Descript Tutorial for Beginners - Everything You NEED to KNOW!

Descript is amazing but frustrating. I'm here to fix that. In this video, I'm going to go over a complete descript project workflow. For the absolute beginner. I'm going to go slowly and be very explicit as I go. So it's going to be a long one. Go ahead, use the chapter markers to skip around if you need. And I Recommend Having this YouTube video open while you're going through a project alongside me in descript so you can see the technique or the feature and then do it on your own project. The video on your screen right now is the one that I'll be editing today, and I've left a link in the description of this video to this exact same video file so that you can download it yourself and edit it with me. Or even better, use your own footage instead of this one. If you want to use my video, this one right here, go into the description below and click on the link which will open the page that you see right here with this video called to edit. This that you see is descript Custom video player. So from here find the download button in the top right, it's this down pointing arrow with a flat surface below the arrow and you click on that and it'll open up the video in another page and automatically start playing. Now, to download it to your computer, there's one more step. You have to right click on it on the video itself. Or if you're on a laptop, two fingers. I recommend use a mouse if you have one, and then you'll have the right click capability. But again, if you're on a laptop, two two fingers. So then when you right click and you have this open, hit save video as it opens up this option and I'll just keep the name in there original, that's fine. And I'll hit save. All right, and now it's just going to take a moment to download. It's already almost halfway done, so it goes quick, no big deal there. But while that's downloading, I'll talk about best practices for using this tutorial as we go through it. Feel free to pause it, rewind it, go into full screen mode if you want, go into 2x speed, do whatever you need to do for your particular learning style in order to master the features that I'm going to show you today. And if at any point you get stuck or you have any questions about anything that I cover, feel free to drop them in the comments below and I'll respond to you there. Or check out my course where I go into a lot more detail about everything. All the features in Description and that course is@ descriptmastery.com I also do one on one tutoring calls. Links to both services are in the description below. Okay, it looks like our download is complete, so let's get started. When you open descript for the first time, this is what you'll see. This is your project workspace. And for you, if you are an absolute beginner, you're not going to see anything here, but eventually this is where all the projects that you create will go. And each project, each video project has a little thumbnail next to it. If you hover your mouse over it, you can see a frame of what that video is, as well as the title of it, the duration of it, the size in megabytes or bytes or even gigabytes. If it's really big like this one, you have who the owner is, if it's you, or if it's somebody that you share the workspace with when it was created and the last time that it was viewed. All of these can be sorted if you click on them. You can sort from most to least in any of these categories. You can also change the view by clicking on this button in the top right. Let me grow up, make my window a little bigger here. Right now it's in List view. You can change it to Grid view by clicking on that button. And once again, you can sort by different parameters there. It's up to you. I'm going to go into List view because that's the default. You can sort by your most recent or just recent projects in general. Right here. Downloaded, meaning the videos are on your computer as opposed to just in descript Cloud, whether they're owned by you or whether they're shared with you from somebody else. So that at a high level is how to interpret all this. There is a Quick Recordings tab. This is for if you make a screen recording of yourself or a webcam recording. And it's. It's a little different than a normal project. We'll talk about that more later. You have AI speakers. This is how you create a text to speech AI voice where you can type something in and the AI will read it in your own voice. We'll talk about that later. There's templates. Templates are a way that you can take any setting that you make a lot of basically any repetitive task that you find yourself doing in descript and you can make a template out of it so that you can apply it with the click of a button. Private workspace are things that are only on your own work, that are only in your own drive, as opposed to shared with other members of your drive. So just like it sounds, it's private. You have your workspace down here, which is just another view. The projects are everything unorganized. The workspace view down here is where you can set up folders and you can make things a little bit more organized and you can make folders right here with this new folder button. Now you'll notice below my workspace I have three other options. These are things that I have favorited. And the way that you favorite something is you find this little star and then you hit it and now it's favorited. That one was the YouTube shorts folder. And you can now see it is under my easy access, under my workspace view. I'm going to go ahead and unfavorite that. And it's gone. And I showed you the. The thumbnail. If you hover over a video, if it's an audio only project, it'll just have a little microphone right there. And inside of our this view here, the workspace view, if you hover over to the left of your project, you'll see this little checkbox there. And that is so you can make a bulk action. So you can select multiple projects and then you can go to the three dots and you can say move to and I can move all of those into a folder. Eventually they don't have this option yet, but eventually there will probably be a way to bulk delete things, bulk removed from your computer and so on. Okay, so that is how to read all of the workspace options you also have. If you have multiple drives or you're editing for clients, there's a dropdown here where you can go into other work other drives rather and you can go into your settings with this button right here. You can add members to your drive, add other editors with this add members button button in the top left. And lastly, you have normal settings and things you can look at a help window where there's a debug option. There's check for updates. Descript 78.1.2 is the current version. As I make this and all sorts of different resources here at the top. Okay, without further ado, let's go ahead and make make a project. And we'll do that with the plus new button. It's this big blue button in the top right. Go ahead and click on it. And we have a dropdown. We can make a video project which is audio and video. You have an Audio Project, which is only audio. We have Quick Recording, which is a project, but you're more limited in the editing features. It's just a quick capture of your screen or of your webcam. And we have remote recording, which is SquadCast, which is another service that integrates with Descript where you can make a recording of an interview with multiple people. So let's go to Video Project. It says retrieving project as it sets it up. And the first placer where your cursor is blinking is going to be the title of your project. So let's go ahead and name this tutorial Video. And if you hit enter, it now skips down to the next line and this is your transcript. So when you add a video, it's going to automatically transcribe it into text and that is going to be how we can read our video and edit our video. There is an uploading, it's letting us know that it is uploaded. Uploading my. Another process I had going in the background, it's uploading it to the back. So anytime you see that spinning, there's something happening, something processing in descript's backend. Okay, to familiarize you with the user interface here, we're going to go over some key terms that you need to know. So over here on the left is our scene thumbnail bar. And this will make more sense once we add more scenes and have some video in here. But basically this is gonna be a preview of how our video is broken up so that we can quickly and easily navigate through it. Here once again is our transcript section. And you can add files here. You can split things into scenes, you can record, add recordings here and a lot of other things as well here. Moving over to the right one box is our canvas. So it's got this light gray and then inside is a black box. This is where our video, we'll be able to see our video as we're editing it. You can change the aspect ratio right here in the top left. So right now it's in landscape mode, which is the standard 16 by 9. That's the YouTube format, the long form YouTube format as well as you know what a lot of things on your TV would be. Yeah, just the general landscape format. Next you have one by one aspect ratio, which is a square, equal sided square. And you have portrait, which is the vertical mode. It's, it's taller than it is long or 9 by 16. And you can go into advanced mode where you can set different aspect ratios. I'm going to do 1080p don't need much more than that for this, but I'm also going to return it to landscape and then you can get more granular. It defaults to 1920 by 1080, but you can type in numbers here to make it something more custom. By default those numbers are going to be linked, meaning let me Change this to 1921. And notice that the height went up with the width. The reason is is they're linked. So if I click on that, they're now unlinked. Let me return it to 1920. And now you see that this one did not change. So I'm going to make it 1080 once again and hit return. And it's telling me that that's full HD. Ultra HD is 3840 by 2160. We don't need that for the sake of this video. And consider what you need, because if you go 4k is a very large file. It's going to take up a lot of space, it's going to be slow to edit. So for all those reasons, pick what you need and not more or less if you can get away with it. Now, frame rate, this is. You can go from 23.98 frames per second all the way up to 60 frames per second. The default is somewhere in the middle at 30 frames per second. That's what I'm going to go with for the sake of this video. If you have more questions about frame rate, picking the right one, et cetera, you can do a Google search or a YouTube search about the best option there. But I'm not going to waste time in this video going into detail on that. Okay, let's go ahead and close out of that. There is a option here in the top right to expand the canvas. So by default, this is kind of small. You can click on that and it'll make it full screen. Once again, in the top right, shrink canvas and we're back to where we were. Here on the right is our properties bar. It is open by default. This is where we can make changes to our layers, we can make changes to the duration, all sorts of stuff that we're going to go into later. This is where we're going to spend a lot of our time today is just right here in the properties bar. You can close it by clicking on that in the top right and that makes your canvas a little bit bigger there. Turn it back on by clicking it once again. Right to the left of that is the comments section. This is where you can leave comments with your teammates so you can Leave specific comments at specific timestamps so that you can communicate about the project that you're editing together. Super useful. Okay, once again, back to our properties. And with all of these, you can put your mouse in the boundary between the two sections, click and drag, and you can resize things. So this makes the transcript smaller and the canvas bigger, or vice versa. And then same, same, same thing with the scene thumbnail. You can make that smaller, Bigger to an extent. Okay, moving on. The next thing we're going to do is add a file to our project. And there's several ways we can do this. One way is, while you're inside of your transcript, click Add File, and then you can drag and drop something in here, or you can click Add Files and then find the file that you want to add, select it and hit Open. That's one way. I'm going to show you another way before I do that. The other way is to just find the file on your computer, on your desktop, wherever it might be, and just click it and drag it and release. And now it's. Now it's there. You'll see. Once again, anytime you see this spinning, something is processing. If I hover over it, it tells me that it is uploading. It tells me the name of the file, and it tells me how long it is. And there's a little check mark next to it, and that indicates that that is the file that I currently have previewed right here. You can also play it and make sure it's the right video. Make sure it's what you were expecting. There's three dots here where you can do different. Different settings. I'm not going to go into those right now, but we will talk about those later. By default, it inserts it into script. Or there's this little dropdown here where you can add it as a new layer. Your script is what gets transcribed by descript. You can think of it as your main layer, your base layer. Everything above the script is a supporting layer. So this is going to be our script layer. This is our most important layer, and this is what we're going to use. And again, back to the beginning of this video. You can download this file to your own computer so that you can use it. You can use the exact same file that I'm going to be using, and we can edit together. Or feel free to use your own footage if that's better for you. Whatever you want. This video is linked in the description. Okay, Insert into script. I'm going to click it. And the first thing that happens is it says set transcription language. By default, Descript will automatically transcribe your files in the selected language. You can change this at any time in your app preferences. So pick your language. Presumably it's English and you can toggle off if you don't want it to prompt you again. But I'm going to leave it on just for demonstration purposes. And now all you can do is click transcribe. Or if you don't want to transcribe, you can hit this X at the top. Right. Right button of this box. Now, the reason you might not want to transcribe is if you're on the free plan or the creator plan, where you have a limited amount of time that you can transcribe per month. On the free plan, it is one hour. And so if you're trying to transcribe your video, don't need up your time and you can just close out there. But if you want to transcribe, go ahead and press the transcribe button. And now you can see there's one more pop up. It says transcribing. It's telling us the file is transcribing the number of speakers. So if you have an interview here or you have multiple people on camera, you can select that here. In this case, it's just me. So I'm going to select one. There's just, I'm letting it know there's one speaker and it says detecting speakers. So if it already knows or if it's already had videos before where you've identified this particular speaker, it might be able to identify who it is. It says it's found multiple speakers in this file. So it didn't work perfectly well because it's just me. But let's see what it, what it found. I'm gonna hit get started. And you can't hear it, but it's, it's playing a preview of me and it said who's speaking? So I'm gonna let it know it's me, Ross. And I'm already in there because I've trained an AI voice on myself. So I'm going to click that. And now it's playing a second preview. And of course, once again, it's me. So I'm going to select myself. Says that's it. If you need to add, if you need to adjust the speaker labels, simply drag and drop. I'll hit close. And look at that. Our transcript is now in there and it's labeled at the top. I could hit this X button to relabel it or rather to get rid of my label, I can relabel it by clicking on the name. And then there's this dropdown. You can choose yourself, or you can go to stock AI speakers. And these are like narrator voices or like deep, or, you know, just typical narrator voices that are very professional sounding. Okay, so our file is now transcribed. Look at this. This. This is my entire transcript. A couple things to point out here is, first of all, this slash right here at the beginning that indicates that this is a scene. Scenes are how we break up our project into smaller units so that we can apply effects to smaller parts of the video versus applying it to everything. And then you'll see some words are underlined in blue. That's words like, see right here, I repeated the word what twice, so it underlined the first one in blue. It's telling me that that might be a mistake. And what these are are filler words. These are words that don't add anything to what I'm saying. And descript has a tool where we can get rid of these. So the very first thing I'm going to do as part of my workflow once this has been transcribed is get rid of those filler words. And if you see this actions button in the very top, we can click on that. There's several things here. There's a new layer. There's remove filler words, shorten word gaps. And we're going to do remove filler words. So if you click on that, it now highlighted all the filler words in yellow, and it tells me it found 78 filler words. If I click on this right here, it tells me everything that it found. So it found 32 ums, 16 uhs, 6sos, 3 likes, 21 repeated words. So I can get more granular if I want to change what it found. The repeated words. Sometimes you want to keep those in uhs, and ums are almost always you're want. You're going to want to get rid of them. The exception to that is if the um or uh is really close to the following word. And then it gets clipped by cutting it. But we'll look at each of these individually. They're also here on the right. And you can see the word in context. So right here it says, I've done this. Just talk about an hour or just talk for about an hour. So I can click on it. Done this. Just talk for. I can click on the next one, mostly now that we have more people. So it plays it in context. It plays like a second before it plays the filler word and then it plays a second after. And what I can do with this is I can click this X to remove the result, basically saying, this is fine, this is a good filler word. I'm going to keep it. Or I can hit remove. And if you were paying attention to my transcriptions about it's now gone. And right where that was, there's this vertical gray line and that's telling me that my video has been cut at that point, that something is missing from what was originally there. Now let's do it again. So here is the. This one in orange. This that's highlighted in orange is where my current where it's currently looking. So I can hit remove and it's gone. Talk about notice if biggest update, it was if and if was lowercase. Now it's capitalized because it's now at the beginning of that sentence. Now the other thing we can do is remove all. If I know that I want to get rid of all of these, they're all bad filler words, I can do that with the click of a button. I'm not going to do that just yet because I want to. I want to change what I'm searching for here so I can unselect all and then I can just search for ums. And usually I know for sure I want to get rid of those. So let's go back and see what it found. Okay, 44 total and us. And I could search through these on the right and just make sure I want to make the changes. It also puts the timestamp of where that video or where that word was found. So that one, for example, was found at 9 minutes and 7 seconds in my video. But again, I'm just going to get rid of all these. And actually, one second, there's delete. I want to go over some terms. There's this. There's delete by default. There's delete and replace with gap, which would just put a. A video that has a black frame and is silent. So it'd get rid of my voice and it would get rid of my video. There's ignore, which will do a strikeout. So let me show you how this looks. So let me select this right here. Just talk for. So I have this right here, this orange one highlighted. And if I hit remove, notice how there's the biggest grayed out and there's a line through it that is gone now from my video, but it remains here in the transcript so I can stay aware of it in case I want to bring it back. And if I wanted to bring it back, I could simply hit that restore button or I can hit delete, which again removes it. And now it's gone. But okay, with all of these uhs and ums, I'm just gonna go ahead and delete them. I'm gonna hit remove all and they're gone. I get this little notification in the bottom middle. Deleted 43 selections. And now I'm gonna change my parameters once again. Ums and uhs are almost always. I don't want them. But some of these likes and so's and repeated words, I'm going to get a little bit more granular with these. Just checking what, what you're able to see. And instead of delete, I'm going to do ignore on these. A best practice is to do ignore because then you can bring them back if you want. So with these ones that I'm not as sure about, I'm going to do that. I'm going to hit remove all using the ignore option. And you can see there it is. Okay, enough about the filler word removal. I'm gonna do shortened word gaps. This is the next thing to look for. And with shortened word gaps, you can look for big pauses in your video. So right now it defaults to looking for three seconds or more. So this is three seconds where it doesn't identify any speech in my video. And three seconds is pretty long. I'm going to bump this down to two. Two seconds, two seconds or more. And you hit enter and then you can choose what you want to shorten it to. So right now it's set to shorten to one second. I can make it zero. I can make it just so there's no nothing there at all. No gap. Or I can make it 05 or anything I want. So let's see. It actually didn't find anything that was two seconds or more. Let's try one second or more. Okay, there we go. So now very similar to the filler word, we can see different gaps of 1 second or greater and how long they are. So this one's 1.1. Once again, we can click on it to play it in context. Got. Let me just verify. And it plays one second before, plays the gap and a second after. So I can make sure if that's really something that I want to remove and if it is, I can hit this shorten button templates and it just put that for free. It just cut that 1.1 second gap to half a second. Now we can find gaps on our transcript with these little, these little dots right there. If you see those, those light gray dots. And I don't have a lot of big dots, but if you had a really long line, you might have several lines of dots. So it really depends on how long the gap is. And you can turn those off as well on the transcript so that you don't see them, but for now they're there. And then once again, we can review these one by one. We can click through the arrows, the up and down arrows here to review them individually, or we can just blanket shorten all. I'm going to go ahead and do that. I don't know if this is a good edit or not, but that would be something to look into in your individual project. So shorten all. There we go. And then we get this notification in the bottom. Shortened 17 word gaps. Okay. And the next thing I would do is just go through the project and start making my rough cut. So maybe there's parts where I repeated myself and actually Descript just added a thing to do this. So right here, this Remove Retakes button, let me, let me show you that again. So right here at the top, there's your AI Actions tab. So go ahead and click on that. Right here at the very bottom is Ask AI. And then there's this thing that says Remove Retakes. And what this is, is if you shoot a long video, this is what I do when I'm making a video is I'll just shoot it in one take and I'll do a particular scene or a sentence, and if I make a mistake, I'll just start over and then I'll know to go back and edit it in post. Well, descript uses AI to make this really easy. You can just do Remove retakes. And it has this prompt in here which is detect and delete all the repeated takes from this recording. I don't think it's going to find any because this was from a webinar that I did in November. But I'm going to hit return and see what it finds. And it says AI is thinking I can stop it. Okay, so right here where it crossed out some things crossed out things that it thinks are retakes. And I could say apply edits to script, in which case it would go ahead and remove those. Or I can say copy edits to new composition. It would just take this edited version and copy it into a new composition. I'm going to talk about compositions in a moment. Or I can hit start over to just run the process again. I'm going to go ahead and apply edits to Script. And I can see my. My video is now 10 minutes and 17 seconds long. It was 10 minutes and 22 seconds. So it got rid of about five seconds. It got rid of this line right here. And I can tell that because it's crossed out and it's light gray. If I wanted to bring it back, I could simply hit the restore button or I could delete it if I decide I don't want it and hit delete. Descript is non destructive, so anything that you delete or ignore or get rid of in any other way, you can always bring it back. And we'll talk about that in a moment. So first of all, I mentioned compositions. I want to go into what that is. So your project. You can think of your project as a folder, a folder that holds compositions. Every project has at least one composition. So this, this video that I'm editing right now is a composition inside of a project. And the project is called Tutorial Video. If I click on it in the top left, I get this dropdown and there's a button that says Enable multiple Compositions. I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And now I have a composition called Tutorial Video inside of a project also called Tutorial Video. By default, it gives it the same name as the first composition. But again, if you click on this one, you get a dropdown. This is a left click. You get a dropdown and it says Compositions. And then there's a check mark next to Tutorial Video. This is the video that I'm currently in. This is the composition that I'm currently in. And I can hit New Composition right here. And now I'm in a second composition. So this is an untitled composition inside of the project called Tutorial Video. Let's return to our first composition. And now we're back in here. And I can rename this project by clicking on it. I get this dropdown. This is a left click. And right here at the very top it says Rename. So I'm going to go ahead and click that and I'm going to change this to Tutorial Project. And notice my video one is still called Tutorial Video. So let me call this Tutorial Composition. Okay, so hopefully that makes that a little clearer. There's Project and there's Composition. Every project has at least one composition. Now before I start chopping up my video into smaller scenes, I'm going to go ahead and apply things that I want to apply to this entire video. So that Includes my sound editing and any special effects that I want to add. So to do that, to add your sound effects, the typical ones that I would add to this project, click on the layer, click on the video, and you'll see here in the Properties bar, there is an audio effects section. And if you don't see your Properties bar again at the top right, you can left click on this button here, and that'll toggle your Properties bar open and close. So in your Properties bar, Audio Effects, you go to this by default. There is this thing that says Studio Sound under it. Studio Sound is a really cool feature. It uses artificial intelligence to touch up your audio. So if you have dogs barking, if you have traffic noise, if you have anything going on, this can make it sound. It can get rid of those to make it sound like you're recording in a studio. To turn it on, all you do is hit this little toggle here, click on that, and now you can see it's working because there's this little spinning bar. It says processing as well as this toast in the bottom right that says applying Studio Sound to and then your video file name. Now, Studio Sound is really simple. There's not much you can do with it. The only thing you can do is change the intensity. And these, this little icon here that looks like dials. If you hover over it, it says effect settings. And if you click on it, you get this little dropdown. And there's only one thing you can do with Studio Sound. Well, really two things. The first one is turn it on and off. The second one is adjust intensity. By default, it goes to 100% intensity. Now, why would you not want to use 100% intensity? Sometimes studio sound, if it's too intense, can make your voice sound robotic. It can take some of the tone out of your voice. It can cover up things like laughs. It might detect your laugh as a background sound. And so it just sounds like this awkward, weird noise. And it can make your voice sound robotic. So for all those reasons, you might consider turning this down. With my particular setup with the mic that I use in the room that I use, I find that about 85% works well. So you simply click in there, type in the number you want to adjust it to, and then hit enter. And now it's going to be at 85% studio sound. You can also click in there. Click on the blue bar. Hang on, click in the intensity bar, and drag to the left to lower it or drag to the right to raise it. And I recommend just do some Trial and error, click in a setting, play it, which is to the course to my website and business. See how it sounds. If you like it, stick with it. If you don't like it, raise it or lower it accordingly. And you can get rid of Studio sound simply by clicking the toggle button once again. And now it's off, just like that. And you can delete it all together with this minus button there. And it's gone. Go back to the plus button and re add it. And the interesting thing about Studio sound is once it's been applied, once it applies instantly. So it, it locks in that, that setting and you can just immediately toggle it on and off. See what you prefer right below that is ducking. If I'm going to add background music or sound effects, then this is when I would add ducking. Ducking. What it does is let me go ahead and apply it and then go to the effect settings and you can see the amount of ducking is 10%. What this does, and it says in that black box to the left of it, is other tracks will be reduced to this level, except when a gap clip is playing on this track. So what that means is if I have another track, let's say it's my music track, it'll be reduced to 10% so that that music track isn't overpowering my voice. And then if there's parts where I stop talking, that music will smoothly increase in volume to its maximum level until I start talking again, when it will drop back down to 10%. So ducking is really useful if you have background layers like music. I'm gonna go ahead and close that. The next thing I would apply, I'm going to go back to the plus button. I'm going to go into Dynamics and we have Compressor and Limiter. I'm not going to talk about limiter because that's not as common, but it's useful if you have a really loud background. Compressor is good for really loud or really quiet. It lowers, it compresses. As the name implies, the dynamic range of your audio. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that and we can now see it's automatically applied. If I click on the Effect settings icon. I have all these settings. If you know what you're doing here, if you're a sound guy or a sound woman, you can change the threshold, change the ratio, Attack, Release and Knee. I'm not going to go into all those. I usually just use a default, which if you click on the word default, you get this dropdown And I always do podcasts and voiceovers, so I find that the classic voiceover works really well. I'm going to click on that, and it has a default set for all of these numbers. I'm just going to close on that and let's take a listen. Let's see how it sounds now. And here it is. This is the new. Sounds pretty good. I'm happy with that. There's also other things in here, like creative. You can do bit crusher, distortion, flanger, reverb, which kind of adds an echo effect to your voice. So all of those things might make sense to do in different types of videos. For this video, I don't want those. Those are all going to distort my voice. Okay. The next thing I might do is change the audio level. By default, Descript will sometimes adjust this automatically. So if your voice is really loud, like maybe you're really close to your microphone, it might automatically lower the audio level here to a negative decibel level. Mine's at plus 0.0 decibels. The video sound was good enough, so I'm gonna. Let's. Let me just play it. Let me see how it sounds. Ending page for Descript Mastery. It's almost a little bit quiet, so let me just bump this up. Let me do +2.5, see how that sounds. I've got. And feel free to drop. That's fine. I'm gonna. I'm gonna stick with that. I can click in there. I can adjust it left and right, or I can just click and then type in a number like I just did. Both options work. To the right of that is a speaker icon. It'll be on by default. But if I click is now muted and you can see my audio effects, everything disappeared along with that because it's going to mute this entire layer. So let me turn that back on. And now we're gonna be able to hear it again. There's this opacity here. If I wanted right now, it's at a hundred percent, meaning you can see it completely. If I wanted to turn it down and make it kind of hazy, I could do that. Where you can barely see it doesn't make sense right now. But you could see how for other layers, if you put something on top of this, you might turn the opacity to something less than a hundred percent. As with the sound, there is a button right to the right of the setting where if you click makes it completely zero opacity. So you can't see it at all. And it looks like A shut eye icon. If I click it again, it turns it on and you can see it. Okay. The next thing I would do through this whole video before I start chopping it up into scenes is here under the effects section. Now, by default, there's a green screen section thing or green screen feature open. If I toggle that on, it's going to process this for a moment. You can see applying green screen to original MP4. And this isn't going to work great because my image is so small in the top right. I'm actually curious to see what it's going to do at the beginning. It'll work great and you'll see in a moment when it's applied what it does. But this is using AI to take out my background. So while that's processing, let me apply something else. Oops. And I keep getting my. My recording menu there on the right side. So let me just make this a little bigger, move it around. Let me hit this plus button. And if you go down to this eye contact, this is the next thing I'm going to apply. This uses AI to make it look like I'm always looking at the camera, even if I'm actually reading off of a teleprompter or looking somewhere else. So super useful for video walkthroughs like I'm doing right now. But it does tell us it's in beta. So it may take a while to process and it may not be perfect, but let's go ahead and apply it. There we go. And for some reason, the green screen didn't actually do anything, so that didn't actually work correctly. It should have removed my background, so there's just black behind me, but that didn't work. So I don't know why, and I'm not going to troubleshoot that live, but that should work. Like, if you've ever used zoom where you can take out your background, it should do that effect. When it's working, apologize that it's not okay. The other thing is chroma key. If you have an actual green screen, if you have a green background behind you, you would use chroma key. And chroma key by default. Let me close these toasts so I can see it. There's a setting. So for example. Oh, okay, there we go. The green screen just kicked in. So let me. Let me close the chroma key before I talk about that. So there's my green screen. Let's see how it looks. Once I start sharing my video, I'm scrolling through my timeline you can scroll through your timeline if you have a mouse with a wheel by pressing Shift and then scrolling up or down. If you scroll down, it'll scroll to the right on your timeline. Okay, so notice because it didn't detect a person. This is where I was sharing my screen. It did the green screen effect on me on the top right. But it also got rid of the screen I was sharing. So that's why I was saying this doesn't really make sense to apply on this type of video. So let me go ahead and select that layer and I'm going to turn green screen off by clicking the toggle. A left click and it's off. And now it's back to how it originally was. But let me finish my discussion on the chroma key. So if we go to our effects, hit the plus button, hit chroma key. The way this works is again, this is if you have a real green screen, like a green sheet behind you, you can set the color of the sheet, which it defaults to this. But I could also get rid of this yellow background, for example. And that, that, that didn't do a good job because it also got rid of everything. But then you can set the similarity. So this is how similar the colors that it's getting rid of in pixels are. And if I slowly bring it back, so that's with zero percent similarity. And it's, it got rid of the, the wall, but it also got rid of all the similar shades of yellow in my face, in my clothing, in the, the carpet and wall around it. So again, not a good example, but that is how you would use an actual green screen. And let me just get rid of that by hitting the negative button. And it's now back to how it was. Okay, so the next thing I would do is if I had the green screen, I could apply a background. Let's go and do that actually, just for fun. So we can go into our media bin here in the top right or here in the top middle. It's this media bin and it produces this dropdown right here. The first tab you'll be on when you open it is files. I can go to videos, I can go to GIFs, but I'm going to go to images for this particular instance. And then if I come down here, I can just find one that I like. Like this one looks nice, looks peaceful. It's just a little stream. You can click on it and it says loading media that's downloading that image from Descript or whichever third party stock footage service that they use, and it's going to put it into my project in a moment. Okay, while that's loading, I'm going to show you some other things. When you have a layer selected, one very important thing in descript is where your mouse is and what you have selected. Or if, for example, if I have this layer selected, this is my video layer. I have all these options. If I click into the canvas, all those options go away. But I have a different set of of things that I can do, like add transitions, effects, background, color. So notice when I clicked on that, it made a white background. I can click on this little white dot in the background section and I can make it any color I want, like so. And then I can hit this little X button to close or actually, one other thing to show you is this eyedropper. With this eyedropper, you can select a specific pixel and you can replicate that color. So here's this gray background. Boom. And now it's all just gray. That's a little confusing because it just blends into the canvas, but I think you get the idea of how that works. So, okay, there's our background. It finally finished loading. And notice, this is our introduction to layers. That background is now a layer right here, this blue one that I have selected. And it's on top of my script layer. Again, script layer is like your base layer. So I now have something on top of that, and I can adjust it by right clicking on it. Hit SELECT LISTEL CORRECTION 1 below that layer order, and you can bring to front, which it's already in front. It's on top of all my other layers. I can bring forward, which will just move it one layer forward. If I had a bunch of layers, I can hit send to back or correction send backward, which moves it one layer back, or I can hit send to back, which moves it all the way to the back, which is what I'm going to do, because this is going to be my background. So there we go. That layer is now in my background, and now with it still selected, I can tell it's selected because the blue line around its perimeter, it might be really hard to see in YouTube, but it's there. And on the corners, there's these little white dots. And if you notice, when I move my mouse around it, I have these. This cursor turns into a double arrow, and on the corner it turns into an angled double arrow. So if I click that, it'll change in proportion. It'll change proportionately. If I move on the sides, I can Just make it longer. And then I can adjust that layer with my arrows. So right now I'm clicking the up arrow and you can see it's slightly moving up and down. Or I can click and move it up and down, left and right, whatever I want, I can adjust it to get it just right. And I release and that layer is now in place. And if I click into my canvas so that no layer is actively selected, you can see my layers right here. There's my script layer on top of the scenic layer. And I can click these and adjust the order by clicking, holding and dragging. And now I put my scenic evening view on top of my script layer. So now my script layer is hidden. I'm going to undo that by just clicking and dragging. And there we go. And now if I click on my script layer and you can tell your script layer because it has a purple box around it instead of a blue box. So now that one is selected and same thing, I can adjust it, I can move it up and down, left and right. I can make it bigger. The little white dots in the corner I can drag to make that bigger. I can hit Undo Command Z on a Mac, Control Z on a Windows. Or you can go into File, correction, Edit and then undo like so. And with the layer selected, you got these things above it, this little menu here. You can hit Fill screen, which makes it as big as it can be. Inside of the canvas you can hit this circle, which it made me expand and filled into a circle. It doesn't make much sense to do right here. You can change it into landscape portrait. You can crop it, you can rotate it there I am upside down, you can flip it there I am opposite, you can flip it horizontally. Correction. That first one is horizontal. The second one is flip vertical, which will put me upside down like so. And there's three dots where you can change the layer order. We saw this before. I can bring to front, bring forward, send backward, send to back. I can hit view media, I can hit replace media, which I could change this image into another image if I wanted. I can change the source. We can talk about all those later. I don't want to confuse you just yet. Okay, so now that we have an interesting looking video here, let's talk about scenes. It's time to finally talk about scenes. And what scenes are is a way to break up our project, our composition rather. Right now this whole composition is one scene. And I can tell that because right here on the left is my scene thumbnail. Right now there's only one Scene thumbnail, telling me there's only one scene. And the scenes are noted in your transcript with this slash button or this slash symbol as well as down here on your timeline. You see this, this little thumbnail with the number one next to it that is indicating that this is scene number one. Now, if I wanted to create scene number two, I can move my cursor on the transcript to wherever I want to put it. So right now, right before the word if, let's say I want to put my, my next scene right there, I can type a slash on my keyboard, forward slash, or right here to the left, there's this add scene button. And if I click it, I now have a second scene, and now there's scene one on my left. Scene thumbnails, and they're scene two. And by default, the thumbnail that you see here is the first frame of scene two. Down here on my timeline, I'm going to hit command and use my scroll on my mouse to zoom in again. That's command. While holding command, scrolling. Or if you're on a laptop, two fingers on the trackpad. The other option for scrolling in is down here on this bar. If you see this little dot, you can click on that. Your cursor turns into two arrows, and you can scroll to the right to zoom out, or you can scroll to the left to zoom in. And now we have scene one denoted by a thumbnail and the number one. And then right here to the right, scene two with the thumbnail and the number two. And then once again, you, you got it on your, your scene, thumbnails on the left and your slash right there on the transcript. To get rid of a scene, we can put our cursor right before that slash and simply hit delete on your keyboard like so. And it's gone. That scene is now gone, but I'm going to add it back by pressing once again, the slash button. Okay, now we're back to two scenes. Okay, so the reason that we break our project up into scenes is so that if we make a change to one scene, it'll apply to only that scene. So, for example, right now, my playhead, this vertical black line on the timeline is my playhead. So right here where you see that, it's telling me that's at 9 seconds, 0.74. That is the frame that appears right here in the canvas, that exact moment in this video, as well as right here in the transcript. You can see that blue, dark blue line with the blinking cursor. That is where we're Looking right now. So it doesn't matter as long as I'm inside of scene one. Anywhere in scene one, I can add something to it. For example, I could add an image again, or I could add a video. I could add a gif, which are like these little memes, these usually funny. Or there's something from a movie. I'm not going to do any of those right now. I'm going to instead do a title. So up here in the top middle is this T that says text when you hover over it. If I click on it, I can do title, subtitle, or text. These are all going to be pretty similar, and what these are are static. So let me go ahead and add a title. So it adds a big title right in the middle of the video. And what I want to point out here is this is a new layer. It's this blue layer here on the timeline. It's on top of everything. It's on top of the background, of course, and it's on top of my script. And it just says the word title. So in the preview, it just says title down here. But what's important to know is because I added it inside of scene one, it filled the entire scene. So it starts at the beginning of scene one and it ends at the end of scene one. Now, I can adjust it if I put my mouse on the very end boundary of it. You see how it turns into a bracket? I can click and I can drag to the right and it extends now into scene two. Or I can click to the left and make it so it does not fill the entirety of scene one, but by default, it's going to fill the scene where you add it. Okay? So clicking on that layer again and then clicking here onto the video, I'm going to highlight those words and just change it. So I can just type in there as if I'm editing a PowerPoint. I think most people watching this are probably familiar with how that works. So again, that was a double click onto the scene itself or onto the layer itself to allow me to change the title. Now, if I click away and then I click and select that layer once again, I can drag it around my canvas and let's move it down here so that it's not covering my face. Now, the other thing is, with it selected, and if you see there's a blue border around it, letting me know that it's selected, I can resize it. We're familiar with this by now. The white dots in the corners or on the vertical and horizontal Boundaries. We can resize it like that. But we can also look in our properties bar under the text section. It is default to Roboto. That is the font is Roboto. If I click on that, there's a number of options here. I can select a different type of font, like let's do lato. And it's so big that it goes into. It just puts the last letter into a different line. So let me just expand that. So I just made it bigger so that it all fits into one line. I can change the weight. So the only option is black, which is like a really bold, heavy weight. But you could do with other ones. Let me find another one. Let's do inter. So with inter, I can do black or I can do medium. I can do thin, extra thin, light, regular, semi, bold. I can do anything I want with the weight. Next is the size of the font itself. Right now it's at 200. It's really big. So let me. Let me bump this down to 120. I just clicked in that box. It's a left click and then type on your keyboard whatever number you want to resize it to 1, 2, 0. And I hit enter. And now it's a lot smaller. Moving on, you have your alignment. So right now it defaults to centered. But I can make it left aligned. I can make it right aligned. I'm going to stick with centered for the purposes of this. You can also do your justification. So you can make it top aligned. Correction. I guess that's. I guess it's also called align. So top align, which moves it to the top of your text box. Center aligned or bottom aligned. I'm going to stick with bottom aligned. I like how that looks. And then the last option in your text box is standard case, also known as camel case. This is where some letters are capitalized and some letters are lowercase. If you want to make it all capitals, right to the right of that is this uppercase button. And if you click on it, look at that. It's all caps now. So pretty convenient. The next thing after that is the fill color. It defaults to white. But let's say I want to make it red. I can click on this little white circle here and I get this dropdown and I can just move my pixel to any color that I want. I'm gonna make it red. So I'm gonna go to the top right corner and I'm just gonna close that box. And now it's red. Our text color is red. I can add a border to that. With this plus button here. Click on it and by default, It's a weight of 10. I can click in there and drag to the left to go all the way down to zero, or I can go all the way to whatever I want to some ridiculous until it fills the entire screen. I'm not going to do that, of course, but I can click in there and just type a number. Let me do 15. Okay, that looks good. I can change the color of the border. Right now it's black. I can make it a white border, like so. And oops, my Descript recorder is in the way. So I'm just gonna cancel out of that. I can get rid of the border by clicking this negative sign. Or I can bring it back and it's back. And it remembers our changes. So I. I had a white background and that. Wait, it remembers the last setting that I had. I can add a background to the text. Again, we're only manipulating the text layer right now by hitting the plus button and added a black background. I could do white background. I'm gonna do like a light, like a dark gray close that. You can add shadows. That makes it pop a little bit. You can do the effects where you can change the intensity of the blur, the color, all sorts of different shadow effects right there. You can also do chroma key color adjustments, blur, all sorts of different stuff. I won't get into all that or this video will be even longer than it's already going to be. So that was titles. The next thing I'm going to show you is captions. Captions are different than titles because titles are static. You type in what you want it to say and it stays that way. Captions are changing. Captions are based off of your transcript and they're synced in time with your transcript. So if I go back to the T, it's the same button that we added the title with. And we go down to captions and simply click on that. There we go. It added a caption. And now watch what happens when I play this. And we're live. Welcome to the November edition of the Descript Mastery Webinar. And there we go. You can see it's moving with my words. It's reading the transcript now, as before, as with everything in descript, this is a layer. So right here it's just called captions. And by default, once again, it only applies to the scene that I added it in. So I recommend, if you're going to add captions and you want it to cover your whole video, add it before you start chopping your video up and into scenes. So let me add it into scene two, because scene two is the entire rest of my video. The scene one is only 25 seconds long. Scene two is everything from 25 through the end. So once again, I'm going to go to text captions. And now that caption layer covers the entirety of my video. I could also have taken this caption and just dragged it, like, clicked on the boundary and then just dragged it all the way to the end. But that's a little tedious. So that's why I recommend just add it from the beginning and have it set how you want before you start chopping it up into scenes. Okay. So with my captions layers selected as before, I can move it around. I can change the colors, I can change the look. I can do whatever I want to it. Right now, it's a black italic. I can make it black, make it bold. You get the idea. I won't go into all the considerations with the look and feel of it. I kind of like this with a yellow. You can also add a karaoke effect. So here in the style tab. This is new and unique to captions. It's not something you can do with the title, but with captions, you can do classic, which is just what you saw where it's just reading my transcript. And it's simple. Karaoke makes it so that the current word I'm saying has a background, and then the future words are a different color. So let me show you what this looks like. If I hit play or any of my services, we can talk about that as well. And on that note, so you can see it bounces the highlighted word as it goes forward in the script. And you can change the color. So there's the background, that blue one, I could change it to yellow. And then the active word has a white background. I could change it to red. Like, so I'm not suggesting that this is visually appealing, but it's something you could do about the course or any of my services. We can talk about that as well. Okay, so that is captions. Captions are really useful. And that brings up another point. If you're going to be using captions, it's important to have a really accurate transcript. So let me go ahead and let's bounce back to talking about the transcript and correcting the transcript for a moment. So I'm going to show you first of all, entering correct mode. So if you select on some words drag and highlight, like, let me take this whole sentence that says, this is like the fifth month that I've done this. So I selected that whole sentence, and when I release my mouse, this box pops up over it. There's a bunch of different options here. You can do the ask AI tools. You can add a layer, which would be like adding another B roll or something. You can hit replace, but for our purposes, we're going to do correct. And it puts in that entire highlighted section in a text box. And let's say descript AI. Whoops. Accidentally click something. I didn't mean to. Let's say AI's descripts. AI messed up the transcript. It picked up the word fifth, but it should have said fourth. Well, I can select that word inside of that correct box, and I can type in what I meant for it to be like so. And then when I hit correct, there it is. It's now in my transcript. It's now down here on the timeline. The word fourth is right there. And if I play it, it'll be in my captions. This is like the fifth month that I've done this. Now, notice the audio didn't change. I'm still saying this is like the fifth month, even though the words say fourth, because I manually changed it. So be aware of that later. We can talk about actually changing the audio as well with the AI speakers, but we're not there yet. So another way to get there is you can do the same thing. You can highlight some words. Correction. Let me go back a step. You can hold C on your keyboard, and when you hold C, like the first letter of correct on your keyboard, you can see my cursor has a little pencil below it now. And now if I click on a word, it pops up my correct box immediately. So if I say, it says this, but I meant to say that I could just make that change, hit correct, and now that changes in place. So that was just one word. I can also hold C again. Oops. Correction. You don't even need to hold it. You can just tap it, and then you can select a whole line as I did before, like so. And then let's say I wanted 4th to be like the number 4th. Boom. Like that. Okay? So that was the correct tool. And then also getting there on your keyboard through the letter C, the next thing is the letter X on your keyboard, like X ray. So if I hold X, notice my cursor has a period and a comma after it. So what I could do now is when I put my mouse over something, it gets a light gray background behind it. If I click on it, notice this word, this has a period behind it. If I click now, it has a comma. If I click again, it has no punctuation. If I click again, it has a period. And notice when it adds a period, the next word just is now capitalized. And if I go back now, it's a comma and the word just is lowercase. And again, I'm holding the letter X this whole time. Okay, then the last one, the last keyboard shortcut for your transcript is the letter Z. If I hold Z, notice there is an uppercase and a lowercase A below my mouse. And if I go to a word like welcome, which is currently capitalized, I can click on it. And now it's lowercase. Click capital, click lower. And I can do that to any word. Like if I want to say the November edition, all caps, I can do that. Okay, so those are the Z, X and C hotkeys. Very, very useful for correcting your transcript. So what I would recommend is if you're going to use captions, it's important that your transcript is accurate. So go through, fix up the punctuation, fix up the spelling, and get everything looking exactly how you want it. Okay, so we've done captions, we've done titles, we've done some transcript correction, we've done scenes. The next thing we can talk about is adding audio. So let me go into our media bin. We have this drop down. Once again, we can go to audio. There are two headings under audio. There's music and there's sound effects. Let's start with music. Under the music category, there's all. These are all the different song names. You have the name, and then over here on the right you have how long the song is. On the left, a play button. The play button allows you to have a preview of that song before you go ahead and add it to your project. So let's just play this one. That's called Little Pastry Instrumental. Very good. Hit it again to pause it. And then if you come over here to the empty part with the name, if you click anywhere in there, a left click and it's going to add it. Now once again, I'm inside of a layer or I'm inside of a scene. I'm inside of scene one. So it's only going to apply to this scene when I add it. So let's go ahead and add it. And it says loading media. That's just letting us know descript does download everything when it adds it. And then it'll add it as a layer, which we'll see in a moment. While that's loading, I'm going to talk to you about one more way that you can add it, which is back to your media bin. You can go to Files and then if you had a audio file on your computer, that's your own audio file, not one of the descripts, like you have your own song, then this is where you could add it. You could go to add files, browse through your computer, or. Or you could drag and drop it into here and then you'd be able to add it in that way. Okay, it's kind of slow. I don't know if descript servers are. Are a little sluggish today, but it doesn't normally take this long. The other thing we can do in audio is there's that music heading right next to it is sound effects. And oh, one other thing, you can search these. So let's say here, here in the music bar, in the search music, you want to find a certain genre. So you could type in Classic, for example, and it's going to find all the different classic music in its library. That's kind of cool. So anyways, next is the sound effects. And it still has Classic in the search bar. So it found me some classic sound effects text, whatever those are. But by default, here's some interesting ones again. Play button to preview it. I'm not able to hear those for some reason. I think it's a little slow and I misspoke. I said that this audio file would only fill the layer that I added it to. It'll actually add the entire music file. So this one is like two and a half minutes long. So it added the entire thing, even though it crossed a scene boundary. So the other thing I want to point out. Let's go and play it. Fifth month that I've done this. Just talk for an hour about your questions. Mostly now that we have more people. So it automatically made it negative. You can see that I have that layer selected because it's dark blue. So I have. That's my music layer and it also has sound waves. So as opposed to. Let me make this a little bigger, as opposed to my captions layer or my background layer, this one has sound waves that. Those black lines, just like my script layer. And if I click away from it, it's. It's a green layer. Audio is green. Everything else, video, captions, images, those are all going to be this bluish purple layer. So audio green. When you select it though, it's blue. Dark blue. And what I wanted to show you is here in the properties bar. Let me make this smaller again. It made it negative 18 decibels. So descript automatically did that. It made it so that it would be quieter while I'm talking. It's not going to overpower my voice, but if you remember, let me select on my script layer once again, I added this thing called ducking, which lowers the background music to 10%. So now that music layer is going to be 10%. It's going to play at 10% of negative 18 decibels. So it's not even audible. I can't even hear it right now. So I'm going to bump that up to like positive six, which is pretty loud. And you can see the sound waves are like. It's almost completely black now. It's filling that whole thing. So that's gonna be really loud, but it's gonna play at 10% of that because of ducking. So let's play it. Let's go ahead and talk about the biggest update, which is to the course to my website. So just like that, the next thing I'm gonna show you is fades. So with any layer, you can do something called fading and crossfading. Now, to do that at the top corner, if you put your mouse on the timeline over any layer, it can be your script layer, it can be your music layer, it can be your title. This little white dot appears in the top left corner, and if I hover my mouse over it, it says 0s. Click for more options. If I click, there's this fade thing and it says the duration. Right now there's no fade. So it's 0 seconds. Audio fade, 0 seconds. You can also do with the audio, there's a crossfade option, but we can't do that right now because it's the beginning of our video. There's nothing to crossfade to. At the back side of this, there's another dot right there. And right if I click on that one now, I can do a crossfade. And what the crossfade is, is it'll fade out of the first clip and fade into the second clip. So it's just a way to smooth out your transitions. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the white dot. If I click on that, you can simply slide it and that creates a fade in. And you see the number that says plus 1.47s. That's telling me that this fade is going to start in black or whatever color I decide. And it's going to take 1.49 now seconds to reach full opacity. So let me start this video over. And this only applied to my script layer. So me it's only applying to my head. And so let's see how this looks. I hit play and we're live. Welcome to the November. That was a 1 1/2 second fade in. I can do the same thing on the fade out clicking. I slide to the left and it adds the fade out. I'm going to bring this out to 1.5. 1.51. There it is. 1.5. And let me just jump forward a bit. The blue line is my playhead. Once again, that's the image that I see on the canvas. I'm going to hit play like the fifth month that I've done this. Just talk. So I. I faded out for a second and a half there and then I can get rid of it by simply clicking the white dot again, bringing it back to the line. And now it's at 0 seconds. That fade is gone. And now I'm going to show you a crossfade. So using this white dot, instead of dragging to the left, if I drag into the adjacent clip, I'm now creating a crossfade. You see how there's a big X and the fade goes into both directions. It's now a 1.8 second crossfade. Let's see how this looks. Fifth month that I've done this. Just talk for an hour about. So it kind of was a funky effect there. This isn't a great clip to demonstrate it on, but basically it fades out of one and fades into the next one, including the audio. So there was kind of a weird overlap there of the audio files, which it's not the ideal clip for crossfading, but you at least know how to do it. Okay, the next thing we're going to do is add shapes. So we can add a shape by going to our top menu bar and this little icon with a square and a circle and it says shape when you have your mouse over it. When you click on that, you get a dropdown and you can add a rectangle, an ellipse, a waveform, a progress bar, a line or an arrow. Once again, when we add one of these, it's going to become a layer that fills our entire scene. Right now I'm in the first scene, so that's what it's going to do. So let me add an arrow to start with. So I click on it, left click. And it's now in my first scene, you see the blue on the timeline here. Our layer fills that entire first scene. And here is what that layer looks like. So it's got a dot, a white dot on the starting and a white dot on the end. And I can click on those white dots and reposition them any way that I want to. So let me just have this arrow pointing at our text box. And if I click off of it, you can see how it's really thin, it's really narrow, it's not very big. So I'm going to click on that arrow again to select it. And now my properties bar looks a little different. Every layer is going to have different options in the properties bar. Hopefully you're picking up on that by now. If it's an audio layer, you're going to have audio settings. If it's a captions layer, you're going to have captions layers where you can add things like the karaoke effect. You get the idea. When I have a arrow, this is what my properties layer looks like. And if I go to layout, I expand it with that little toggle icon. I have two sets of X and Y coordinates. The first set of X and Y coordinate. If you remember back to high school, what was it? Algebra, where you learn x and Y axises. So we have our X and Y axis for a start point and an end point for this arrow. And you can click in here and you can adjust it, adjust the X and Y axis. Or you can click in there and type something 140, for example. And then you can do the same thing for the end point. Hit Enter and it locks that in. You can set the border, and the border here being the arrow itself. So a five is what it currently is. That's the width, and I can make it like a 15. And now look at that. It's pretty big. Now you can see it a lot better. And then right next to that is this little ring. And that's your fill color. So I'm going to make it red. I can do a preset. Let me just do. Let me do yellow to match the captions. So just like that, I have my yellow arrow. It's 50 15th, 15 in thickness. Let me do a 20. There we go. I can add a shadow as before and all sorts of different things like that. Now I'm going to talk about animations, but not just yet. Let's add another shape. The other thing that I want to show you is, for example, a progress bar. Let's add a progress bar. So once again, it adds this shape, it fills, it adds a layer and it fills the entire scene that I added it to. And the interesting thing about progress bar is it goes off of the current playhead and the current scene. So this playhead or the scene is about 24 seconds long and the playhead's about halfway through. And as such, this white bar in the progress bar is indicating what's already been played. The gray part is indicating what hasn't been played. So for example, if I play it. Pay attention to the progress bar or questions mostly. Now that we have more people, we can. It moves in time as the scene progresses. I can resize this so I can make it smaller or narrower rather and make it fit the whole scene. And now let's see how it looks and do a lot more Q and A. And with this, once again, our properties bar looks different. We can round the corners or. Sorry. This is for changing the angle of it. So I can put at an angle if that was something I wanted to do. Return it to zero. I could make it so it's a different color. The let's make it yellow. Everything's yellow so far. I can make it right now it's a bar, but I could make it a ring. That's kind of cool. I can make it a ring. So let's see how that and then talk about the updates of what's come out. Pretty cool. I could make it a pie. So similar to the ring. But since the last time we did this, now it looks kind of like Pac Man. Pretty cool. Let's go back to the bar and let's make this fill the whole top. You can set the start percentage so maybe you want it to start 25% of the way through. And now look what happens at the. At the start of my scene where the progress bar starts. The progress bar starts at 25% because I told it to. I could have it end by default. It ends at 100%, which is the very end of the layer. But I could say I actually wanted to end at 75%. I don't know. I can't think of situations offhand where you would do that. But it's an option to you. So let me reset that to 0 and 100. You can add a border to the whole thing. There's a black border now that adds by default black and 10 in width. You can change the background color. Right now it's that light gray with 50% opacity. But I can make it green, for example. Now let's see how that looks. And we're live. Welcome to the November edition. Cool. Yeah. Different, different options in there for you. Back to our shapes. We have rectangle, which I won't go as depth and as in depth as this one. But as before, you got X and Y. You have height and width. You have. By now, some of these things should be familiar to you. We've talked about height and width, we've talked about X and Y. We've talked about the rotation. This one is the one that if you type a number in there, it'll tilt it certain degrees. This one is new though, actually. This bottom right one in the layouts section, it's currently set to zero. And this is your corner rounding. So at the rectangle, a zero is 90 degree corners. That's a sharp corner. But I can bump this to let's say 50. And now look at that. It's got a smoother, rounder corner. And you can put any number in here up until it becomes a circle. I can put 200 and it's basically an oval. 250, 300. Barely changing at this point, almost completely a circle. Let me knock that back down to zero. Typing zero into the corner rounding box, hit Enter and it's a square again. We have our fill. I won't go into that. We've already seen it border and effects, so that should all be familiar. At this point in the tutorial, I'm going to go ahead and delete the layer by pressing delete on my keyboard while it's selected and it's gone. Then we have a waveform. Waveform mimics the audio in your script. So if I play it. Descript Mastery webinar. I do these every month. This is like you can see the waves bounce with my voice. And you can change this. Once again, normal layout options. You have lines, you can change it to a circle. The fifth month that you can change it to a ring. I've done this. Just Talk for. You can change it to wave or an hour. About your question. You can change it back to lines and you got color for the fill. You got size, fidelity, magnitude, which is how big they are, and mirror, which will just flip it. So pretty cool stuff you can do with that. But the next thing I'm going to do, I think we got a gist of all of these. The line is just like an arrow without the tip of the arrow. It's just a line, that's all. But the properties are very similar to the arrow. So the next thing we're going to talk about is animation. Now animation When I say that people might think of special effects or you think of cartoons like a Disney animation. That's not what animations are. In descript, animations are moving layers. So way to make something Z. Zoom and pan is a default. And the way I got here is in the properties bar with a layer selected. I currently have the arrow selected. You see this animation at the bottom of your properties bar, hit the plus sign and there is a zoom and pan zoom in spin or custom. So let's just apply a spin. This is a default built into description and it's going to apply it starting at where my playhead is. So notice my playhead is about at the 13 second mark and if I go ahead and click on spin, you can see it added a little rectangle to the layer I had selected, which again is the arrow. And it added another one a couple seconds down the timeline. So here's what happens. This is the starting point of that layer. It's a starting keyframe. And at that keyframe it looks like this. It hasn't changed at the ending keyframe. Notice it's like off the screen. So whatever happens between these two rectangles is what's going to be our animation. Let's see how your questions. Mostly now that we have more people, we can do a lot more Q and A. And then so it does like a pendulum, it's swinging off the screen and it's pretty slow. So if I. The way I can change that is I click on my layer and now it has an animation one with a pencil and a minus sign. If I had a bunch of animations, they'd all be stacked down here. Animation two, animation three, et cetera. But we only have one animation one. So if I click on the pencil I can edit it and it's got our rectangles again. I can make that same the animation exactly as it was. But I can make it quicker by moving the second keyframe closer to the first. Let's see how that looks. Hit play. Questions? Mostly now that we have more people and now it's like just a second and a half versus like a three second animation. Let's change it again back to our our scene, the era, or rather our layer, the arrow layer. I have it selected. We see our animations. Hit the pencil. I can make it longer. This would be like a 10 second question. Mostly now more people. We can do a lot more. Pause that. Edit it once more and I'm going to go ahead and delete that. So oops, I deleted the whole layer. So the best way to do it is to just hit this minus button. And now that animation is gone, if I add another one back to the plus button, I can do again. There's a zoom in option, zoom in pan. I always do custom because this gives me the most control. So by now you have a familiarity with how these two rectangles work. So the first one once again is your starting keyframe. The second one is your ending keyframe. So what we can do is let me go to the starting keyframe and I'm going to move this layer off the screen. So now that starting keyframe, everything up to that point. So from the start of this, where this layer begins at the 0 second mark to that point, that layer is going to be off screen. It's going to be out of our canvas, out of our view. And then by our second keyframe, by the second rectangle, by the time our playhead hits that, our arrow is going to be right here. So it's going to animate smoothly to appear. And we're live. Welcome to the November edition. I like that. And it's kind of slow, so I'm going to adjust it, I'm going to make it so that it's like a half of a second. So let's go ahead and play that. Welcome to the November. And there we go. That arrow slides in there. And I could do that with any layer. Once again, all the principles are the same once you learn how to do it. So let me add an animation. I clicked on the Word Tutorial, our title that we added earlier. I'm going to go to animation. Oops, my descript recorder keeps popping in there. Hit the plus button, hit custom if you want to do custom. Or you can do the preset I'm going to do at my starting keyframe. I'm going to have the tutorial, the word tutorial, start off screen and by the time it reaches the second keyframe, it's going to be back where it was. So let's go ahead and play that. Moving the timeline back. Hit play. Or you can hit space on your keyboard. We're live. Welcome to the November. There we go. And that just adds some motion at the tutorial. Slides up and into view and the arrow slides right and into view. So that is animations. Animations are a little tricky. It's not super intuitive how to do all that, but hopefully you have a basic, basic understanding of how to go ahead and add those. Now, related to animations is transitions. Transitions are between what happens between scenes and the Fading that I showed you earlier, like the crossfade that we have here at the 10 second mark, that is a transition. But there's another way to add transitions and to have even more options, which is to right here on, on this section, right here in the properties bar, transitions. But to be able to see that, you have to make sure that you don't have a layer selected. So click into the gray part of your canvas so that no layer is selected and then find the transition section, hit the plus button and you have a dropdown that has in and out. And they have the same. They're identical in what they show. They have faded, crossbar, crossroom, crossfade, dip to color, directional wipe and star wipe fade is what we already did. So we saw one way to add it. This is a second way to add it. And the way to interpret these is in is what happens at the start of the scene. We are still in scene one. So if I do a transition in, this would be the effect that we start with. And if I do a transition out, this would be the effect that happens between scene one and scene two. So I like this cross zoom. And let me show you what happens when I do a cross zoom. So again, this is what happens between the end of scene one and the start of scene two. I'm going to hit play. And this is the last time we did this. If you have any questions about that. So if you saw that it does a big zoom in and kind of a rotation around around and it goes into the next scene. So let me go back to my transition. I have my cross zoom. I'm going to keep that. And then there's this. The effect settings. I'm going to click on that transition out. Yet it gives you yet another chance to change the effect. It has the duration, so it defaults to a 1 second zoom, which is pretty slow. I usually knock this down to about 0.4, 0.5 somewhere in that range. Hit enter to lock in that change. And then there's a blur amount. So the amount that you saw was a 200% blur. Let's just knock that down a little bit to 150. Hit enter and that locks in that setting. Hit the close. We'll close that box and let's hit play and see how it looks. This if you have any questions about the course. All right, cool. And that kind of just makes things a little more interesting between scenes. Now let's add a sound effect just for practice. Back to the media bin. You have your files, videos, gifs, Images, audio Again, music. We're going to go to sound effects. I really like this whip whoosh for sound, for transitions like so, click on the word and it says loading media. And there it is. Now I'm going to zoom in on my timeline again. You can use the bar on the bottom, or you can hold command and scroll wheel or two fingers on your laptop to zoom in. And so what I'm going to do is this is my whip wish effect. This is the layer, the blue one right here, right where my mouse is. And I'm going to just simply click it and drag it to move it to where I want it to be. And you can see the. The black sound waves on this sound effect. I'm lining that up. So it's right in the middle between the two scenes. And it's going to try to lock into place. If you see those red dotted lines, it's trying to lock it into place. So it starts. The sound starts at the start of that scene. But you got to kind of finesse it to make it so it doesn't click into place. You got to just slide it over until it is positioned where you want it to be. And now let's take a look. If you have any questions about the. If you have any questions about the. So notice you probably can't hear the whoosh, because remember, we have ducking on and it's lowering everything to 10% of the volume. So that whip whoosh is at negative 7.3 and it's getting reduced further by the ducking effect. So it's super quiet and I couldn't hear it at all. I'm gonna make that plus 10. And now let's see how it sounds. If you have any questions about that. Okay, I could hear it a little bit that time. Like whoosh. Very good. So we have some transitions, we have captions, we have titles, we have a background. Got all sorts of cool stuff going on. Let's add a gif. The way we can add a GIF is back to our Media Bin and then into our GIFs section. You got Giphy GIFs, which are these. These are the default. These are always changing based on I don't know what's popular or what the algorithm serves up. And then there's Giphy stickers, which are more like animated type of GIFs. The Giphy GIFs are more like clips from movies. These are more like emojis and kind of animated type of things. So I could add something like this dog. So I just click on it and it Says loading media. So I'll just give it a moment to download that file. And notice my entire. It filled my entire video with this gif because my second scene goes from 24 seconds all the way to the end at 10:17. So typically I'm not going to want it to do that. So what I can do is with that layer selected and it's a blue layer because it's not audio is right here in duration, you can set how fast it plays. 1x is just normal, 2x would be double time and so on. And it's telling me that it plays for 9 minutes and 52 seconds. Now I don't want that. So what I can do is right here where it says loop. Right now it's saying that it's looping that gif until the end of the scene, which happens to be the entire video. Or I can say once and now it just plays it one time and it's 5 seconds long. 5.8 seconds. So let's see how that looks. I'm gonna hit play. If you have any questions about the course or any of my services, we can talk about that as well. And on that note. Cool. Now I can click on that dog, that gif once again, I have white dots where I can adjust it. I can move it around the page. And our dog is now positioned how we want it to be. Very good. And one thing I can show you here is notice how this layer is on top of myself, so my shoulder is behind it. I can click on that layer. Go right. That's a right click, by the way. Right click. I get this drop down two finger click. On a laptop, I come down to layer order and I can say send backward. Okay, it sent one. Now it's. If you look on my timeline, the captions layer is on top of this gif, but my shoulder's still in front of it, so it's not quite far enough back yet. I'll right click again. Layer order, send backwards. Now check it out. My shoulder is in front of that dog. It looks like that dog is just behind me. Pretty cool. So you can manipulate layer order just like that. You. You can also click into the canvas. And once again, here are our layers. I could simply drag it. So let's say I want to bring my dog up to the front again. Now it's in front. Let's say I want to bring it back. Now it's behind. Click, drag. Now it's behind even my background, so I can't see it at all. So very important is Understanding how to work with and understand the layers. Okay, so that's GIFs. Now let's talk about recording. So this whole video is recorded in descript. All of my videos are recorded in descript. And to create a recording you go right here at this record button and you have three options. You can do audio only, which will just do an audio track. You can do camera, which will do your audio and camera, oh, there I am playing with my hair, you can see me. And to start it you just hit the red dot and that would start the recording. Or you can close out of it with that X back to our recording button. You can do the screen recording. This will do your webcam, your audio and your screen of your computer. And then below those three options you have more settings whether to play the computer audio or not. So this is like let's say you're playing a video on your computer. Whether you want that audio to be heard or not, you can toggle that on. You have your camera. If you have Your built in FaceTime camera on a Mac or if you have an external camera, this is where you would select that or you can turn it off. Camera disabled. This is your display screen. You can choose which screen to display or not to display a screen. And then below that is your microphone. You can use your built in microphone in my case a MacBook Air microphone, or you're in in another case an external microphone. You select all those and when you're ready you hit record into script. It'll prompt you for a transcription language. This is the exact same box we had when we first transcribed our file. And then you'd hit record to go ahead and start it. And after that you'll get one more final prompt, which is it'll ask you to select a portion of your screen in a screen capture that you want it to capture. Or you can hit spacebar and it'll capture your entire screen if that's something you want to do. And then you have recorder settings, you can have it do a countdown where it'll on your screen there will appear a number, three, two, one, recording. So if that's useful to you, you can toggle that on. You can set your transcription language, you can choose the resolution that you want to record at. Most webcams built into computers are 1080p. If you have more than that, you're welcome to go up to 4K, et cetera. And I should mention I haven't been mentioning this throughout the video, but if you are on the free plan, you're going to be more limited. And this is one example where you're not going to be able to record above 1080p if you're on the free plan. And you won't be able to export above 720p if you're on the free plan. So be aware of that. You can have it Highlight clicks when recording. You've been seeing this throughout the whole video. You see my mouse, how every time I click there's that blue animation around it. That is what that is the highlight clicks when recording. Confirm the recording area. That is the option where it lets you select the part of the screen that you want it to record. If you turn that off, it'll automatically just record your whole screen. Minimize the recording dock that is. I don't know if you can see it on this recording, but I have the doc pulled up right now. It's a little thing on the side that shows how long I've been recording. Right now it's 26 minutes and 10 seconds on this take and then there's a stop button and a pause button and then the last thing is to hide descript when starting screen recording. And this is as soon as you start the recording your descript application itself will minimize so I don't have that on because I'm showing descript so I wanted it to be visible. So that is the recording. Best practices for recording are as follows. Make sure that you have enough space on your hard drive. If you have 20 gigabytes or less, descript might cut your recording off prematurely. And that's never fun. So especially if you're going to be doing a long recording, make sure to have plenty of hard drive space. Additionally, make sure that you only record on one screen. If you have dual monitors and you try to record across screens, that's not going to work. It's going to glitch out. I've tried to do do that before. And lastly, I recommend this is just a best practice with screen recording on descript is to break your video up. If you're going to do a long video like I'm anticipating, this video I'm making right now is going to be two to three hours long. I've broken it up into 30 minute recordings and that way I'm not an hour and a half into my recording and then something glitches out. It could be on descripts and or be it could could be on my computer and then I lose everything. So I recommend just general best practice. Just break up your recording into 1520 minute pieces that way, if something happens, you don't lose everything. Okay, so that is the screen recorder, recording, best practices and all of that type of thing. Let's jump back to the transcript. We've talked about it a couple times in different places. Places. But there's another thing I haven't shown you, and that is your AI speaker. This is a very, a favorite, a fan favorite of descript. And the way that we do that is we're going to have to go back. So go to your D menu at the top. Go back to Projects, and we're now back in our workspace. Go to AI speakers on the left. And if you'd created a speaker before, this is where you would see it. If you have not created a speaker before, there will be a button right here in the middle that says create a new speaker. And if you have created a speaker, whether or not you have, there's a button here that says new speaker. Click on that and you can label it. By default, it's already got my name in there. So add your name, hit confirm. And now you're going to have to train and authorize the speaker. And the way that you do that is you have to read this script exactly as it is. Read it word for word. You'll hit record, start speaking it, and then you'll hit stop. That'll send the script to descript and that becomes the training data on which you train your voice. I'm not going to go into that here. I've made separate videos about it. It's fairly well explained, so this shouldn't be too difficult to figure out. But you can set your microphone here and you'll just read this. And the way it works is you're providing this data to the AI. You're training your data, you're training it on the intonation of your voice, the pacing of your voice, your pronunciation, your accent, etc. So I recommend do this in the environment that you're going to record in the most because it will match room tone. So if you're recording in a room with a bit of an echo, it's going. And you always record in that environment. Then keep it consistent, record there. And when you read this script, best practice is to read it with a little bit of an exaggerated tone and range. Read at a normal pace, the pace that you want to make your AI voice, but give it a little bit of an exaggerated tone so that it can learn the full range of your voice. Alternatively, if you don't do the recording, you can upload a file so if you have a client or a family member or you're just. You're making a file for somebody else, that is how you would do that. You would have to have them record the file on their own computer or device and then send it to you to upload and train the AI in that way. So you could just screenshot this and then send that to whoever's going to make the video or make the AI speaker. Okay, so let's go ahead and close out of that. After you submit the voice, it happens very quickly. It takes about 20 to 30 seconds for the training to be complete. This used to take a full day, by the way, but with the recent upgrade, it now only takes a few seconds. So I'll go back to my projects and the most recent video I had open was the correction. I opened one in between while I was looking for it. But it's a tutorial project, so I'm going to go ahead and open that one up. Retrieving project. And we're back inside of our tutorial composition. So now that we're back in our project, you can label all of the speakers in your project. Presumably it's just you or, you know, maybe whoever you're interviewing. And descript will automatically try to label it now that it knows your voice. If you remember, way back at the beginning when I first added this project, it prompted me, who is this in this project? And I just said, ross, that's me. And the reason that we do this is with the AI speaker that we just changed, we can add. We can change the words of things. So for example, if you remember, we were messing with this word, it was originally fifth, and I changed it to fourth. So if I select that word again, I just click on it, highlight it so that it's blue like this. This menu pops up and you remember we had our correct. The thing we're going to use now is replace. So right to the left of correct is replace. Click on it. We have this dropdown. There's a record option, so I could just record over it. I could do a fresh recording in my own voice using descripts Recorder. Or I can do overdub now. Overdub. I'm going to go ahead and click on it and it says overdub. This looks just like the correct box. But we can type anything in here. So I could use fourth. It'll probably recognize that. But just in case, I'm going to exclude explicitly spell out 4th. F, O, U, R, T, H. And as soon as I click overdub, it's going to change that audio using my AI voice. Let's go ahead and click on it. And you can see it's now a light gray and it's pulsing and it says generating. It's only one word. So this should be pretty quick. If you have like an entire paragraph or like a few minutes of audio, it's going to take longer, but one word should just be a few seconds. In the meantime, I can click this, the left side of this box and it'll restore it to what I had before. And now it's done. And you can see down here on the timeline, it looks a little bit differently. There's like a small crossfade. Let me zoom in command. And scrolling in on my cross wheel, it created crossfades on both sides of it is to just smooth it out because it's going to use our AI voice. And there's also this thing that says convert to audio. I'll explain that in a moment. So I'm going to zoom out. I'm just going to put my timeline, my playhead, right before that part that we overdubbed. I'm going to hit space to play like the fourth month that I've done this. So it sounded okay. It's not great. It's clearly not original. But. But here's the other thing that happened. Notice it got rid of my video. The layer of me speaking is gone. So be aware of that. When you overdub something, it's. It's only changing the audio. It won't do anything for the video. And in certain cases you might change the words. And if your video is still there, the audio is going to be out of sync with how your mouth is moving. But what we can do is if I like this change, then I can hit convert to audio. If I don't like it, I can put my mouse over it and hit the restore. I can do play to preview it. I can do regenerate, which will use AI to do something else. I'll explain in a moment. Or I can hit keep to keep that change. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. Keep. And now this is an audio file. And now my video is back. You see that? So I brought my video. So it was just in preview while I took the video out. But once I lock in that change by hitting keep, it brings my video back. But now like the fourth month that I've done that and there's some weird stuff going on because of all these crossfades. So the. In this case, my mouth would still be saying fifth, but the words are saying fourth. And it's not that big of a deal in this situation. But you could see how an entire sentence, if I made it something entirely different, it would get out of sync with my voice, which is something I don't want. And in that case, you could add B roll. B roll is anything that's not your primary video. And this brings up something else that we can do. So I showed you how to add. You know, I added the background layer, but let's say there's a specific area we want to add B roll to without adding new scenes. There's a way we can do it without adding new scenes. So if I want to add cover up this sentence, I can just select that sentence from the word that to the word mostly. I just clicked and dragged. And now what I can do is go to insert this. The box that pops up, I find the three dots, I go to insert, insert, and I can add a scene, I can add a marker, I can add all sorts of different things here. I'm going to go ahead and add something from files. I'm going to go to videos and I'm going to type in nature and just give it a moment to load. They're just light gray screens with. With kind of a gradient on it until they load the projects. It does take a moment. And descript does seem to be a little slower than normal today. Usually this is pretty snappy. Let's see if images are any faster. Okay, much faster. So let me just take this. This looks nice. Nice little forest path. I'm going to click on it. And remember, I have just one sentence highlighted. So when I click on it, it's loading media letting me know that it's loading. What it'll do is it'll add that photo to just the selected words I had without me having to create another scene. And without the remember, if I don't have a portion of the transcript selected, the layer that I add will by default add to the entire scene that I added in. But in this case, it added. It automatically added a scene two. So remember, I had. This was my previous scene three, Scene two. Now it's scene three. And this one now right here make my mouse big is scene two. So I now have four scenes in total. And this forest background fills up the part that I had selected on my transcript. Now that we have more people and let me go back to the start of scene two, clicking in my scene thumbnail. And if I play it, this is like the fourth month that I've done this just talked for an hour. So it covers up the imperfection in the video where I overdubbed it. Okay, very good. Now, in the transcript, this is just a personal preference, but you can see where that slashes. That's the start of the scene 2. I like to just to keep things clean, I like to put the start of each scene on its own line. So I just put the cursor before the scene slash and I hit return on my keyboard and it starts the scene. It starts the line with the start of that scene. So, yeah, now our scene two has that nice little forest background. Our audio is uninterrupted behind it. And what I'm going to talk about next is how to organize our transcript. So we're pretty good. We're pretty comfortable with the layers. We know how all that works. The next thing is, and I hope you're doing this along with me so that you're learning. You know, it's one thing to watch me do it, but it's another to actually do it yourself and get the feel for where things are. And then, you know, I said this at the beginning, but go ahead and pause the video. Make the changes on your side as needed. And if you have comments or questions as we go, please drop those in the. In the comments. Okay. With that out of the way, let's talk about adding markers. So markers are a way that we can add organization and quick way to sort through things in our project. So if you let me just hit another return here in my transcript, and now I have this blank line where it says start writing, what I'm going to do is add a marker with a hotkey, which is the hashtag or pound sign. And so if you hit shift and the number three on your keyboard, that's the pound key. It adds a marker and you see it's highlighted in blue. And I can type in marker. Oops, let me highlight it again. Marker number one. And now it's bold. So it's. It's separated from the normal transcript. But it doesn't show up in my video. It's not going to be a caption. It's just purely for my own internal organization. And it also showed up here on my scene markers, on my scene thumbnails. So let me go through and add a few other markers right here. Once again, the pound sign, marker number two. And let me do marker number three and so on. You get the idea. If you had a really long video, you could have hundreds of markers. You know, you could you could break it up by theme or whatever else is going on. So I can click on these now in my scene thumbnail, I can say, take me to marker number one, marker number two. The other thing that's happened is here, in the top right of my transcript section, there's a new button. This was not here before until we added markers. It says jump to marker. If I click on it, it I can hit tutorial composition, which is the name of my composition, takes me to the very top. Or I can hit marker number two. It scrolls me down in my transcript to marker number two. I could hit marker number three, and so on. So this is a way to break up your project into chapters. And once you've set a marker, you can easily move it by putting your mouse to the left of it, clicking, and simply, I'm gonna have to scroll down, clicking and dragging it to a new position, like so. And now our marker has changed position. Now again, these won't affect your captions. The captions will not read marker number two. The only thing that this does, besides allowing us to quickly sort through things, is when you publish it. If you publish this directly to YouTube, these can become your timestamps in your video. So that's a handy way to use markers. You can also sort through them. You can find them in the search. So you could type in here like I could type in marker, and then it automatically found jump two, marker number one. Jump two, marker number two. And if I clicked on it, it takes me there. So a lot of different options to get to the same place. Okay, we're two hours in. Just a reminder, I do have a course, so if this is useful, but maybe you want to go a little bit deeper, the course is great for that. It's six hours of lessons, so each feature is more of a deep dive onto, like, how it works and how to apply it and best practices versus just a tutorial like this. But if that's useful to you, check the links in the description. It's a Descript mastery course. The next thing we're going to talk about is collaborating with teammates. So we've seen our properties bar up here. And then right to the left of that is comments. So backing up even a step beyond that, to the left of comments is who can see the project. So there's me. You can add your photo and you can name yourself within your Descript account. And then to the left of that is your drive name. So this is me as the editor and then the drive name. And it's saying that members of my drive can edit this. Now, if I wanted to add somebody to this project, there's this plus button called Project Access. If I click on it, I can add somebody. And you might be familiar with this adding people to like, for example, example, a Google Sheet or a Word document, anything like that that you've collaborated on. You can simply enter the email address of your teammates, your editor, your client, whoever it might be, enter their email address here, and then you can choose if they are an editor, meaning they can obviously edit the video, they can make changes to it, or if you only want them to comment. If you only want them to comment, then that's all they can do. They can only look at it and leave comments. And then once you type that in there, you would just click Invite to Project and they would have the access to be able to see it. Down here in the bottom left, there is more further options where you can set anyone with the link to this project can comment on it. Or. Or you can say anyone with the link can view it. Or the most restrictive is only people with Project Access can access it. Project access required. So those are your choices. And then once you have the one you want, let's say anyone with the link can comment. I can just hit copy link, and that is what I would send to somebody who I want to be able to comment on this project. So you can either invite them through email or by sending them a link. Both options work. So once somebody has received your invite to see your project, to access your project, they will then be able to comment on it. And they can comment on it. Like, let me show you how inside of the transcript, they would select a section. So let's say right here I just select this sentence and I get this familiar bar. We've seen it a few times at this point, there is the comment bubble, the same one that we have in the top right. You simply click on that and it highlights it in this orange color. And then over here on the right, it tells me that that comment starts at 1 minute and 45 seconds into my project. And then there's a blinking cursor where I can add a comment. I can say, can you please remove this section? Maybe there's a line that I don't want in there, and I could just communicate that to the editing team like so, and I can hit send. And now that comment has been saved and the editor on their side would be able to see this. They can click on the comment. So when they put their mouse on it, they click it the comment section pops up again on the right, and then they can add a comment and they can say, you know, ask a question about it. Did you want the whole thing removed or just the section, you know, whatever related to the video, they hit end or hit send, and it's now been uploaded. And so there it is. It, it starts this little throw thread of conversation about the section in question. And now if, let's say I address the comment, everything's good, everyone's satisfied. There's this little check mark in the top right that says resolve. And if I click on it, the comment's gone. And it says comment archived. I can undo it or I can just close that notification and get it out of the way. So it's only going to show comments here, but that are active. If a comment has been archived, AKA it's been marked resolved, I can hit these effect sliders, these little dials here, and I can go to show archived comments. And now there it is once again. And if I want to bring it back, like maybe I'm not satisfied with the edit or I changed my mind, I can unresolve it by clicking that button. And once again, again, it's back. So let me just bring that up again. And if there was a bunch of comments here, I could sort by timestamp. So I could. This would put it in the order of the video, chronological order. I could put it sort by oldest, which would do the oldest comment, sort by newest, which would put the newest comment first. Or I can just close out of that altogether. Okay, so that's how you collaborate with a teammate. Pretty, pretty convenient. Now the next thing I haven't talked about as much in the UI is navigating the video itself. So if you hit this back button, that is, this goes between markers. So now that we have markers, I forgot this is one more use for markers is this will skip between markers, so previous, next, etc. And if there's no more markers remaining, it'll jump to the end of the video and. Or in the case of reversing, it'll jump to the beginning of the video. So you can just click those to scroll forward and backwards through your markers. Between those, obviously, is the play button. This is like the fourth month that I've done this. And if you click it again when it's playing, it'll pause it. The number on the left here in the dark, in the, in the black is where the playhead is. This blue line right here that tells you the exact second and frame that the video is at. It's at 10 seconds on the first frame. And out of the total length of the video, the total video is 10 minutes and 17 seconds. So it's letting me know that right to the right of those is your playback speed. By default, it's at 1x. It's going to play at normal speed. You can also slow it down. You can play it in slow motion at half speed. Just talk for an hour. So if you're really examining something, you want to see how something looks to, you know, if it's too fast to see it in normal speed, you can slow it down, play it slower, and really make sure it's all perfect. Moving beyond that, you can play it faster. If you're. If you're comfortable with how everything looks, you're just giving it one last look over before you send it live. The 2x could be your questions. Now, we want people we can do all our Q A and then talk about. And that plays it really fast. And you can go all the way up to 3x speed and you can just toggle it. You can decrease speed, increase speed with these hotkeys j1 or shift j to decrease speed, increase speed with shift link or reset the speed with shift k. That'll put it back to 1x. I'm going to go ahead and do that. And it says playback speed, change to one in this little toast right there. So that is the playback speed. Just can make things a little bit faster as you're going through. One very important thing I haven't. Oh, on that note, one last thing. Your arrows. So if you do your left and right arrows, I'm going to press the left arrow on my keyboard right now. Left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left. If you see my video, it's slowly moving one frame at a time. So that's really good for precision work. If you're making really precise, you know, the point where you want it to transition or the exact moment you want B roll to start, you can use the right keys. Now I'm pressing the right, right, right, right, right, right. And you see is moving as I'm pressing right quickly. Right, right, right, right. And it's also moving here. And so you can make a really precise cut on the exact frame where you want to make a particular edit. So another important thing is on the same plane there, right all the way to the right. On the right corner of your timeline are your timeline tools. We have five timeline tools. And this entire video I have been in select mode. Select mode is the default that is your cursor that we've seen throughout this whole video so far. And you get to the select tool by either pressing right there or it's the leftmost tool. And if you haven't changed it, it's going to be in select mode. Or you press the letter A on your key keyboard and you're in select mode. Select mode is what we have used to move layers around to change the position of things on the timeline and everything else that we've done so far. One other really cool thing that the select tool can do is let me find, for example, right here on the timeline. You see this gap where there's no words before the word and I can simply click click on the word and itself. Again, this is with the select tool and I can drag it to the left and it shortens that gap. Alternatively, I can drag to the right and it creates a gap clip. You see a little asterisk in the top left that tells me that there's no sound there. It's just a gap clip. It's a frozen image of that frame where I started that gap clip. But let's click on the word and again and let's drag it to tighten up that gap. Or I could go to the word before it the word on and I can drag it over the word and. And the word and is now gone. Now I mentioned earlier that descript is non destructive. So even though that word and is gone, it's gone from my transcript, it's gone from my timeline, it's gone from my video. I can bring it back by putting my cursor again in the select tool right where I got rid of that word. And you notice my mouse turns into this bracket. I can select that line and simply click and drag and that brings the word back. Or I can do the opposite. I can click and drag and that word is now gone. And notice my bracket is open to the left. If I move my. Excuse me, it's open to the right. If I move my mouse slightly to the other side of that boundary to where I'm in the previous scene. Now the bracket is open to the left and if I click and drag to the right, it'll expand it in that direction. Or if I drag to the left, it'll get rid of it in that direction. So that is a little bit more that you can do with the select tool. Beside that is the blade tool, which is Hotkey B on your keyboard. I'm going to go ahead and select it and switch into it. And now you see on our timeline, we have something different. You see that red? Like, it looks like a razor blade. My cursor is now a razor blade. And wherever I click, any layer that I click, it's going to split it. So, so right now, this layer or this clip starts right where that. Basically everything that's in blue right now. But let's say I wanted to make change something. I can just click inside of this timeline and right where I clicked that clip is now split. So I could then delete this small portion. I could using the bracket, I could drag and make changes like we just learned about. I could make a scene right where I just clipped. I could do anything I want. But that is the blade tool and it allows you to split clips into smaller ones. Next to that is the Range tool. It's going to be hotkey R on your keyboard or you can click it. It's got two dots and connected by lines. And the way we do, what we can do with this is select a range in our timeline. So if I click keep my mouse down, left click and drag and release. I've now selected this portion and I can do. I could grab it and move it. Like, look, I just dragged it up and I made this a different layer. I'm going to undo that command Z and now it's back. I could just delete that portion. I'm going to hit delete on my keyboard and it's gone. Undo command Z. I could speed that up. So let me go ahead and click and select that range again. I'm going to open up my properties bar. We got our Properties bar here. And right now that range is 2.3 seconds long. That's the duration and it's at 1x. But I could make this 2x. I just typed in a 2 into the duration and now that part is going to play twice as fast. I could copy it. I could right click and I guess I can't right click. I could hit Command C to copy it, or I could go into my edit and hit copy or cut. If I cut it, it's going to take it out and then I could paste it somewhere else into another project, for example. So all sorts of things that we can do with the Range tool. It's super useful. Or maybe I want to reposition something. Maybe I want to actually put this at the beginning of my script. I just selected that as a range and I'm going to move it to the beginning of the scene rather. And then if you see that purple line, that's where it's going to get positioned. I release and there it is. I moved that small range to that portion of my video. So all sorts of things you can do with the range tool. Next is the slip tool. So right there to the right of the range tool is slip or letter Y on your keyboard. That's the hotkey. You can see the letter Y underneath the word slip. And slip allows us to move a clip in place. What I mean by that is notice when I put down in my timeline with my slip tool active, I can see this thing above my cursor that says 45, 48. That's telling me that this clip, it's three seconds long and it's the 45 second to the 45 eight or correction, the 45 to the 48 second part of that clip. But what I can do without moving the boundaries of this, without it's still a three second clip, is I can click in there and change which 3 second portion gets played. So I'm clicking and sliding to the right and it's basically dragging the portion of the clip that gets played. So now I've slid to the right a few times. It's going to play from the 38 second mark to the 42 second mark without changing the length of what's getting played. It's still three seconds. It's just changing what gets played. So I can slide right, I can slide left, like so. So super useful if something gets messed up and you just need to change what's getting played within a certain clip. Next to that is the hand tool. It just looks like a little hand, a little hand icon or you can press H on your keyboard. Go ahead and click it. I'm just going to reposition my window. We are now in the Hand tool. If you see on the timeline there is a hand, when I click, it turns into a fist like it's grabbing something. And if I click and slide to the right, I'm moving through my project. So this, the Hand tool is navigational only. This only moves through your project. So if I click and slide to the left, the project slides to the left. Click and slide to the right, the project slides to the right. Okay, let's go ahead and go back to our select tool. The select tool you're probably going to be in 90% of the time, but these are useful for certain other uses. All right, so that is pretty much it. For transcript, timeline manipulation, layer manipulation, we've covered most of the most important stuff. Not too bad, right? We're at two and a half hours in the last thing to do is to publish and or export our video. Once we got everything looking perfect, it's time to publish it. And once again, just a reminder, I do tutoring on this. So if there's something you would like to go deeper on, or just pick my brain about YouTube or anything like that, I offer tutoring packages where you can get a series of calls and I can help you learn all of this stuff in a lot more depth. Okay, so to publish or export, there is a publish button at the top right corner of our project. Click on that and you get this drop down. And there's two things here. Export and publish. Export means that this file is going to get saved to your hard drive, to your computer. Now, within export, you can export the video, you can export audio, you can export gif, timeline, transcript or subtitles. I'll talk about each of these. The video is everything. It's the audio, it's the layers that we added and it's the video. It's always going to be dot MP4 format. You cannot change that. It's just MP4 format. There is inside of the export. The first option you have here is markers. This would be to export the markers that we created. Everything that's inside of those markers. You can export just the current scene, which would be just our scene one. Here you can export current composition, which would be the whole thing, everything we've worked on. You can do all compositions, which, if you remember, we created two compositions. So if we selected that, it would export both compositions. But we're just going to do current composition for our purposes. The next thing you have is your resolution. You can select at max resolution. I made this video at 1080p, so it does not allow me to go above that. It defaults to the max. But for the sake of time, I'm just going to make this really small. I'm going to do 480p. You can do quality. The quality relates to the quality of the audio. It defaults to high, but you can go medium or low. I'm going to do low just to keep this smile. Fall this file small. After that is audio. You can can do more audio settings like number of channels. This, this is more advanced and relates to if you have multiple mics or fancy mics, you can set that stuff there. You can toggle on whether to have metadata or not. Your metadata is things like the show title, the episode title and a description, as well as whether to include the markers as chapters. I'm going to go ahead and close out of that. But that is how you would turn all, all of that stuff on. And when you're ready, you just simply hit export. It asks you to save it to, to make the name and then to choose where you want to save it and hit save. And then you get this toast that says exporting video 0% Currently it shouldn't take too long because it's a small file. Or I can hit cancel to go ahead and close that out, or I can just dismiss that notification altogether with that X button and it's still going to be exporting in the background. Now, if I don't want the video, like let's say I made a podcast where there's a video portion for YouTube, but there's also an audio portion that is going to become a podcast all on its own. I can go to this audio tab. Once again, there's export. I can do all compositions or I can just do the current composition, which is what I'm going to do. I can do do a AC audio, which is a.m4a. I can do.wav or I can do.mp3. The differences between those are beyond the scope of this video. But for most purposes MP3 is probably fine. You can choose whether to have metadata once again or not and Advanced audio settings. And then when you're ready, you hit export. You can do a gif, which is video without the audio. So it's a smaller video file file. You can do that there if you want. You can do Timeline, which is if you want to import your project into another software, for example Pro Tools, Audition, Final Cut, Premiere or DaVinci. So select the type of file that the format where you're going to import it to. So dot xml. I don't have a lot of experience with this, but I assume that this is to. It'll. It'll retain the layers and all the different transitions and things, things like that, so that you can edit these, edit your project in another software where maybe there's features that descript doesn't have or something else that you is useful in those other softwares for you. Now, transcript. This is to export just our transcript. And I'm going to go ahead and show you this because this is really cool. You can export it as an HTML, as a markdown, as a Word document doc, as a. Txt and so on. I'm going to do a Word doc because that's probably the most common. And then you can include how you want it to look. So the word doc that gets created from your transcript do you want it to include the composition name. If so, toggle it on. Include the markers. If so, toggle it on. Include the ignored text. This is another case where it's useful to have the ignored text. So the stricken out words will appear in your transcript if you want it to whether to include the speaker labels. If you have multiple speakers, then you could show them there. And lastly is the time codes. If you want it to have the time codes as it goes through the transcript, you can add it there. It defaults to 60 seconds, but you can change it to anything you want and turn that on accordingly. I'm going to go ahead and export that. You can title it. It's going to default to the name of the composition.docx and I'm going to save it. And it's pretty much instant. I'm going to hit that open button and I'm just going to open it in my word processor. One moment here while that opens. And here it is. So you can see in like a big, big header, it put my composition name. There are my markers, marker number two along with a timestamp. And you can see this is my transcript. This is exactly what came over from descript. If I'd added highlights or anything else, those would all appear here in my transcript as well. And the last thing is subtitles. You have dot SRT or dot VTT These would once again take the transcript with the addition of their timing in sync with their time. And then you could add that file to YouTube to give it super accurate transcripts versus YouTube does automatic AI ones that aren't quite as accurate. So that is how those are all of your export functionalities. Moving on, the other thing we can do besides export is publish. Publish is what allows us to push this video to YouTube or other podcast places or even descripts cloud. By default it puts it to a web link, which is descripts cloud. And let me go ahead and demo that. So I have it set to web link and you get a chance to name it. You can set a the frame that it uploads as this. This would be like think of this as your thumbnail. So let me change the frame. You can scroll through right here. And for some reason my preview isn't loading, it's finalizing video for playback. But you would just click. Once you find the frame that you want to use as your thumbnail, you'd hit use frame. Or you can upload your own right here. Click upload, browse through your computer, find the thumbnail you want to use and then hit Use Frame. And it's not. It hasn't loaded, so it's not going to let me do that. But. So you set your web link. This is descripts web link. It's going to create a URL for this video. You set your resolution again, defaults to max. But you can make it lower or higher access. You can make it public, meaning it can be found by a search engine, or you can make it where only people with the link or. Or only people in your project can access it and you have further settings whether or not it shows the transcript, allow comments, all that kind of good stuff. I'm going to hit publish. It takes just a moment and in a second we'll get a check mark to let us know it's done. Once it does that, we're going to have a link where we can find this on the Internet. And there it is, it's done. So you can download it right here, which is the same as exporting. It'll just download it to your computer. There is a link. If you click on that and copy it. It's now in my clipboard where I could copy and paste that and send it around to a friend or a editor or anything else. And then that last button, the one I just clicked, it's a little globe with an arrow that is what will open it up in my browser, which looks like this. So this is my video on descripts page. This is my streamed video. It tells me the date that it was last updated. December 4th. That's today. My name, the name of it, the name of the drive, Descript Mastery up here. And if you're not on the pro plan, then if you're on the free plan, it's just going to be descripts logo in the top. Because that's a premium feature, you have to pay for the branding. And it's rendering, so it's not quite ready yet. If I try to play it, it's not going to let me. But you can see the first frame. You can see that it's 10 minutes, 13 seconds long. And this should look pretty familiar. You can, you know, change the audio, you can change the playback, you can turn on or off closed captions. You can make it full screen or not full screen. And then here's our transcript and that's going to play alongside our video. You can search. This is pretty cool. If I search for like marker number three, it's not gonna let me search for markers, but I could search for things inside of my transcript. The Part where I talk about the course. There it is. Every time. Every instance of the course is right here. I could click on one and go to it. Which by the way, Quick plug. I do have a course where I go in depth, more in depth than these tutorials. And you can learn a lot more about descript through my course link in the description. You can also leave comments here if. If you left comments inside of the descript, you can select a portion and say, please remove this or whatever you want your comment to be. Hit send. Oh, and I'm not logged in on the browser, so I'm not able to leave a comment. You do in fact have to be logged in so you know who the comment's coming from. But it works the same as. As what we saw inside of the app. And there's an option, here's the link where you could. This is the copy and embed. If you wanted to add that to your website, here is just the link. If you wanted to send that to somebody, you could have it start at a specific timestamp. So that's pretty cool. And lastly, is your sign in in the top right or sign up if you don't have an account yet. So that is descripts Player. Descripts Web Player. Enough about that. I'm gonna go ahead and close out. And beyond the web link that I just showed you is YouTube. If you want to publish to YouTube, which is something I always do, I always publish straight to YouTube. You hit sign in. And I'm not going to go into all of this because it will open up my Google login page, which I don't want to show right now. I've done other videos about this in the past, but you'd hit sign in. You choose the channel that you want to upload it to. Maybe you only have one channel, maybe you have multiple. Select the channel where you want your video to go. And then. Oh, sorry, before that even. You can set your thumbnail as we did before. This will become your YouTube thumbnail. You can set your description, the title, and now here's what I was talking about. The markers that we made. Marker number one. At eight seconds, this will become our timestamp on our YouTube video. This will become our chapter where we can easily navigate through the videos using the markers that we made. So pretty, pretty cool capability there. And then you can set your category, you can set your tags. It defaults to descript. I might have set that, I don't remember. But you can set your tags there. And then you can set Your access, whether this becomes a public video, private or unlisted, I recommend start off with private or unlisted. That way you have a chance to review it before it goes live. And then you can always change it inside of your YouTube studio to make it public where anyone can watch it. Okay, so once you got all that set, you'll hit sign in. It'll take you to the Google sign in page, you'll select the channel that you want to publish it to, and then it'll bring you back to description and this button will change to say publish and you'll have to hit it one more time and then it'll give you a little loading bar, telling you that it's, it's publishing and it'll take a few minutes and so just let it, let it do its thing and it'll publish in the background. And then you can go into your YouTube studio and fine tune any of the settings. If you want to change the title, anything like that, you can do that inside of YouTube. Below YouTube is everything else. Blubrry, Buzzsprout, Restream, Podcast, co. All these different features that you can directly publish to. These are all podcast hosts or in the case of Headliner, this is a podcast like basically a real creator where it can create like an audiogram for you. And so you just click on one of those. When you hit publish, it would take you to their page, you would do the sign in and then you'd hit publish and you can go directly to their platform. Okay, two and a half hours later, we are at the end of this video. I hope you found it useful. If you need to go over anything, repetition is the mother of learning. So go back, review a particular feature or skill, do it again, do it on your own project, and if it's still not making sense or you're still not, still not clicking once again, you can leave that in the comments as a question or book some time with me. Let's get on a call and I will walk you through it in real time and we can go as deep as you want. This was like 80% of what you need to know to get started with descript. If you want to go even deeper, I'll say it for the fifth time. I have a course as well where you can find all of this in a lot more detail and you can really get become a professional. Really become a professional. Maybe you want to build the second income as an editor or start a podcast that you want to monetize. Whatever it is, descript is the best way to do it. And my training programs are the best way to get you up to speed. Okay, that's it. Thanks for watching. If you made it this far, you're awesome. Bye.