Descript Tutorial - Everything You Need to Know

Hello, and welcome to this tutorial on descript. This is going to be about 20 to 25 minutes of everything you need to know from never having open descript before to starting your first video project. Editing like a professional. I'm going to assume that you've already created an account at descript. Com. I'm going to assume that you have downloaded it and you have opened up Description. So one note is I am on Mac, so if you're on Windows, things will look a little bit differently, but generally all the functions will be exactly the same. Your hotkeys might be different, other things that I had mentioned might be a little bit different, but it's going to function exactly the same. Okay, so the first page that we have is our workspace view, and this is inside of your drive. Your drive is where you hold all of your projects. So over here on the left, you have your projects, which is a list of all the projects that you've ever created. And then we have our workspace, which is if you share this with an editing team, then they will also have access to this or whoever you grant access to. And you have a private workspace, which is only on your hard drive only you can see this. This part cannot be shared. So in your workspace you have the option to create folders, which I recommend you do. This allows you to keep things organized. You can also add stars to folders, and if you add a star to favorite it, it puts it here on your left. So you can see I have descript, course client work, and YouTube all favorited for easy access. And those all fall under my workspace. So aside from creating the folder next to that, we have our new button. If we click this, we have the option to start a video project, an audio project, a quick recording, which is like a loom video. It's just a short recording that can be shared with people. It generates a URL that you can send to people. You have a remote recording, and this takes you to SquadCast, which allows you to record a remote interview as if it's on a zoom call or something. And that integrates with descript, so you can edit it right after the call's over. And there's classic project. We're not even going to talk about that because that is going away in a couple weeks as of the time of this recording in September 2023. So let's go ahead and start with a video project. This is our blank project to go over some terminology. This is where our scenes will go, scene thumbnails. This is the first thing it's prompting us to do is put in a title for this project. This is our canvas. This is where we'll have a display of the video, the frame that we're currently editing. And on the right here is going to be our properties bar where we can edit the properties of our layers. Let's call this descript tutorial 2023. I'm going to call it fall 2023 because descript changes a lot. So if you're watching this anytime after September 2023, there's a very good chance that some of the features have changed. Some of the ways that this looks, the ways that it functions, et cetera, will change because descript changes quickly. Press Enter to continue and we're taken to our first line. Now, descript is a transcript based editor. They try to make it like editing a Word doc versus like the traditional timeline editing that you do with some of the more mainstream editors like Premiere, Final Cut, et cetera. To demonstrate this, I'm going to pull a file in from my computer and there's several ways you can do this. You can hit this plus button and insert project files. If you'd already had things added here. You can insert videos. These are stock footage that is built into descript. One more thing I should note here. I am on the Pro plan. If you're on a free plan, then you'll be limited in some of your features, including the selection of stock stuff that you'll have. So there's stock videos, stock images from Unsplash. There is gifs, which are like memes. There is audio, you got music as well as sound effects. And then you can add text, captions, shapes like, like rectangles, circles, progress bars. Or you can make a recording like I'm doing right now. This is a recording through descript. For our purposes, this project file thing is our Media Bin. If you're familiar with media bins from other editors, our Media Bin is also accessible up here in this top. It's this little play button. If we click that, you can see once again we have our audio images, GIFs, videos, and then on the far left, files. And you can drag and drop a file into here. Or you can click this and it'll open up your browsing option. So what I'm going to do is find a file I want to import and I'm just going to import a video that I've made about descript before. And so you select it. It has to be an MP4 or other video file. Or you can Also import audio. You can import pretty much anything you want. But for our sakes, we're going to do video right now. And you hit the open button. It takes just a second to process it. And it's now in our media Bin. We can Preview it. Version 73 of descript is here. We have a couple new changes, some improvements and some like that. If we hit back, this is where all of our files that we've added into our Media bin will live. If we've, if we added a bunch right now it's just one. It's simple. But if we click it again, it takes us back to our preview thing. We can insert it into script, our script. Think of this as your base layer. This is the layer that will be on the bottom. All the layers you add will go over it. Or if we already had a script layer, we could add it new layer. But again, this will be our script layer. So I'm going to hit insert into script and it prompts us for the transcription. It's asking for the speaker name. I'm going to add my own name. Add Ross as speaker. It's in English. Create a composition. We'll skip that and I'll hit done. And it's transcribing. It usually goes pretty quick. This is only a three minute video, so I expected it to take around 45 seconds to transcribe. While it's working on that, you can see that we have our view here in the canvas. We have a thumbnail view as well in the scene layer on the left side. When it's selected, you can now see our property bar. We can change how quickly this scene will play. If it's at 1x, it's a 3 minute and 3 second clip. We can change the audio here. We can apply studio sound, ducking, et cetera. I'm going to explain what all that means in a moment. Again, this is a project within projects there are compositions. So this is a composition within the project. I can add a new composition, which now you can see that this is another blank composition. I can come back up here and switch back to my previous one. So these are compositions here. On the left of it is your project. And right now they have the same name. It's descript tutorial fall 2023. But inside of this project here is the basic workflow that I would use if I was editing. First of all, descript gives us a lot of AI tools. This little star indication in the top right is our AI tools. And you can see when we hover over it. It says shorten word gaps, remove filler words, and more. If I click it, I can do the shortened word gaps, remove filler words, copy highlights or detect transcription errors. I'm going to do the shortened word gaps first. What this is telling us is it's looking for gaps where there's no one speaking for half a second or more. And then it gives us the option to shorten it to 02 seconds. And it found 14 instances of this. And over here on the right, we can see those 14 instances. So if we click one, it'll play it, et cetera. But we also. And it plays it in context. So it plays a second before, it plays the gap and then it plays a second after. Now, half second gap isn't very long. It's a natural pause. So I'm going to increase this to let's call it 1.2. And I only found two of those. So here's one. That's 1.2 seconds new UI feature that. And that's actually not a gap. I said UI right there. But Descript didn't pick that up as a word. It didn't transcribe it. So that's actually, I'm not going to make that change now. I could hit shorten all and it would. It would shorten both of those gaps. But again, since the one that I just played, I don't want to shorten it. I'm going to skip it. I'm going to go to the next one. So now it's just a freeze and that is a gap. So I'm going to hit shorten New UI is gone feature that. So that's how that part, that feature works. The next thing I would do is remove filler words by clicking on it. It found seven filler words. And if you click on the filler words thing here, it tells us what it was looking for. It's looking for repeated words. So if I say the same word two or more times in a row, it'll find that as a filler word. It found ums. So's it was also looking, but you know, hmm. I guess. I mean, it didn't find any of those, but it's telling us it found five ums, one so and one repeated word. And once again, the same format as the shortened word gap. We can see it on the right here and if we click it, we can play it in context. It goes into my. And I'm definitely going to get rid of the. I had the chance to just blanket remove all without reviewing them. But as we saw in the previous example, sometimes Descript makes mistakes, sometimes things are in there intentionally, so it's good to review them individually. So I'm going to hit remove and that one is going create a new scene. There's another. And another thing is on the transcript you can see that it underlines the in blue, a blue dotted line that's telling us that it's a filler word that's been detected. And in this case it's highlighted in orange because that's the filler word that we're currently looking at. So that's it on the transcript. If you look down here on the timeline, there is the as well. And I'm going to hit remove from the other. The other options. So that place. I repeated myself twice, I said the other. The other option. I'm going to get rid of it. So let me just adjust my. There was a. So I'm going to get rid of it green and the last three are just shown black. So I'm going to hit remove. All right, and all three of those are gone. And if you were paying attention, this is where the was. And there's now a vertical gray line. Two vertical gray lines. And here's what it looks like in the timeline. So that vertical gray line in the timeline corresponds. That vertical gray line in the transcript corresponds with this on the timeline. And Descript is non destructive. So if we want to bring something back, we can hover our mouse on the boundary between these two scenes and it looks like a bracket with arrows pointing left and right. And we can click when the bracket is open to the right, we can drag left to expand that clip. And look at that. We can bring the back or we can close it back up or we can move our brackets slightly to the left. And now the bracket is open to the left. Click, click and drag and bring it back like that. And if I release, I'm going to show you one more way to manipulate the timeline. You can click on a word and drag it to cover a word up. And if you do the opposite. So that was dragging left to cover up a word. If I click on a word like this word black and I drag, right? What it just did is it created a freeze frame right there, that little asterisk on the timeline that's telling me there's no video there, it's just a freeze frame. And there won't be any audio there either. So that can be useful to you in certain circumstances. I'm going to undo that with command Z and we're back to how it was. Okay, we did the shortened word gap, we did the remove filler word. The next thing I would do to fix this up is fix the audio. And I'm going to go ahead and select my video. You can tell it's selected by the purple frame around the outside. And then over here in the property bar, we have the audio effects. We have something called studio sound. To turn on studio sound, just toggle this button and you can see the, the circle spinning. That's telling me that it's applying. It's going to take a moment, takes about a minute for a three minute video. And what this is, is, is it's using AI to improve the sound of my video. If there's dogs barking, if I'm in an echoey room, any other bad studio environments, it's going to fix that using AI. It works really well and it honestly works better the worse your sound is. If you already have really good sound, you have a good mic, you're in a soundproof room. You probably don't even need studio sound at all. Oh, look at that. It's already done. And yeah, it really helps with improving your audio quality. Version 73 of descript is here. And sometimes it's a little strong and it'll remove things that you don't want, like a laugh. It'll detect it as background noise. And if that's the case, you can click on the word studio sound and turn down the intensity. I usually find that 70 to 90 works pretty well. You can type it in there or you can click and drag left and right to change the intensity. Again, I'm going to go with 80 for this video. And then you have ducking. Ducking, if you're familiar with other editors, is a common feature. What this does is it'll reduce the sound of other tracks to that level. So if I had music, it would be reduced to 10% so that you can hear the speaker. And then if there's a gap, if there's a silent part where I'm not speaking, that music will automatically increase in volume. I'm going to go ahead and apply that. I don't have any background sound yet, but I'm going to put it on. And then I can also apply other effects by hitting this plus button. There's a compressor. I usually apply a compressor. It has a default setting where you can change the threshold ratio, attack release and knee. But I'm going to go ahead and change this to classic voiceover. That is what I usually use for podcast and talking head videos. Hit plus again. There's a limiter. There's eq. You also have default here, where you can manually change all of these settings or you can pick a preset. I usually do presence. There we go. And let's see how it sounds. Version 73 of descript is here. We have a couple. All right, so that's our audio effects. You can change the volume right here. You can type in a decibel level. You can make it plus 10, minus whatever you want. You can set it there. We can change our opacity. This is the opacity of the layer. You can turn it off completely by clicking this I button and it's gone. Our layout has to do with the size of the canvas, what's on the canvas. You can. You can change this by changing the corners. Like you can click and drag to make this bigger. You can drag on the edges and you can reposition it by clicking, moving it left and right, up and down. And if you're paying attention, these numbers were changing. So you can manually type in a number here and you can see how that shifts on our canvas. I'm going to undo that. So we have the. Where it is on the X axis, where it is on the Y axis, the width in pixels, the height in pixels. You can change. You can rotate it, you can change the roundness of the corners, make it more like an oval. And you can apply a green screen effect. I'm not going to do this right now because this isn't a good video to demonstrate on. But basically what this will do is remove the background and I have it applied to my recording right now. So if you notice my talking head in the bottom corner of this screen, I don't have a background, even though I'm in the same room that you see on the canvas, you can't see my background because I applied green screen and descript removed that, even though I don't have an actual green screen behind me. So, very handy feature. You can apply animations. This is like if you wanted to slowly zoom in. So again, to apply that, you'd go to the animation, hit the plus button. There's some preset ones like zoom and pan. Zoom in, Spin. I usually go with custom. This gives me the best control and how this works is when you click. Adds two keyframes on our timeline. So we have a beginning keyframe. This is where this is the state of the current video. And then if you select the second keyframe, the end keyframe, then you can manipulate this to however you want. So if you want to zoom in, this is how you are telling Descript to make the last frame look. So it'll go from the beginning keyframe, couple new changes, some improvements and some tweaks as usual, to the end keyframe. And if we click on it again, we go back to our animation. We hit this pencil that allows us to change it, we can return it to its original state. And you can do all sorts of things with this. You can have it move. That could be your last keyframe. You can have it spin. That could be your last keyframe. So there's all sorts of different ways that you can animate this and you can change how quickly it happens. If I move this end keyframe closer to the starting keyframe on the timeline, it'll shorten how quickly the animation happens. So let's do a zoom in again. And now watch how it looks. A couple new changes. Now it's a quick zoom rather than a 5 second zoom. It happens much quicker. That is how I would do that. The next thing I would do is add captions. If I'm adding captions to this video, captions can be found on this T in the top middle of the menu bar. At the top, click it. We have title, subtitle and text. These are static titles. So this is just. I can just call this video one, something like that, whatever. And we can change how this looks in the. On the properties bar. With this layer selected, you can change the font to whatever you want. They have a lot of preset fonts as well as you can add your own fonts. And I've made a video about how to do that previously. You can change if it's italic, the weight of the font, the size of the font, the alignment. So basic, just text editing stuff there. That all should be fairly familiar to most people. So that's title. That is static, it doesn't change and by default it applied it to the whole video. So I'm going to go ahead and delete that layer by selecting it. And this is our first time seeing a new layer. So again, this is our script layer, our base or bottom layer. And above that is our title layer, which is just called Video one in this case. So I'm going to delete that. So now I'm going to add captions back to the T at the top. We click it, we have our dropdown and we hit this captions button. Now, the difference with captions is, is captions is live, a live captioning of your transcribed words. So it's Going to take exactly what is here in your transcript and display it on the screen. Now, just like with the title, we can click it, we can move it around the screen, we can resize it, we can change the font, the weight, the color. We can do everything to make it our own. But I'm gonna go ahead and play it and show you how it works. Pay attention to the transcript as well as the screen. Version 73 of descript is here. We have a couple new changes, some improvements and some tweaks. And the. The transcript, of course, is time synced with my voice, so that should all be matched up. Sometimes it gets a little bit off, and that's more advanced to sync those if you have to. But usually Descript does a very good job about keeping things in sync. Let's go ahead and change how the captions look. Maybe I'll make it taller so we get two. Two rows of words. Okay. Just so you can see how that looks. And I could drag this. I can move it to the top, move it to the corner. You do whatever you want with it. I'm going to keep it in the bottom, since that's what most people are familiar with. And then you have this style under the text heading, you have this style heading. So if you hit it, it defaults to classic. And there's a couple presets here. So karaoke, this is a pretty cool one. This is where it highlights the active word. So let's see how that looks. Version 73 of descript is here. We have a couple. Karaoke is a popular style. Clean is where it's just the active word is different. Or version 73 of descript is here. We have a couple new changes like that. Or you can just go to classic and you can set your own. You can change the fill. So let's say I want it to be blue. I want the active word to be white. And it gives you a little preview here with the lorem ipsum. So lorem. And the active word ipsum is white. You can set a border. Let's go ahead and set a black border. Changes how it looks a little bit. You can set the thickness by clicking and dragging left and right. There's a really thick border. There's a really thin border. You can set a background over the whole thing. I just set it to green. You can see how that looks. You can get creative with that. Make your own. Do whatever you want. You can set a shadow, and then you can set the X and Y axis of the shadow as well as the Level of blur, I'm going to just turn that down a bit. I think a 5 on the Y and a 5 to 10 on the blur looks pretty good. That's kind of more of the what Netflix applies with a white fill, of course. Okay, so we went over the AI tools, we went over captioning and titling, sound improvements. The next step to complete your project would be simply to publish it. Now, to do that, you go to the publish button in the top right of your screen. Now, publishing. There's two important terms to know here. Exporting and publishing. Publishing is sending it to the web and they give you a lot of options. They default to web link. This means that it'll post to descripts cloud and it'll generate a URL where you can watch or share that video. So this is useful if you have client work and you're sending clients drafts, they can receive this link, they can leave comments on it, and it's very useful. It's also kind of loom functionality I mentioned where you could send this to an employee. It could be a training video and they can see it. You can make it where only they can access it. And it's very convenient. But if we click this dropdown, you can also publish directly to YouTube. This is a very handy feature. It allows you to bypass needing to download it to your computer and then upload it to YouTube. You can do everything straight from this software. You can set your title, your description, category, tags, whether to make it private, public or unlisted. Super handy feature. You can publish directly to a bunch of different podcast supporters, Bloovery, buzzsprout, E webinar, headliner and so on. And it just prompts you to sign in and then you can publish that directly to those sources. Next is our export button. So this is where we download it to our local hard drive. In this case, it's a video. So we have our video tab selected. You have a choice to export just the current composition. We talked about compositions, or you can do just the current scene. I, I only showed you one scene. I didn't split this up into multiple scenes. So this current scene would be this whole composition in this case. Or you can do all compositions. If you remember, I made a second composition. This would download both of those videos. You can change your resolution here. It only allows us to go to a max of 1080p because that's what the video is. But if I shot in 4K, I would be allowed to export in 4K. And if you're not on the paid tier, you'll be limited in your export functionality. Here you can choose the quality of the audio low, medium, high. You can change some audio settings here like channel, sample rate, audio bitrate, and so on, and then you just hit export and it'll save to your computer. Next you have audio. You can download this as an MP3, as a wave, or as a M4A, and once again you can choose composition, scene, all compositions, etc. You can download it as a gif, which would be no sound, it would be just the video. You can download it as a timeline, which means that you could put this into other tools, for example Pro Tools, Audition, Final Cut, Premiere, DaVinci, and this would allow you to edit it. In those other softwares you can download just the transcript as a docs, as a dot txt file or as a dot docs, etc. Or you can download the subtitles in SRT or VTT. So you could download this and then upload it with your YouTube video to allow subtitles for your viewers. So that is it. That is the gist, the 101 of how to go from never using descript before to publishing your very first video if you found this useful. I also have a course called the Descript Mastery Course. It is available for $99 at the time of this recording in September 2023. I'm going to do one of these tutorials once a quarter or once a month because this software is always changing and I'm going to cover different topics. I also have a webinar on the last day of every month. The one for September is in three days on September 30, so go ahead and register for that if you're interested. Links to everything in the description.