Descript's new Underlord AI editing tool lets you edit video by talking to it. The speaker recommends duplicating your project first, using conversational prompts, and practicing often, but warns the beta is unreliable. He predicts video editing will be conversational within two years.
June 2025.
The entire month of June 2025.
June 2027 (24 months from June 2025).
Something monumental has happened in the world of video editing in the last few days. I'm talking about Descript releasing their new version of Underlord. Over the last five days, I've had dozens of students I've done tutoring with in the past reach out to me about getting up to speed on best practices with Underlord. I want to share a few best practices on how I've been using it and stick around because I have some predictions on where this is all heading in the coming months. My first piece of advice is that, remember, it's in beta, it's not perfect, and in fact it's really unpredictable. It will tell you it's completed a task, but actually it hasn't done it at all. And there's a lot of things that it still can't do at all. So I tell you that because there's been a few projects where I spend more time undoing what it did than it would have taken me to just edit it myself in the first place. So my first tip to you is I recommend that you duplicate any compositions you plan to experiment with Underlord in, and then do all of your Underlord editing in that duplicate. And then if there are some scenes you like that Underlord made, you can copy that layout and then paste that layout into your final version, your human edited version in a separate composition. My second piece of advice is to speak to it like it's a human editor. You were giving it instructions in plain English, so write to it like you would write an email to your freelance editor. And the workflow I've settled on is what I call the pyramid method. So imagine you have a pyramid down here. At the bottom you have your base. You start with your first prompt. In your first prompt, be very general. Try giving it a vague prompt. That gives it a lot of room for interpretation and see what it does. So I'll say something like, do whatever you think this video needs to look and sound great. And that's another tip for you, by the way, is give it a result in your prompt. So how do you want it to look? Or what's the desired end state? And then depending on the length of the video, it might spend five to 15 minutes going through and doing a ton of stuff to my video. It'll clean the script, it'll apply studio sound, it'll add text and B roll and do all sorts of stuff. Once it's done with that first pass, I'll move my way up the pyramid to a more specific prompt. So my next prompt might be there are long sections with no changes in the scene. So make sure that the scene is changing every 30 seconds, whether that means adding more B roll or titles and then moving further up the pyramid to even more specific prompts. I might say go through this video and change every instance of text that it's already added to the font. Bay, Bass, New Montserrat, whatever font you like to use. And it'll do that. And I'll repeat that, giving it more and more specific prompts as I ascend my metaphorical pyramid. My third tip for you is to just practice with it at first. You're not going to like the results. I didn't. I definitely didn't. But the more I've used it, the better and the faster I've gotten with it. Just like anything, it's a skill. And the video you're watching right now was edited using my pyramid prompting method and underlord. With that said, it's June 2025 as I record this. And descript has made this feature free for the entire month of June. So get in there and go crazy with it, experiment with it. Come up with a workflow that works for you and your videos and, and speed up your editing forever from this point forward. And that brings me to my prediction on where this is all heading. I think when I'm talking to you In June of 2027, 24 months from now, video editing is almost entirely a conversation. What do I mean? You're going to tell descript I want my videos to be edited like fill in the blank diary of a CEO and it'll do that for you. And likely there will even be a voice input field. So it'll literally be a conversation. You're just going to be speaking to it and it's going to edit your video. So remember, this is version 0 of this tool. It's just going to get faster and better from here. And if you'd like my help learning it, check out the Descript Mastery School, my program with three times per week group coaching that will get you creating professional looking videos fast. Link is in the description.
