Descript's new Timeline beta is live in Labs. Video layers now appear gray while audio stays green, thumbnails are bigger with rounded corners, and you can scroll vertically through layers and control their size. The toggle applies across your whole drive.
Recently, Descript introduced what they call Descript Labs. Descript Labs gives every user the opportunity to try new and upcoming features before they get pushed out to all users. Here's how it works. To access the Descript Lab feature, it's not something that you have automatically, it's something that you have to opt into. And it's super easy to do. But before we do that, the feature that I'm going to show you, the beta feature, is the Timeline. It affects the timeline. And so this is what the current timeline looks like. It's blue, blue for video layers, green for sound layers. And it looks like this. It's very boxy. You can make it bigger and smaller by doing this. And then let me just add a couple more layers just to show you a few things. There's a sound layer, and if I add an image, just add that. So I got three layers. They just stack on top of each other and you can expand it and contrast it. It's got the name right there. So that's what we currently have. If you come up to the descript logo and you go down to Settings and then right here in the first window in general, at the very bottom is Labs. And this is where Descript is going to put all of the lab features. And right now it's just one. It's the new timeline. But in theory, in the future there might be three, five, who knows how many here. And you can hover over this little information icon and it has a brief explainer of what it is. So it tells us new design of timeline with better clip editing and improved selection states. And to activate it, all you do is click on this toggle and if you saw my timeline just changed, and it'll change not only for this project, but my entire drive. So every project that I have in my drive will, will be opted into this different timeline. And now look at it. We don't have the colors and it's a little bit different in how we can view it. For one, we can scroll up and down. So I'm using my mouse wheel and I'm able to scroll vertically through these layers. The audio layer is still green, but our video layers are now gray. They're not colored like they were before. There is also this thing right here to the right of the timeline tools that is layer size, and right now it's on default, but you can make it large and that just makes them a little bit wider. And one thing that's really nice is the bracket is a lot bigger. Look at the size of that thing, because that's a big problem. I know that a lot of my clients have is seeing the bracket in the timeline, and then they just look a little more aesthetically pleasing. They got rounded corners, they got a bigger thumbnail, so you can see what it is that's in there. But really the biggest difference is the ability to scroll up and down vertically. Also, when we collapse this, when we collapse our timeline and make it smaller, when it's in default mode, the name of the clip is always visible. So these never get super, super tiny like, like they did before in the. The old school timeline. They stay a certain height. So, so you can't shrink them below this height. And so you're always able to see the name of that layer. So with the Slip tool, when I hover over a layer, it tells me that this scene that I'm on, this layer goes from 2 to 11 seconds, and I can click in it and I can slide it in place. So now it goes from zero to nine seconds, and now I'm gonna switch back to the select tool. The other thing it tells us is for clips that, that expand across multiple scenes. So this one right here, this image, it goes from scene one to scene eight, and you can see these little dips where it goes into another scene. So that's kind of a useful little UI feature to let you know that that's not all one continuous scene. And right now, and this is similar to the old timeline, but right now it's completely selected. And I know that because the whole thing is blue. But what I could do is, like, let's say I want to make a change only to scene three. What I could do is double click inside of my canvas on that layer. And now notice that the blue portion, the portion that I'm going to edit is blue, while the rest of it is gray. So whatever changes I make to this portion of the layer in scene three will not affect the rest of the scenes. So, for example, I could make this disappear. I could make that opaque. And now it still appears in scene four. It appears in scene two, but it's gone in scene three because I made it invisible. I hid it. But I can bring it back, and there it is. I can click out of there and then click on the layer again. And now the whole thing's selected. And if I make it invisible, the whole thing is gone. And then the last thing I'm gonna show you is the keyframes. The keyframes have changed a little bit. So you can right click at your playhead click, add volume keyframe. And you can see that little white dot that just appeared. That's our first keyframe. And let's go ahead a few seconds. I'll click again, add volume keyframe. And now there is my second keyframe. And I can lower this. I can bring it closer, bring it further away, and it can span across scenes. And I could add a third volume keyframe by clicking somewhere else in my project. Right, clicking again, add volume keyframe. And there's my third white dot. And I could bring the volume up once again. So it could kind of do this gradual fade out and then fade smoothly back in. And there's one more thing I just found as I was about to wrap up this video, which is that the animations have changed. Let's say I want to animate this video and I come over here to Animations to add an animation. I hit the plus button. I go to custom. And remember, before we had the rectangles for our animation keyframes. Now they're just these little diamonds. So you still have your starting keyframe and your ending keyframe, but they have changed visually. They're these diamonds. You can still slide them left and right to make them shorter and longer, and you can still adjust the properties, the layout properties at that specific keyframe to adjust how your animation looks. So that's it for the new timeline. And it's mostly visual stuff. It's not like a huge change to a workflow or anything like that. But the important thing is to know how to opt into the Descript labs. And again, if you haven't done that, you won't see this new timeline. But I'd imagine within the next couple of months, this timeline is what all Descript users are going to have by default.
