Demystifying Descript Projects, Compositions, and Scenes

One of the things I see descript users struggle with the most is simply a lack of understanding about the project structure. What is the project structure? I'm talking about projects, compositions, scenes, how things break down. In descript, it comes down to terminology, but it's a lot more than that. So join me in descript and I'll show you how this works. This first page, when you first log into descript, this is your drive view. This is where all of your projects live. You have a Projects folder, you have a workspace folder. Everything lives under the drive that you signed up for descript for. In my case, it's called the descript Mastery Drive. Usually it defaults to your first name apostrophe S drive. Within your drive, you store projects. So projects are the basic unit of descript. When you come up to the top right corner here, it says New Project. You click on that and you have a choice of a video project or an audio project. I'm going to do a video project. And as soon as you click on it, it says Opening Project. And I'm now inside of a blank project. Now, inside of a project, I can add files, I can upload files, I can drag and drop files into here, I can import things from my phone, from Zoom, etc. But this right here is actually a composition. Now, I know that's a little bit confusing, but each thing that gets exported, if I go to the export button in the top right corner and I hit Export, it's actually going to export the current composition, that is the standalone unit that gets exported. So what does that mean? So this is called Untitled Project. And then in here, I'm going to call this Composition one. When I label it Composition one, my project becomes called Composition one. If I click on this little arrow right here, this is a list of all of the compositions inside of my project. Again, right now, it's just one Composition one. But if I click on this button that says New Composition, now, I have a new blank Composition, I'll call this Composition two. And now if I click the dropdown, I have Composition one and Composition two. And then I can change this and I can say call it Project. So up here in the top middle, everything on the left of that forward slash is the project name. Everything on the right is the Composition name. I click that dropdown, Composition one. I click on it, and I switch into it. Drop, click that dropdown, click on Composition two. I'm now in Composition two. Now, let me show you this in another way that might make this make a little Bit more sense. If I click on new project, I go to video project again, let's say I'm making a course. This is just another example, another way that you could use this. I'm going to call this lesson one. So my first composition can be my first lesson. I'm going to click the dropdown, create a new composition and then I'm going to create a lesson two and I'm going to create a lesson three and then I'm going to click on. Remember, left of the slash is the project name. So I'm going to change my project to be called module one. So now inside of the project called module one I have lessons one, two and three. So then for example I could go to lesson one, I could hit the record button, record lesson one, go to lesson two, record lesson two, and so on like that. One thing people ask me all the time about descript is how do I take project. How do I take files from one project and transfer it to another project? Well, you can't. There's no way to do that outside of downloading it to your computer and then re uploading it to the other project or copying and pasting it from one project to other. There's no just move a file from one project to another. So that is why you use compositions. Because these compositions 1, 2 and 3, they will share all of the project files under this umbrella of module one. So if I add something in here, let me just add an image for example. So I'm dragging, I'm dragging a file into my project files. I drop it in and I'm inside of lesson one and I could reference that file, I could drop it in. There it is, I could switch to lesson two. You see, I still have access to it. I can drop it in. And so every single composition inside of a project shares the project files, which is a big advantage of using compositions. If I go back to the export button and I go to. I'm under local export right now. So I'm going to. This would be downloading the finished video to my computer and then I under export options. It's currently going to download the current composition, but I could also come down here and say all compositions. And if I click that and export, it's going to download all three of these lessons at once. And then I could take those and bulk upload them to my course platform. So to show this visually, here is your biggest unit. It's the project, it's created when you click the new project button. Beyond that you have inside of a Project one, at least one composition, and up to as many as you want. The next unit down from a composition is the scene. And I'm going to talk about the scenes in a moment. Now, one thing about the compositions is you can make as many as you want. I'm not aware of a limit to how many compositions you can create. But with that said, I have had projects get corrupted when they get too large. And you will also get a warning. A little notification will pop up and say, warning, this is a large project. Consider splitting it up into smaller compositions. And so I've had happen where one of the compositions inside of a project gets corrupted and then I lose that whole project. It won't. It won't open anymore. So I don't say that to scare you, but rather consider as a rule of thumb, I just don't usually put more than 10 compositions inside of a single project. Just be aware of that. And the next smaller unit than a composition is a scene. What are scenes? There's a lot of confusion about how to use them, when to use them, but I'll break that down for you right now. So my general rule of thumb when deciding if you need a scene or not is. Is the visual changing. So in this case, I have this picture of myself and it's playing for six seconds and then it's ending. That's my entire video right now. But if I want at the end of that six seconds for this image to turn into something different, then what I can do is click this plus button right here, and that's going to add a scene at the end of the current scene, my one and only scene. And it first prompts me to put in a layout. And if you don't know what layouts are, click the button in the top right corner of your YouTube window, which is a popular video of mine showing how to use layouts. But if we don't want to use layouts, then we simply click away, click outside of that box and it'll close that window. What I'm going to do in scene two is drag in an image like this, dragging in stock media. And if I hover over this image over here on the right side, I can see that it's 1.7 minutes long. So it automatically expanded that scene. The scene was five seconds by default when it's a blank scene, but by dropping that image in, it expands to fit the entirety of that video that I put in. Now, of course, I could trim it, I could cut it up, make it shorter, do whatever I want with It. But, but the important thing here is that the visual was changing between scene one and scene two. Now why does that matter? Well, because scene two is completely different than scene one. I might have different needs for this. I might need to zoom in on scene two. So if I. If I click on this 100% above the image and I type in 200% and it zooms way in. Cause maybe I'm trying to show this, this icy path on this mountain. Well, I only want that to apply to this image. I don't want it to apply to my scene one image, because that's a totally different thing. So you see that if I go Back to scene one, it's still in the original 100% zoom. So scenes are how you split up your project so that whatever you do in that scene won't affect the rest of your video. So again, scenes are the smaller unit of a single composition. Now, inside of scenes, we can break it down even further into clips. So clips are the smallest unit we have in descript. And I'll show you how we use those. So if I take my minute and seven second or 42 second long video here, so I select this layer just anywhere, it doesn't matter for the sake of demonstration. And I click on this split button right here, I just split that entire minute and 42 video clips into two pieces. So if you notice, the right side is highlighted in blue, and if I click on the left side, it's now highlighted in blue. So each small piece that I can select in descript is a clip. So this is a clip, and this is a clip. Now, why does it matter? Well, I could select this clip, the one that's currently highlighted in blue, and I could, for example, press delete on my keyboard and it deletes just that clip. I'm gonna hit undo. I could also, with that clip selected, go to layer and I could change the opacity of that clip. I could change how fast that clip plays back with this 1x, I could change it to 2x half x, et cetera. But now this clip is a separate unit from this other clip inside of the same scene. I know it's a lot to take in and it's confusing when you're first exposed to it all. But watch this video a second time, then watch it a third time if you need, and I promise it'll all click. Go through it in your own projects, try it out. Try making scenes make multiple compositions, and you'll start to understand how it works. And you'll start to understand how you can use these in your own projects. On that note, if you're looking to create and publish your very first video to YouTube, check out the youe First Video Challenge linked in the description below. It's a week long cohort where I take you from never having used Descript before to publishing your very first video. I hope to see you there.