Learn what you can turn into Descript templates: captions, titles, watermarks, intros, and interview layouts work best. Keep templates simple with one layer per template, and stack them together if you need more. Templates fail on podcasts when the type doesn't match your sequences.
Questions this video answers
Filler word removal cannot be made into a template.
Keep templates to one layer or one property per template (stack separate templates if needed).
A hundred plus free Descript templates (available via the link in the description).
Here's three common questions I get about templates in descript. Question number one comes from Paula. She asked, what exactly can be made into a template? In other words, what can be templatized? Almost every property or element in descript can be templatized. That said, there's a few areas where templates work best, and there's some others where I recommend you don't templatize them and templatize. I don't know if that's a real word, by the way, but I'm talking about making something into a template. So templates work best for captions and titles. If you have a standard font, color, size, anything like that, that's a perfect candidate for making into a template so that you don't have to do that in every single project. Next is watermarks and logos. If you put a watermark somewhere on your video, or maybe a logo up in one of the corners, which is basically the same as a watermark, then that's a great thing to turn into a template. Intros and outros. If you have on your YouTube channel or your course or whatever else you're making videos for a standard intro and or outro that plays in every video, that's a great candidate for making into a template. Interview layouts. If you're doing interviews or multi camera, multi speaker stuff where you have two or more people on the screen and you're putting things like borders or audiograms or social media handles, titles, things like that, that's a great candidate for putting into a template. And then you can just make your podcast with the click of a button, apply that template. It's going to automatically put it into that standard format and you'll be good to go. Like and subscribe buttons. You can use descript's built in GIFs or you can download one from Canva or other places on the Internet and those are great. But maybe you want to have something more custom with your own colors, your own fonts, then you can do that. And I recommend making into a template. So you only have to do it once by the way, for all the templates. I just mentioned these ones that make for great templates. I have all of these available for free on my website. If you click the link in the description, you can download those for yourself. Now let's talk about things that don't work well for templates. The first one is animations and transitions. You can make animations in transitions and I'm talking about zooms and all sorts of things like that. Transitions between scenes into templates. But in general I find it's more reliable to learn how to make these from scratch and then apply them every time that you need them. The reason is, is things just get wonky. Like if the positioning of the animation isn't exactly right between the template and the scene you're applying it to, things are going to get thrown off and they're just not going to work. The next one is any AI effects. I'm talking here about things like studio sound, eye contact, filler word removal, will. Filler word removal, you can't make a template out of. But those other, the first two, you can make templates out of them, but I just don't recommend it. It's so easy anyways. You just click a button and I guess the advantage there would be that you could stack them, you could put eye contact, studio sound, green screen, all those kind of things into one template. But I don't recommend it. And I'm going to talk more about that in a moment. The third thing I don't recommend for your templates is audio projects. The reason being is that templates just aren't meant for audio. They there's no scenes in audio projects, so you can't control where a template would land. And you could templatize something like sound effects, which again I have in my free downloadable templates. But the only exception here would be is if you have something like a standard intro track or a standard outro track. Those could be good candidates for audio only templates, but they're just not meant for it. Question number two comes from Steve. He asks how fancy can templates be? In other words, how complicated can templates be? And that's a great question. The short answer is don't try to do too much with templates. In other words, keep it simple. And when I say simple with templates, I mean try to keep it to one layer or one property per template. If you try to do too much with a template, weird things are going to happen. You never want to try to change too many properties at once or they're just going to not, not work, not behave how you expect them to. So one property per template. Now you can stack templates, you can apply multiple templates to a scene. So if you have one template that changes the size and position of a layer and then you have another template that adds a title, that's okay to do. I just recommend have them separate and then stack them after they're already built and then test them, make sure that they work how you expect them to, because even stacking them can cause issues where if you have the properties of one conflict with the properties of another, the template you applied later is going to be the template that goes into effect if they have conflicting properties. So in building templates, don't try to do too much. It's like the difference between a flashlight and a smartphone. The flashlight just has one function, it turns on and off, and that's it. The smartphone, on the other hand, has tons of functions, including the flashlight, so things are prone to breaking all the time. So just keep it simple. The fewer moving parts, the less likely things are to go wrong. Question number three comes from Bruce and he asks why don't templates work on my podcast episodes? And I didn't get the full context of what exactly you're trying to do or what your podcast how it's set up. But what I think is probably happening, the most common thing I see is that they apply exactly as you make them. So what I mean by that is if your podcast is in a sequence and you apply a template that isn't created for a sequence or vice versa, then it's going to cause unpredictable behavior. So that's probably what's happening. And if you don't know what sequences are, I recommend watching my other videos about that and I'll leave one right here that you can watch. So again, if you want to download my a hundred plus free descript templates, you can find the link in in the description below.
