Descript Crash Course For Beginners (2024 Tutorial)

Go ahead and open up descript on your computer and meet me in the software. When you first open descript, you get this view. This is called your Drive view, and this is where you can see all of your projects. So the first thing we need to do is open up a new project by clicking on this button that says New Project. Up here in the top right of your drive, you'll see this dropdown with different options. We are going to edit a video today, so go ahead and click on Video Project that first one. And we're now inside of a blank project. This first thing at the top that says Name your creation is where you can give your project a name. But before I go any further, a quick note on everything I'm about to show you. I am on the creator plan, which is one of descript's paid plans. If you're on the free plan, you're going to have some limitations that I do not mostly related to AI usage, but you'll still be able to follow along and do everything that I show you. Also, I am on a Mac computer in light mode. If you're on Windows, everything will look and work the same. But the biggest difference is that some of the keyboard shortcuts are going to be different, and I'll call those out as we go. Lastly, I'm making this in September 2024, and this is version 97 of descript. And this software updates very frequently. So if things look different, just know that there may have been some changes since I recorded this. And feel free to browse through my YouTube library to see if I have anything more recent. Okay, pressing on with descript. So to familiarize you with what you're looking at here, over here on the left side, where this number one is in the top left, this is where your thumbnail, your scene thumbnails are going to go. I'm going to explain scenes in a moment, but for now, just know that there's going to be a little thumbnail here marking each scene in the middle. This is where your transcript is going to go. Descript automatically transcribes your video, so your video or your audio. So when you upload it, it's going to automatically turn it into text on the screen. And that's how we can edit our video, like a document in description. Over here on your right is a display of what is in your video, how your video looks at a certain moment in time. And this is called your canvas. And then over here on the right is all of your property bars. So you have underlord which is all your AI stuff. You have your Projects file, and then everything else I'm going to explain as we go down here. We don't have it yet, but this is where your timeline is going to be. Once you add something to your project, you'll be able to click this Show Timeline button, and that's how you'll be able to see your timeline. Up here in the top left corner, this little home button that'll take you back to your drive view like this. And there's the untitled project, the one I just started, so I'm going to click on that again. And you have your Settings dropdown. You have all different File Edit, where you can undo and redo, copy, cut, paste, all that kind of stuff. You have a Settings button right there where you can go into your descript settings. And then over here in the middle, this is going to be your project name. Over here in the top right is a Publish button where you can push this out to the Internet somewhere or export the video to your computer's hard drive. And then right to the left of that is who has access to this project. So if you're sharing this project with some team members, or maybe you have an editor, this is where you could invite people. But that is a basic familiarity with the ui. We're going to go much deeper as we go. In order to get the most out of the rest of this tutorial, you need to have something to work with. So if you already have some video, some RAW video that you've shot from something else, that's perfect, bring that in. I'm going to show you in a moment how to import that and start working with it. If you don't have something to work with, I'm going to assign you something right now. We're going to use descript's recorder to record yourself speaking for three to five minutes and talk about anything. Talk about your favorite hobby, talk about your pet, talk about your hometown. It doesn't matter. No one needs to see it. But talk about that for a few minutes and don't script it. Talk off the cuff, because you're going to have lots of filler words, you're going to have lots of pauses, there's going to be imperfect lighting, all that kind of stuff. And we're going to edit that in descript. Okay, let's go back to the software. There's two different options you can take here. You can record yourself speaking, which I'm going to show you first, or. Or you can add a RAW file that you already have. Maybe it's something you took on your cell phone or some file that you have, a zoom call. Whatever it is, you can use that for this tutorial. But I'm gonna start by showing you the record option. So there's the record button right here from the opening page of your brand new blank project, or there's a record button here. Both will take you to the same place. So if I click on that, it opens up here on the right side and you can see there's a little preview of my webcam, there is a little sound bar bouncing up and down and I can change here the camera that I'm using. So right now it's my default built in laptop camera, the FaceTime HD camera. And if you had other ones, like you had an external webcam or a camera plugged in, you could select that here or you could select no camera. And you're doing audio only now. And you can see your sound waves when you're in audio only. And then you can choose which microphone. So I have a bunch of different microphones here, including the built in one, which is the one that it's using by default. But just select your microphone and that's what you're going to use for this recording. And if you wanted, this is where you would turn on a screen share if you were showing something on your computer. But we're not doing that right now, so I'm going to skip over that. So go ahead in your project, hit that record into script button. And as soon as you do so it's going to start recording. You can see that it's counting up. That's letting me know that it's recording. There's this little pause button, it's that little, the two lines there. So I can pause it, resume, and that's going to make it just one continuous recording. Or you can hit that red button again and that stops it. And as soon as you stop it, you'll see this thing that says activity and it's going to automatically start processing that video that you just recorded. You can see that almost immediately it transcribed it. Okay, so that was the recording method for those of you who already have video to work on. And I'm telling you both methods because both of these are super important to know because you will find yourself using them. So let me first close the record button by clicking on that record again. It gets rid of that, that view, the recording view. And so now we have this view again, which is what you have when you first open up your project and you can use this upload file button to browse through your computer and find the video that you want to add. So I'm going to go to my downloads, I'm going to select that. This is the video I want to use. I'm going to hit open, and it's automatically pulling it in. And when this is what this is doing. This. This box that just popped up, it's asking us to transcribe it, because descript automatically will transcribe your video. So there's the name of the file that I just added. There is the number of speakers that are in this project in this video. And right now it's just one. So I'm going to leave that as it is and I can give it the name. I'm going to say, that's Ross, that's me. And I'm going to choose the language. This is, of course, in English, so I'm going to leave it on English. But you can choose any of Descript's 23 different languages. Always ask before detecting speakers. I'll show you in a second what this is going to do. So I'm going to hit done. And you can see this little activity bar in the bottom. It's uploading that file that I just added. Added. So what's happening? If I go to this thing that says Project right here, this is where all of the files that make up my descript project live. This includes, if I add any stock media. So descript has built in music and images and things like that. And if I add any of those, they'll show up here as well as the videos that I've added. And I already have a couple files in here because I was testing things before recording this. But this one right here is the one that I just added that you saw me add. And so this is where everything shows up. I'll refer to the project files a lot as we go. So now that I have my RAW video added, the very first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and edit the sound. I'm going to go ahead and listen to this and see how it sounds. So if I go down here to the bottom left, there's this button that says Show Timeline. Go ahead and click on that. And it opens up this box here, and you can see those squiggly lines that represents the sound waves of your file. And on top of that you have. Well, first of all, let me back up on the transcript. Now you can see that the words are transcribed, the words that are in there and this was me repeating the opening line of this video, because this is how I did it. So I'm going to show you exactly the video I use and how I would do this. So that's the transcription. And then down here, you can see also the words transcribed above the sound waves. And then between it, where there's no sound waves, that was just silence. That was me resetting, preparing for the next. The next take. And by the way, this is a recommended way to record videos. Just start your recorder, go through it all together. If you mess up a line, don't worry about it. Just say it again, and then edit it out in Descript. Let me go ahead and play this. Go ahead and open up. So there's about five seconds of silence before I even start speaking. So I'm going to get rid of that right off the bat. And the way I can do that is I can put my mouse right here at the beginning of the entire video clip. And you can see it turns into that bracket, that open bracket facing to the right. The fact that it's facing to the right tells me that I'm affecting that clip. And. And you can also see it's highlighted in blue. If I move my mouse off of it, that blue goes away. So anything I'm doing is going to affect what's highlighted in blue. And you can see also it's highlighted in gray up in the transcript. So if I grab this with my. With the bracket and I drag, click, and drag to the right, it's getting rid of that blank video so it'll start quicker. Right. When I start speaking like this, go ahead and open up descript on your computer and meet me in the software. Okay, sounds good. And it's a little bit echoey. So what I'm going to do is apply studio sound. And Studio sound is going to be the first AI feature that we look at today. So with this layer selected, and this layer, by the way, is called the script layer, you'll hear me refer to that. So this is the script layer, the layer that got transcribed. So I'll go to layer. And then right here, under audio effects, there's a thing that says studio Sound. Go ahead and use this little toggle to the right and click on that, and you'll get this box that says applying Studio Sound. A studio sound is going to isolate my voice. So if I had air conditioners or traffic dogs barking, it's going to get rid of all that and just focus on my voice and make it sound a lot better. And it Usually takes anywhere from a few seconds to a couple minutes to apply, and it's already done. That was about 15 seconds. So that's great. So let's just go ahead and play it again and let's see how it sounds with Studio Sound. Go ahead and open up descript on your computer and meet me in the software. Okay, much better, but it's too robotic now. It's too flat. Studio Sound also can take out a little bit of the intonation of your voice. So what I'm going to do is go to these little dials right here, this little dial icon that says effect Settings next to Studio Sound, and click on that. And with Studio Sound, there's only one thing you can do. You can go from 0 to 100%. So I'm going to just type in a number. I happen to know that my microphone in this room with 85% works really well. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to say 85% and let me listen to it again and open up descript on your computer and meet me in the software. Okay, Sounds much better. A little bit. A little bit flat still. And I would dial that in more. This brings up an important point with editing. It's all about making a change. If you like it, keep it. If you don't like it, keep changing it until it works. So that goes for transitions, editing, sound, adding anything, Just make a change, play it back. If you like it, keep it. If you don't, then don't keep it. And the way to play it back, if you click anywhere on these numbers here in the timeline, that'll move this blue vertical line. That's your playhead, and that's where if you start playing this video, it's going to play from that point. So if I click over here, my playhead is now between 2 seconds and 4 seconds in my timeline. So if I hit the play button, meet me in the software, it plays from that point. And you can also hit the spacebar to. To start and play and pause the video. The that's spacebar. And this back button will return you to the start of the video. This little dial right here is a playback speed. So by default it plays at 1x, but you can go up to 2x or 3x to playback faster. And this playback speed only affects how fast the video is when you're reviewing it. When you export the video, it's going to be still playing at 1x speed. Okay, the next thing I'm going to do is this audio sounded a little bit quiet to me. So. So still in the layer section over here, I'm gonna go to audio. This audio section. And you can see it's at positive 13.2 decibels. Now, I didn't set that level. Descript automatically sets it when you import it. It's auto leveling it based on a certain parameter that it chooses. But it sounds a little quiet to me, so I'm actually gonna bump that up. I'm gonna go to like positive 20 decibels. And I can see how my sound waves, they look a lot better. You don't want them to be too big. Like if I go to positive 30, you see how the dark sound waves are going out of the timeline. We don't want that. It's going to sound really blown out. But 20 still looks good. And it's open up descript on your. That's good. It's probably still a little bit too loud. So I'm going to go to like positive 16. And if your video is. Descript might have adjusted your video to a negative decibel level, but whatever it is, you can adjust it. So your video might call for going to negative 20 if you recorded it in a really loud environment. But just adjust that so that it sounds good. And also, by the way, whatever platform you upload it to, YouTube, Spotify, things like that, they will also do another series of auto leveling. So this is something you'll have to play with over time. And notice I haven't, I haven't split up my video at all yet. It's all just one piece right now. So we're. Whenever I make a change, like to the audio level or anything else, it's affecting the entire video. Later on, we're going to split it up into smaller chunks so that we can control just smaller pieces of it. But for now, come down to where it says effects, hit that plus button next to it and hit color adjustments. So my video looks a little dark for my liking. So what I'm going to do is hit these little dials, come to exposure. And with any of these settings in descript, you can type in a number here. So I could type in 20, for example, and you see my, my exposure just got a lot brighter. Or I can click in here. Let me click away first. Click in here and drag. Slide to the left and you can see it's getting darker. Or slide to the right and it's getting brighter. But I'm gonna bring it back to about 15 to 20. That looks good. You can change the contrast, change the saturation, and I won't go into what each of these mean. That's beyond the scope of this short tutorial. But like I said, make a change. If you like it, keep it. If you don't, keep changing it until you do. And that's kind of how you learn this stuff. Okay, I've got it dialed in to a reasonable level for now. I won't waste too much time on that. But there's one other thing. If you can't see it like that was really small while I was doing it, which is actually not good, I should have made it a lot bigger so I could see the detail of what I'm doing better. And you can see when I just grabbed put my mouse on the middle there on this vertical boundary between the transcript and the canvas, you can resize the window like this. So if you slide it to the right, it makes it smaller inside, to the left, it makes it bigger. As well as up here in the top right, there's this thing that says app layout. The default is this side by side view that we've used up until now. There's also stacked where it puts your canvas up top, it puts your transcript in the middle and then it puts your timeline on the bottom. And then there's canvas only, which essentially makes your canvas full screen. And that's how you can get the most detail. So for something like this, like color grading, this is the best, the best view because you can see the most detail. Okay, but let's click on that again and go back to the side by side view. Next is in this top left corner, there's this thing that says landscape. So that's where that's like a standard YouTube. 16 by 9 is the name of this dimension. This is what you're used to seeing on YouTube on most TVs and most computer screens. If you click on it again, you can go to square, which is one by one. And you can see that by doing that, it added a black bar on the top and bottom of my video. That's because my video was shot in landscape. And so in order to fit inside of that square, it added that black space. I can easily change that. I can change the layouts of my video by grabbing any of these edges. So I can grab this purple edge and I can drag it down and you can see I'm losing some of my side side of my video there when I do that, but that's okay. And I can drag up and it looks like that I can Grab the sides, I can grab the corners. The corners will shrink the height and width together to keep it all proportionate. And I can hit this position button with it still selected. You can see when it's selected, it has the purple border around it, but it's still selected. I can hit Position Fit canvas and it returns it back to the original view. If I hit Position Fill canvas, it puts it back like that, where it's filling the entire space. There's no more black space. So those are all options. And if you wanted to put yourself in the corner, for example, I could do that. I just hit the bottom left. There's bottom right, top left, top right. And then next to that there's shapes. So it puts it into a circle by default. And that's a popular view. Like if you're showing your screen, people put themselves into a little circle in the corner. This is how you would do that. You can also do square portrait, landscape down here. And I'm just going to go back to fill canvas now. The other thing we can do is crop. So let me go back to fit canvas, actually. And if I double click, that's double. A double left click on the image itself. Anywhere on the image, then you can see that these little white corners appeared. So now this is crop mode, where instead of resizing it, it's actually cutting off parts of the picture. So you can see that I can crop out like my background, crop it like that. So it's only about me. I can grab the corners. So it does height and width proportionally, as we saw before. It's got grid lines, so I could put myself in a third of the frame. And it's got a percentage here of a zoom level. So it's 111%. And I could type in a number like 120, 150, and it zooms me in. Also in crop mode, still in crop mode, I can click my image and drag it around the frame. So in your project, do this, go into crop mode, crop out. If you have a door in your background, if you have anything that you don't want in there, crop that out and resize. Play with the sizing of things to make it look how you want. And when you're all done with that, you can hit this done button. And now it's all set. And let me just put that in the corner again and resize it. And now it's just my face. Okay, so that was changing the aspect ratio going into crop mode, all that kind of stuff. There's also Portrait mode. And this is what you see on, like, TikToks YouTube shorts, things like that. And here we go. You can see that when I resized it, it put my head slightly out of the frame. So what do you think I need to do? That's right, Crop mode. Drag it into the middle and position myself like. So if you don't know what aspect ratio the platform that you intend to upload to requires, then do a quick Google search. Say, what aspect ratio do Facebook reels use? What aspect ratio does YouTube shorts use? And you can find that information super easily. And then go into your project and set it accordingly. Next, I'm going to show you one other way that you can change the size of any object in descript. An object is the video, the images. An object is anything that you add and manipulate in descript. So with any object, there's this box here that says size and position. And again, this is under the layout button here on the Properties bar. And so the size and position tells you the X and Y coordinate of this image. So if I click on it and I move it around, notice that the X and Y is changing. And in the same way I can type, I can click in there and type in a number. So I typed in 150 and it just slid on the X axis inside of the canvas. If I type in 250, it moves over even more, and it's probably around like 400 originally. So there it is. That's. That's one way you can change it is the X and Y axis. Below that is height and width. W is your width, H is your height. So if I grab one of these sides, as we saw earlier, and I make it bigger, you can see that that number is getting bigger. And with the width, you can click in there, drag it, and that makes it wider. Height makes it bigger. Below that is the angle. And let me just reposition this. Right now, it's at zero, so it's flat. But I could make it 15 degrees. And you can see it tilts to the side. 91, 82, 70, back to zero. And then this last one is corner rounding. So I could do like 50, and it's kind of hard to see. Let me make it smaller, but that softens the corners. That adds a little roundness to the corners. And you can take that number all the way up. If I go to 5,000, it becomes an oval, but let's leave it sharp. Corners at zero. Now, everyone's favorite part, let's use some AI tools to edit this thing. So all of your AI tools are going to be found right here under underlord in the top right corner. And it's broken down by categories. You have sound good, look good, repurpose, publish, and write. We're going to mostly cover sound good in this tutorial. The first one is Edit for clarity. And all of these prompts, by the way, use Chat GPT. So on the back end it's a Chat GPT prompt and you have some ability to control those prompts. So if I hit on Edit for clarity, the only option here is low, medium and heavy. And this is how intense you want it to remove. Filler words, digressions, blather, all the obvious cuts. It says. So if I hit submit, here's what it found. So, because this was a really simple one where me just repeating the same line, what this is doing is it's removing all the bad takes and then it's keeping the last one and it crossed out, AKA ignored, all the ones that it thinks I want to get rid of. So I can hit apply edits to script and you can see that it crossed out all those parts. Or I can hit undo. I just did command Z on my keyboard undo and bring it back to how it was. I'm just gonna hit done real quick to explain something. So in my transcript, if I want to get rid of something, I can highlight it and I can just simply hit delete on my keyboard and it's gone. Or I can undo and then with this menu that's popped up over it, I can hit this thing right here, this strikethrough, and that's called ignore. So with both of these, it's removing it from my video, but ignored. I always recommend that people do ignore over delete because with ignore, it keeps it on your transcript so that you're aware that you got rid of it. So if I hover over this part that I ignored, you can see I can delete it. That that's that button right there and it gets rid of it. Let me undo that. If I hover over it, and to the left of the delete button there's restore. So I can click on that and it brings it back and now it's in my video again. So that's why I always recommend doing ignore over delete because it just allows you to maintain awareness of it. And then you can bring it back if you want. And if you export your transcript or you make captions or anything like that, when it's ignored, it will not show up there. So always use ignore Over Delete. Moving on. The next one is Studio Sound. We already used that. So you saw that you can apply that from the Layers section as well. Um, but it's also here under underlord. Next is Remove filler word. And I don't think I'm going to have any. Nope, I do not. If I did, it would show after I clicked on Remove filler words, it would show all the filler words that I have. And then I could either delete it. We just talked about that. Or ignore it. Or I could remove it from Transcript but not from my video. That's another option. Or delete and replace with gap. That'll delete it and put a silent gap in the place of where those words were. So all of those options are available to you and you can see the words that it's looking for. It's looking for times that you repeated yourself, you said, but you know, stuff like that. And then you can remove it one instance at a time or you can click Remove all and it'll remove all of your filler words with one click. Okay, back to underlord. Remove retakes. This is going to be basically the same as what we did with the Edit for clarity, where it just identified all the times that I repeated myself. I repeated the same line and it's going to tell me that it's going to try to find the best one. Since these are all the same, it's just going with the last one. But I'm going to just ignore that for now. And back to underlord. Back. Hit the back arrow, shorten word gaps. This is going to find any time that there's no speaking detected. So in this case, it's looking for anything three seconds or more without speaking and it's going to shorten it to an amount that I tell it to. Right now it says zero seconds. I just changed it to one second. And it found five moments where there's a three second or longer gap. And you see them right here on the right side, the search results. And if I click one of these in the software, it plays it in context. So it plays the words before that gap. It plays the gap itself just to make sure that it didn't miss something. And maybe depending on what you're making, it may be important to leave that in there and then it plays a second after that gap. So if I want to get rid of it, I can hit shorten and meet me in the software and that gap is now gone. And if I want to get rid of all of them, I Don't even want to review them. I hit shorten all and they're all gone and back to Underlord. The last one is Add Chapters. And this is my favorite one. This is the one I use more than anything else. And when you click on that, it now asks me how many chapters I want to make. And by default it says auto. So it's just going to automatically determine how many it should create out of this video. And I'll leave it on that. I'll hit submit. And it only created one chapter. So this is it, the darker one. And then this is a description of or the transcript that's inside of that chapter that it determined. So hit add to script and here's what happened. This dark blue or this dark black part, this bold part that says Getting started with Descript, that is our first marker and that's the one that Underlord created for us. And what these do, if you have a bunch of them, you can click on them and it navigates you to that point in the project as well as if I go to publish this, go to YouTube, for example, that becomes a timestamp, which then becomes a clickable chapter in YouTube so that your viewers can quickly navigate around. So again, that was the Add Chapters feature in Underlord. By the way, everything you're watching this tutorial right now covers a fraction of what Descript can do. I'm not going to go into all the AI features, but I just wanted to give you an exposure so you can start using them yourself. So if you like my teaching style, if you like how this tutorial goes, then you'll probably like the Descript Mastery course where I go into every single feature in descript and I'll leave a link right here in the top corner as well as in the description. So if that's something you're interested in, I recommend checking out the Descript Mastery course. Now let's start adding stuff to our project. And descript comes with a lot of built in elements. So the first one is I'll start at the bottom here with music. If you click on music, you can see this first box that says music and the second box that says Sound Effects. So with all of these, there's a little black play button. Well, first of all, there's the name of the track, there's a little black play button where you can preview that sound or that. So that's reggae is the answer. Instrumental. And then down here under sound effects, we have cinematic whoosh impact like that. And I get asked a lot, does Descript have enough music. Should I get my own epidemic sound or something like that? And personally, I use descript for everything. It's got thousands of tracks. I've never not been able to find something. And what most people are missing is at the top here, there's a search bar. So you could type in any genre you want. You could type in jazz, for example. And this comes up. And then what people are missing is there's this show all button. And so you can get like just within jazz, there's. It keeps going. Look at this. It keeps loading more and more. So dozens of tracks and you can play through these. And I'll go ahead and use that. And to use it, all you do is hit this little plus button. Now add its project. You can see this importing audio activity bar. And that's going to put it in my project. And this is going to be the very first layer that we've added so far. So you'll see how this looks in a moment. If I go back to music, it's the same thing with sound effects. I can hit show all. I can do a search through the sound effects. Oops. And that's actually looking through everything. So if I type in something like whoosh, there's a lot of whoosh sound effects like that. Those are great to add. When you have something sliding into the screen or something that you want to indicate motion, you can just add a subtle little whoosh in the background and it gives it that. That effect. Okay. And I actually got an error right there. Said error Loading media. Please check your network connection. So sometimes this happens and it's important to show when it doesn't work because this happens a lot. So in that case, I'm just gonna try another one. Just try again until it does work. And usually it will. So I just found another track. I hit the plus button and it's now working on importing audio. And to dismiss one of these, these error messages, you can do the three dots and click dismiss. And it's now working on the next one. And while that's loading, I'll just show you something. So there's a page called status. Descript.com and this is where you can see all of descript's different services. And if anything's out, it'll show it here. And so what this is showing me is that there's descript Web has its own server, Publishing has its own server, Transcription has its own server. So if a certain function is down, like in this case, the media is down. If it's not working, then it would show up here. Or if just squadcast, which is the remote recording service, is down, then this is where I could see that. And one thing can be down without affecting the rest. But this is status. Descript.com and you can see these orange or red lines are indicating that it was recently down. Okay, I finally got a track at it. I had to refresh my page, so that's another troubleshooting step. And just try refreshing if things aren't working, and that'll usually clear up a lot of issues. So after hitting that plus button, I added it. You can see on my timeline, and you can make your timeline bigger by clicking on this horizontal boundary and just sliding it up. You can see it's green. So green is anytime you add a layer that is audio only. You'll see what it looks like when we add a video in a moment. But you can see that there's a little music note indicating that it's music there as well in the top left. And this one's called Together, no vocal. And it's got the sound waves. And right now, it spans my entire project. So my project's only 28 seconds, but it spans that entire thing. If I wanted to change where it begins, I can simply click on the the top of the bar and slide it left and right, and that'll move where it begins. And you can see the gray vertical line at the beginning of this layer. That is where this will begin. So if I put this over the word go in my timeline and I drop it there, that's where it's now going to begin. And so I can also grab the beginning and end, and I can click and drag to make it longer or shorter, like so. And I can even extend this past my video if I drag to the right. Notice it's creating this empty space right here where this music's gonna play over it. So that could be kind of like an outro. And I could add titles or things like that over that music. Also, to point out one other thing, this thing in the top right, this is called your layer sizes. By default, it's on default, but you can change it to large. And it makes it bigger, it makes it taller and fatter so you can see more detail. Okay, so that's adding music. And it works the same way whether you're adding descript Music or if you're bringing in your own music. You can drag a music file off of your computer and then bring that in to your project. And then same thing with Sound effects. Let me just add one for fun. I'll just add this one. Cinematic whoosh. I'll hit the plus sign importing audio in the activity bar. And it's going to add it right where my playhead is. So right now it's towards the end of my project. And there it is. It just added it right here. And same thing. You can see it's got the sound wave, but it's just one big sound wave because it's a sound. So I could position that somewhere where I want to add that effect. I could just slide it left and right to position it over some movement in my video. Now let's look at some of descripts built in media, other media like images and GIFs and things like that, which we can find with the button right above music. It says media. And by the way, if your descript says more with three dots, your window is too small. So it's compressing some of these buttons into a more button. If you click on more, then you'll be able to see everything that's inside of it, which it could put music media, captions, etc. In there. So under media similar to music, we have them broken down by categories. We have a stock video category, Giphy GIFs, stock images, Giphy stickers, etc. So to see any of these, we can click Show. All right. And it'll show deeper into what's in that folder. And if you hover your mouse over one of these, it plays it. So here's some nature ones. You can see it playing and you can also do a search. So same thing, I could type in like waterfall here. And it's going to show me all the stock videos of Waterfalls. If I go to Giphy GIFs, there it is still looking at waterfalls backgrounds, just like that. And if I want to add one of these, I could go to. Let's add a GIPHY gif. I just clicked on it. Just click on the image and it starts importing it. And there we go. You can see that it fills the whole. It automatically loops to fill the whole project. Also notice that it has a little thumbnail. So there's this image of what this video is showing right here. And then it loops throughout the rest of the video and is blue as opposed to the green sound layer. So when I go to layer, this is where I can find all the properties of how that GIF is gonna look on my project. And right now it's on looping. So it's gonna play and keep playing throughout the Rest of the video, I can change that to play just once by changing this drop down from loop to once. And now it's only going to play one time. And it's a three second video. I can see that right here. And it's playing at 1x speed. If I wanted it to play fast, I could change that to 2x, but I'm just going to leave that at 1x. Let it play one time and I can click on this layer, I can drag it so I could move where in my video it starts. And as I mentioned, with all objects in descript you have size and position properties. So I can move it around, I can make it bigger, I can make it smaller, I can do whatever I want with that element. Moving on to the next tab in our properties bar is the captions right here. So click on captions and you'll get this view. Each of these are built in templates for captions from descript. And you can see if you hover over it, it plays a little demo of what it does. So this one that my mouse is on right now, it has that karaoke effect where it puts the blue highlight over the active word. And to apply one of these, you just click on it. It says applying captions. It applies almost immediately. And let me just make this bigger so you can see it better. I'm gonna hit play. Go ahead and open up descript on your computer. So it's really small, but that's okay. I can click on it, I can resize it on my screen just like we've seen. Also this menu pops up over it and this is where you can change the font, the weight, the size. I'm gonna make this like 150 so it's much bigger and then the colors and so you can just play around with these to get it to look how you want. I'm gonna leave it on white just cause that's the easiest to see. And the other two colors next to it are the karaoke effect colors. So this blue is gonna be that background. So now it's red. That white is going to be the color in that active word. So I'm going to change it to black. So now it looks like that. And meet me. I'm so. Oops. And we have our music way too loud. So what I'm going to do is go to my music layer. Remember you can scroll up and down in those layers above your script layer, click on the music layer, go to the layer button on the right side and I'm going to make this negative 20. So it's nice and soft. Open up descript on your computer and meet me in the software. Just like that. Okay. And you can also change the properties here under this text box. So again, you got your font weight, whether it's left, center or right aligned, all caps or camel case, top, bottom or center alignment. And then below that you have the style. So if you click on this, the effects dial right there, they have some presets like karaoke, which is what we already saw, classic, where it doesn't have that karaoke effect, or clean, where it's going to pop up one word. The words are going to be invisible until they're spoken. And the captions, by the way, go off of your transcript. So in the transcript, as you can see, I'm saying go ahead and open up descript on your computer and if I play it, you'll see that the captions go in time with my transcript. Go ahead and open up descript on your computer and meet me in the software. And so it has to be transcribed and it has to be the script layer. If you have another layer with speaking, but it's not in your script layer, remember your bottom layer, then you're not going to see the words in your captions. So that's a very important step. And above captions, our next one on our properties bar is this elements button. So click on elements. And now we have text, basic, dynamic text, etc. So text is where you can add static text. Captions is dynamic meaning again, as we saw, it reads off of the transcript text. One of these ones when you add it. And that's super small. Let me make that bigger. Let me make it even bigger. Like that. It's static. So once you add it, it, it's not going to change. It's going to remain where you set it and saying what you typed in. So I typed in the word text. It's going to stay exactly like that for the rest of the video. So that's how you add a text layer. And then the properties work the same as with captions, where you can change the font, the weight, all this stuff right here. Next is basic. These are your shapes. So if I click on a triangle, for example, I can move that around and resize it, make it skinnier and I can change the border size. So all that with all these properties, you're gonna be able to adjust it from this bar right here on the top. That pops up over it as well as you can grab the corners and resize it that way. As we saw before. And these are gonna be different. So you have like this hollow triangle that I have right now, or you have a filled in triangle or you have an arrow. And these are going to have different properties. Like the arrow has just two a beginning and end point that you can adjust where it begins and ends. But then these other ones, like the triangle has four different corners that you can adjust. So different properties based on what that element is. Next is dynamic text. The element is. Next is dynamic text. That goes a little bit beyond the scope of this video. Video. But that brings up a good point for anything that I'm not covering. And you want to go deeper into. Check out the Descript Mastery course. Or you can do. I offer one on one tutoring. So if you'd like to get on a zoom call with me, I can walk you through how to add any of these. I can customize it to your specific use case. I can say here's the workflow you should be using and I'll leave a link to how to book those tutoring calls in the description below. Okay, moving on. You have waveforms. So if you click on one of these waveforms, it'll add it. And this is going to basically recreate computer and meet me in the software. You can see it bouncing. And so that's going off of the waveforms of my script. So as I talk, it'll have either a line going up and down or I can add a circle or different types of waveforms. There progress bar, you can have it. So it has like a loading bar. Basically as you're talking annotations. If you hover over these, you can see what those do. I won't go. I'm kind of moving fast now because you've seen how a lot of these elements work. So if I hover over it, it plays it. If I click on it, it would add it. And you can see like that arrow, for example, could be really useful for pointing something out. You're talking about. You're mentioning something in a screen recording. You can have an arrow that points to it. Same thing with underline or a curved arrow. Overlays. These are like this first one's light leaks, for example. It kind of has that lens flare effect. So if I go back to the beginning of my project and play it and it's just taking a moment to process. Go ahead and open up Descript on your computer. That's what it looks like. And you can see it's too small. So as you remember to fix that, we go to position fill canvas. And if I Peter and meet me in the software, it's transparent, but it's. So it's something that's happening over the rest of the layers of my video. And if I open up my timeline and make it a little bigger, you can see it's just another layer. It's just called lightleak.light lightleak/3.m4mov. And so that is the layer of that overlay that we just added. And I could click on it, I could delete it to get rid of it. And same thing, let me just clean up by getting rid of some of this stuff that I just added. Just going to click on each of these layers and you can see they're all titled triangle. It's got that little shape to let you know it's a shape element. And then with the text layers, it's got the T to indicate that it's a text layer. And that includes for the caption it says captions but it's got that little T at the beginning to let you know what type of element it is. And then moving on, we have frames. Frames are the same as overlays. It's just going to add another layer. And these are things like if I hit show all it's got like an iPad frame, a laptop frame, a phone frame, et cetera, so that it looks like whatever you're displaying is inside of one of those elements. Now let's talk more about layers. Layers are an extremely important concept to understand. So first of all, as mentioned several times, this is your script layer on the bottom. It's the one that gets transcribed. That's your most important one. Everything above that is just a supporting layer. And you have your green audio only ones. You have your titles and your videos. You can also add images, whatever you want. Those can all be layers to go. If you over to Scene, click on Scene on the properties bar on the right side you see this box that says layers. And these are all of your layers written out. And what you can do is adjust these using this right here. So you can grab on this one that says 90 day fiance, drag it on top and you can see it just changed on the timeline. 90 Day Fiance is now on top. And if these were overlapping, for example, let me just resize things here so you can see it a little better. So let me move this title so it's behind that 90 Day Fiance thing. So because 90 Day Fiance is on top, it's covering up my title layer. But if I grab that One again, the one that says captions. Oops, let me go back to scene captions. And I drag it on top. Now it's on top and I can see the words again on top of that 90 Day Fiance gif. And then you can see there's this like horizontal line. And then below it are our audio files. Because those don't matter. The layer order for those isn't important. It's not like they can overlap. So everything above that is going to be our visual components. And that's what we can rearrange. And I can even put my script in front of both of those layers. So if I drag that, you can see that my face is now covering up those two layers. But they're kind of seen on the sides there where my image ends. So that is understanding layers. Next, we need to talk about scenes. Right now, this entire project is in one scene. And I can see a number one right there in the top left, as well as a one right here on the left side. Right here. So that's telling me that this whole thing is just in one scene. If I put my mouse somewhere and I can put the playhead here on the timeline or somewhere in the transcript, and then I type on my keyboard a forward slash. So I'm gonna do that right now. Forward slash. And it's now in my transcript. And notice what happened on my timeline. The there's now a vertical gray line right there. There's a number two. There's a second thumbnail. So I have scene one and scene two. And when I'm inside of one of the scenes. So right now, if I'm clicked right here inside of scene two, there's this little thin blue line letting me know that whatever change I'm about to make is only going to apply to scene two. So another way to think about this is that scenes are like the slides on a PowerPoint. If I make a change to scene number two, it will not affect scene number one because they're separate slides. So if I, for example, change the order of these layers, I put my script layer below the captions and there's no words right there. Okay, there. So now my captions are on top. And if I go into scene one, it's not like that anymore. My captions are on bottom again because I only made the change in scene two. So that is a brief, brief primer on scenes and layers. And the very last thing we have to talk about once you've done all of your editing is doing something with this project, either publishing it somewhere to the Internet or downloading it to your computer. To do that, you come up to this Publish button in the top right corner. Click on that. And there's two important terms here, Export and Publish. Export is what will save this project to your computer's hard drive. Publish is what will push this project directly to somewhere on the Internet. The first option under Publish is a web link. And this will put it give it its own URL. So if you've ever used Loom before, it's similar to Loom, where it'll generate a web link and then you can send that to somebody and they can watch your video. This is extremely useful for professional editors who are editing for a client. You send it to the client, they can review it, leave comments on it, all that kind of stuff. The next one is YouTube. So to publish directly to YouTube, you'll need to hit this sign into YouTube button. It'll open up YouTube in your browser. You'll log in with your Google account link, Google and Description, and then you'll have to hit publish again in descript. And then that'll put it onto YouTube. And as I mentioned before, you can see our timestamp. That's going to be a chapter in YouTube and that was added by Underlord. And then everything else, you can set the name of how you want it to show up in YouTube. You can set the thumbnail, you can set the category, all this different stuff. I don't typically do it here. I recommend that you do it inside of YouTube Studio, but it's an option. And then you have a bunch of podcast hosts, including. Well, so there's Blueberry, buzzsprout, Captivate. The ones that are grayed out are audio only. So I cannot publish because this is a video. But just know that you have all these options if you use any of these. Or maybe you'll consider using one of these because they work with Description and then also Google Drive. You could just push this straight to a Google Drive that you've linked up. Okay, so that's publishing. Next is export. So export by default it's on the video tab, but you could also export it as audio only. If you just want the MP3 of this, you could export it as a gif. If you don't care about the audio, you could export it just the transcript into a Word doc or a text file or anything else. And that would be something that you could publish on your blog or just publish somewhere on the Internet and then subtitles. This is going to create a file that will create Closed captions on something like YouTube. And so it'll use your transcript and it'll be time synced to your video and then that's what you could upload to YouTube or another platform. But back to the video tab because this is going to be our most important one. You can choose to export just the this current composition and I didn't talk about compositions and projects, but I have other videos where I break down what that means. And again, this is just a quick, you know, I'm trying to make this one hour or less. So I recommend check out my other videos. Check out the Descript Mastery course if you want to go deeper. Current scene, we talked about scenes. So if I did that, that would just export Scene 1 markers that would export the the different markers as different files or all compositions. If I had multiple compositions in a single project, it would export those all as separate files. You can choose the resolution all the way up to 4K. It's not an option for me because I only recorded in 7:20, so that's the max that it allows me. Quality is going to relate to audio quality low, medium, high. And you got a bunch of different metadata settings and finer stuff that I won't go into now. And when you're ready you just hit export and that's going to save it. Now the fastest way and the recommended way to save things in descript is actually back in the publish button. This button right here will download it to your computer, it'll publish it to the web link and it'll download it to your computer. And it uses descript servers to render and process the video. So this is the fastest way to download and it's extremely fast. So highly recommend that. And you can change the access level so you can make it public where people could search for it and find it through a search engine. You make it anyone with the link where you have to send them a link to the file to the project or you can make it project access required where you have to explicitly send them an email to get access to your project. So that's it for this tutorial. I hope you've had as much fun as I did making this. If you and if you want to go deeper with descript, I do one on one tutoring calls where you can get on a zoom call with me and I can help you with whatever you're stuck on in descript or if you have just general video content creation questions, I can help with that. Or if you prefer the self paced option, I have a course that is very similar to what you just saw, but much, much deeper. This course, or this tutorial rather, covers maybe 50% of what descript can do. But the course goes into everything, and it goes into specific workflows and how to do things. So definitely check that out and I'll leave a link right here.