounds. That's kind of cool. So I might use just that. But I don't like these. These very obvious AI when they're taken in their hole. So that was drafted title. You can summarize by clicking on the summarize button. Hit submit and it just generates a couple sentences. The script humorously describes a visit to Italy, focusing on the Intense energy from espresso sh and the daring locals navigating traffic on scooters, likening these experiences to Italian cultural highlights. So you could use that somewhere, you know, if you posted it onto LinkedIn or something. Although I'll get to that in a moment. There's. There's another way to do that. You can draft show notes. If this is going on to a podcast, you can have a draft show notes for you. And that'll include timestamps. I'll show you that real quick. So these timestamps right there, if when you copy this and you post this onto your podcast or your YouTube video, that'll create those skippable chapters so that your viewers can quickly navigate around to interesting parts of the video and YouTube description. Exactly what it sounds like. Very similar to show notes. These are just more tailored to the YouTube style. And you could draft it based off of. Off the script here, Draft a social post. You can choose whether this is going to go to a social network or I mentioned LinkedIn, a professional network. And then you can say how many you want it to create how many social posts. And let me show you what this comes up with. There's option 1, 2, and 3. And so you could copy this and paste that into a tweet, into Facebook post whatever you want along with the description or the link to your video. And that's just one more way that this is super useful. And then finally, the last one is a blog post. So as always, you can choose an example, give it a example of the writing style you want to use and any custom instructions, hit submit, and there we go. And the cool thing about this is, first of all, it gives you a title, it gives you sections. So it says introduction, Embracing the Italian experience. And it makes it bold, makes it a little bit bigger. And so you could copy this and put this into your blog. You could start creating content on your website using AI. And as with the titles, as with everything, I don't recommend just copy this and paste it in because the AI is AI. It makes mistakes. It does some. Makes some weird word choices. So I would review this, I would read it, read what you're publishing and, you know, make sure that it's. It's up to the quality standard that you have for your brand. Okay, so that is it for the publish section. Let me come back on. Where is my. There it is. All right, coming back on in the last minute here. I should have had this more set up my obs, but here I am. So thank you for joining. I really appreciate it again. DescriptMastery.com Check out the Descript Mastery School. I do group coaching twice a week. There's also a course that is at your own pace so you can go through and learn all of the features in Descript. You can learn all the stuff we covered today. You can learn how to make your own layouts and yeah, thank you so much for joining and see you next time.