Applying Templates - Descript Tutorial

Templates in Descript are confusing. I get it. Today I'm going to try to unpack those and teach you how to apply them so that they make a little bit more sense. So the first thing is you can think of templates as like a package, a container of layers. So what I mean by that is let's go into our templates and I'm going to start off by using descripts templates because everyone watching this will have those available to you. And you do that by going to the templates button in the top of your screen. You go to gallery and these are descript's built in templates. And from this view you can think of these as folders of templates. So if I click on this first top left one that says titles, click on that. I have a bunch of different titles inside of here. And if I click on one of these, that will apply the template to my project. So let's say I want to apply this one, the social lower thirds. I'm going to go ahead and click on that and it applies it. And remember what I said about this being a container of layers. So look down on my timeline, this is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 different layers. And I can make this bigger. And you can see that it's a, a variety of different types of layers. There are rectangles, there are PNGs. So those are photos. And there's, you can see this T here that's telling me that that's a title layer and that, that'll be the at sign that you put in those social handles. So that template was a package of layers and they're, they're spaced differently. So you can see that the title layer starts a fraction of a second after those images and after those rectangles. So everything is timed differently in terms of how it'll appear, how it's being animated and popping onto your screen. Hopefully that helps start to make sense what animations are and when. They're not just a package of layers like this, they can also be properties that apply to layers. So for example, you can have a template that is a zoom. In that case it's not a layer, but it's something that happens to a layer. I'm going to apply a few more and hopefully this will make a little bit more sense. I'm going to create a new scene at the end here by hitting slash. And I'm just doing that to keep things organized and consistent. Go to templates. So this was our template, our titles folder. If I Go back there. I'm going to go back to gallery. There's also captions ones, and you can see these are in different orientations as well. So this one's portrait mode. And I'm going to go ahead and apply this so you can see what would happen when I try to apply this. So these are captions, and if I click on applies it. But I get this notification that says template and composition have different orientations. And so I'm. My video project is in landscape, but this template is for a portrait aspect ratio. So if I hit match orientation, it converts my project, including the first scene, to portrait mode, which may or may not be what I want. But I at least want to point that out because I'm just showing you a variety of different templates and what happens when you apply them. Okay, so that's changing aspect ratio. Let's go back to our gallery. We'll go back gallery and we could apply a title. And once again, these are in landscape format. So when I try to apply this, it's going to want me to change from portrait mode that I just did. I just converted my project to portrait back to landscape. And it's going to convert all the scenes of my project back to landscape. Let me go ahead and pick one. I'll do this one right here. Nice and colorful. I click on it and it's applied. And there's my template composition orientations toast. I'll click match orientation. And now it's matched. And actually let me undo that. You see, when I. When it's still in portrait mode, it'll just add black bars on the top and bottom. And the important thing, the reason I point that out is these are layers, as I said. I could just simply click on this and I could say position fill canvas to make that fill the entire portrait frame. But I'm gonna undo that. And let's switch this to landscape. So I'm gonna go to my aspect ratio landscape. And there it is. Okay. And this one is only two layers. It's this image, this colorful. Let me see. Was it. Yeah, it's a video. So it's got. It's got movement to it. Let's see what it's called. Vivid and fluid color 4K video animation. So that one's just a video layer with a title layer. And then this title layer, obviously it says your title here. So you could click on it and say, this is my template. And so it's all editable. And that's the whole point of templates, is you create something once that you plan to use often in your projects. This could be an intro to your YouTube channel. This could be a title screen or a, you know, like a Lower thirds title where it says your name and your position, which I'm going to show you next. It could be anything. But then each time you just change the elements that you need to, to customize it to your, your particular use case. So I'll go back to templates, I'll go back to gallery and this time we're going to do titles. So back to titles. And then here's the lower thirds that I mentioned. So you got a couple options. There's basic Lower thirds titles and again these are descripts templates. So if you're on the Creator Pro plan, you can use these tech lower thirds and modern lower thirds. So let's do modern lower thirds. And we can see in our timeline it's three layers. There's one called Subtitle, there's one called Rectangle, and there's one called Secondary subtitle. And if I zoom in even further, you can see this little gray line on the layer that's telling me that some sort of animation has been applied to that layer. And so if I wanted to edit that animation and I've done videos on animations before as well as I go into it in my course, so you can check those out. But if I scroll down in my properties with a layer selected, there's the animations effects, so I can click on these dots, I can scroll down and then you see on my timeline those two keyframes, that is what's happening in this animation. The first keyframe is what this layer is gonna look like at that keyframe. The second keyframe is where that layer is going to end up. So it happens between key keyframe 1 and keyframe 2. That morph, that transition is our animation. And in this case that's for the one titled Secondary subtitle. So let's see what that looks like. Hit play. So it's like a pop down and fade in. So that right there. So the way that you could use this is right where it says subtitle. I could put in for example Descript Mastery and then the subtitle could say, could say my name or vice versa. I could have done that in reverse, probably would have made more sense. You get the idea that could be your template that you put at the beginning of all your videos. So people know who you are, they know who your company is and they know what your position is. There it is. Looks Cool. Now I'm going to have one more scene. We're going to keep going. So those are. Let's. So back to Descripts gallery here. We can even do slides. This one's an interesting one. This one called Strong slide. I'm going to add that. And if I click play. There we go. We got 1, 2, let me make it bigger. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 slides. The first one is just a number one with. Let's see what this font is. Fair Play display. And it fades in. So they just added a simple fade to that. And then the other ones are animated where they pop up one line at a time. And it's just lorem ipsum generic text like that. And so you could customize each of these to be a quote. You could put in a quote there. This could be, you know, something that you're saying. It could. As you're talking, it switches to this scene, pops up quotes to just add interesting textual visual B roll. So that's one use for this. But the important thing is you see those gray lines once again on the top of each of these layers. That's telling me that those are animations and those are what you saw where the word flips up onto the screen as presumably the speaker is saying it. But then, of course, I think you get the point by now. But just to. To drive the point home, you could change any of these. So if you wanted to change the font, you could do that. If you wanted to change the color, you could do that. These are just normal layers that are editable, just like anything else in Descript. So now my one is red and my blue or my last layer is blue. And this doesn't change my template. My template remains the. The first thing that I applied. That container of layers that I originally applied, I'm going to add one more scene and let's keep. For this last one, I'm going to do just one of my custom, my custom templates. And these are all, by the way, all my templates are available for free on my website, which I will put right here, descriptmastery.com templates and you can get a lot of the templates I'm about to show you for free. You can order custom ones. I've made dozens of templates for clients. You know, just YouTube intros, title screens, all sorts of things that if you just don't want to do it yourself, you want professional to do it. That's what I'm here for. And then the third thing I offer is a templates Masterclass. It's a short 40 minute class that'll teach you how to actually make these templates. So all of that is on descriptmastery.com templates and this is one of the packs I have available for free. And this is the pack I use on this channel, I use on my course everywhere. And I just have them very descriptively labeled. So there's like hotkey bottom left, and if I apply that, it looks like this. So there's a layer with a rectangle that slides out. There's the hotkey, which is this one here. And of course I would just change it so I could say like shift +L and then that would be the hotkey. The idea is, as I'm teaching something in descript, I, I mentioned a hotkey, it would pop up like this and then there's a sound effect as well included with this template, that little green thing right there. So it's like a clicking sound and then there's an ice skater in the background. But that doesn't matter because when I apply this template, whatever my script layer is, presumably it's me talking like I am right now or showing my screen, it'll replace the script layer in the template. So that's another very important thing to know with applying templates is if there is another script layer there, it'll replace the one that's in the template. Okay, I'm gonna add one more layer. I'm back in my Descript Mastery template folder. And again, this is available for free for download if you wanted to use my exact ones. And then I also have these arrows. So I have arrow one, arrow two, arrow three, arrow four. And these are descript arrows. These are, these are built in, you can use them for free. But I made different ones because they're angled at different positions. So some are pointing up, some are pointing down, some are pointing left, et cetera. That's why I have so many. And the, the thumbnail isn't loading. That's why you see those gray lines across the screen. But normally there would be a little preview of the template. I don't know why it's not working right now. And then I have Screen record zooms. I have labeled them very descriptively. Screen record zoom, 10% middle. So if I'm showing the screen recording, this is going to zoom in 10% into the middle of that screen. The next one is the same thing, but it'll zoom to the left side of the screen and so on. You get the idea. There's 20% middle, 20% left, 30% middle, 30% right, et cetera. And then webcam, this is what I have applied right now as I'm talking to you. This automatically applied green screen to my webcam so that you only see my silhouette down here in the bottom left corner. And this is my bottom left webcam template. And then I have one for bottom right. I have one for sound effects. So there's mouse click, single mouse click, double click, frantic click. And so these are just things that I use often. Like when I'm giving a Descript tutorial, I use these to aid and help help the viewer understand. Like, oh, I just click there. Oh, I just hit my keyboard. Keyboard click, single keyboard click, typing. And those come once again from descripts Library. But I've made them into templates so that they're just that much easier and quicker for me to find. And then I have the title intro, which you saw at the beginning of this video that you're watching right now. That one right there, it's got that animation where the white background zooms in. And then it's got my logo and our motto. And back to the templates. What else? I'm just giving you ideas here. Obviously, you can make whatever is appropriate for your brand for your channel. And I have different ones. So there's. There's the intro title that you just saw, the centered lower third one. There's an intro side where it comes out from the side on the bottom left. And then I have my Outro, which you're about to see. And then a couple more sound effects, intro, zoom out. So lots of ideas. You can do pretty much anything with templates. And it really is the key to being super fast, super consistent. If you want to go deeper or you want me to make templates for you. DescriptMastery.com Templates Cue the Outro SA.