Descript Tutorial For Beginners - Get Started FAST

If you're new here, I do a descript tutorial every single month. Because the software is always changing, things are moving and getting new UI updates and new features. First, to create a video, you just go to the new button in the top right. From your workspace view. You can choose a video project, an audio project, a quick recording, which is like a loom video, and remote recording, which is the squadcast integration where you can record remote podcasts. We're going to mostly focus on the video project, so click that to start a new project. The first thing it wants you to do is title it. Let's call this tutorial October 2023. The first thing you're going to want to do is click into the transcript. This is where your transcript will go once we add a video. And the way that we add a video is you can hit this plus button here and insert project files. You can insert videos. Descript comes with built in stock videos, stock images, still images, stock GIFs, stock audio, both music and sound effects, text if you just want to write something, captions if you want it to put your transcript on the screen, and shapes, which is to like add a square or a circle or anything else you want to your video. That's one way to add it. The other way is this media bin in the top middle of your screen. If you've used other editors, you're probably familiar with the media bin. You click that and then once again we have our video, GIFs, images, audio, and then files on the left. You can click here to add files and browse through your computer. Or you can drag and drop something into descript, which I'm going to go ahead and do. I'm just dragging this off of my hard drive and release takes a moment to load and it gives you a preview, so you can go ahead and watch what you got there. If you're on Mac, and for most purposes, you're just going to insert this into script. The script is your base layer. You, you can change it to a new layer, a supporting layer, if you go to that arrow on the right and hit add new layer. But again, we're just going to insert it into our script. And by inserting it into our script, it's going to transcribe it automatically. So this is the first thing that it prompts me. It says it's transcribing it. I can label who the speaker is. This gets useful if you have multiple speakers especially, and if you have Overdub, the AI voice trained in different people's voices and Then you hit done. Then it's just gonna take a moment to process that. And in the meantime, we can click on this layer and let's say I don't want that top bar to show of this screen recording. Just like with a PowerPoint or other software that you might be used to, you can click the edges of this layer and drag it to resize it like so. Or you can crop it by double clicking and then bringing in the corners. I don't want those files to show like so. And then you hit this little save button and it locks that change into place. And then we can resize it to fill our canvas. This is our canvas, this is our transcript, and this bottom layer is our timeline. Timeline is what you're probably used to if you've come from any other editor, like Premiere or Final Cut or even Imovie. Those all are timeline based editors. Descript tries to get us to use the transcript as much as possible. So we can highlight words and we can hit the letter C to correct it. So if we want to change what the transcript says, we can simply add it into there by typing it in. But the first thing I'm going to do, the first thing in my workflow is I go to this star at the top right corner of our transcript. And this is our AI tools. We have a remove filler word button. So if I click that, it found three filler words. And if you click this part that says all filler words. Here's what it's looking for. It looked for times where I repeated a word twice in a row or words like, well, hmm, where is it A sort of. Right. Things like that, like filler words that you shouldn't be saying. And it tells us where every instance of it is. And then we can click it on the right side here. Options here. Well, first of all, and it plays it in context to see if that's something you want to get rid of. It plays a second before, plays the word itself, and then a second after to see if that is the change you want to make. If it is, you can hit this X here. Actually, that'll remove the result that didn't remove the word. To remove the word, you have to hit this remove button here in this menu. So let's play the next one where I repeat myself. If you can, you can do these little things. I said you can, you can. I repeated it. So I'm gonna go ahead and make that change. I'm gonna hit remove, which is sort of like studio sound. And this was a Short recording. It was only two and a half minutes, but you can imagine if I had an hour long, just free flowing conversation, there might be 600 ums in there and you could simply hit the remove all button and it would get rid of all of them with the click of a button. Let me just play this one which is sort of like studio sound. Sort of like I'm going to keep that in there. And the way I do that is I just don't make a change. I don't hit remove, I just close out. The next thing I would do is go to the shortened gap words and this is gonna look. Right now it's looking for anything that's 1.2 seconds or more where there's no sound. So and same sort of layout here where we see the results on the right side. So let me play the first one. Descript has some new. And that's the opening of the video before I start talking. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit shorten and right now it's set to shorten to 0.2 seconds. I could change that to zero, which I'll do for this first one and it's gone. And the third way you can. And I'll get rid of that one. This ability to move it, move it around. And I'm just gonna hit moving up to the. To get rid of all the remaining four and they're gone. And I could have changed it to a half second pause or whatever else, but you get the idea of how that looks and functions. The next thing in my workflow is I would select the canvas once again to make sure we have our main layer selected. And I'm just gonna hit the studio sound button. And studio sound makes it so it sounds like I'm recording in a studio. It takes out background noise. If there's dogs barking, cars honking, anything like that, it'll be gone and it'll isolate my voice. Very handy. I would also hit this plus button under Audio effects. Go to Dynamics Compressor. I usually use the classic voiceover since it's just me talking. If you're doing music or anything else, you'll have a different set of considerations. But you can change the threshold ratio, attack release and knee. Or you can just use one of these presets here. The next thing I'm going to do is apply the eye contact feature. So if I hit this effects button, I hit the plus and then eye contact. This uses AI to make it look like I'm always looking at the camera. So even though I'm Looking down at my keyboard, I'm looking down at my screen. It's going to make it look like I'm looking right at the camera and it makes it much more engaging and professional. And the next thing I'm going to do. This would have actually been the very first thing I would do, but I'm just going to mention it here is set my aspect ratio. So currently it's in a custom ratio. If I want landscape, which is 16 by 9, this is the standard thing that's used in YouTube videos, then that is where I would do it. It's right here in the top left of my canvas pane. So landscape, it's 16 by 9 square, which is better for advertisements, Instagram, certain other social medias. Or portrait, which is best for YouTube shorts. And TikTok. That's like the vertical mode. So that is where you would set all that. If I was doing portrait, I would take my layer my canvas here and resize this to fill the screen. It would make more sense if it was a talking head video and you saw me now filling the screen. But I'm going to go ahead and undo all those changes and go back to how I had it, where it's filling out my whole screen. The next thing I would do is add captions. So I'm going to go to this T at the top, which is for text. We can do titles and there's some presets here. There's a title, subtitle and text. They're just different sizes and weights and they're static. So if you apply this, it's not going to change. If I. If I apply this like this, it's going to stay exactly the same and just say title. But I can click in there again, similar to PowerPoint. You can just click in there and change the name to name, whatever. You can change the color with this fill option. Let's make it red so it stands out. You can give it a border so that it's got that little black border around it. You can change the weight of that border. Just made it a little bit thicker. You can do a background, there's a black background around it and so on. You can, you can do all sorts of stuff. Change the font, the size, normal text, editing, type of features there. And then if we script has some new screen recording options for us, it's just going to stay there. It's static. It doesn't change compared to captions. If we go back to our T, we go down to captions and there are our captions. On the bottom. And once again, we can move it around the screen, we can change the size, the color, everything that we did before. But being in the bottom middle is a standard place to put it. So I'm going to leave it there. And this is synced with our voice and synced with our transcript. So let's play it. And the way that we get to it is you can access it in the. So it changes with the. With the words being spoken. So pretty cool. Very handy, Very common use in shorts, TikToks, things like that. The next thing we can do is break our video up into scenes. So if I click somewhere on the transcript, like let's say right here, the. The paragraph that starts with. Well, if I hit this button right here, it adds a scene. And what a scene is. If you saw right here on my left, these are scene thumbnails. So this is the first frame of the first scene. This is the first frame of the second scene. And changes that I make to a scene won't apply to the other scenes. So this is a way to divide up our clip and make more granular changes. So for example, if we go down into our timeline, you can see that right now my captions are spanning the entire clip. Well, I can resize this. I can resize it however I want. I could make it end right there. But for the sake of organization, you can end it right at the end of a scene and it'll snap into place. And now when that scene ends, the captions end. And I got different options here. Well, first of all, this is more. So there we go. And I can do the same thing with this title. Anything you add will become a layer like this. Whether it's title, captions, audio, video, everything will be a layer on top of. Once again, our bottom layer is called our script layer. The script layer. The thing that makes it unique is that it's transcribed. And one other way we can, we can manipulate with transcription is if we zoom in and I'm holding command and using the scroll wheel on my mouse to zoom in and out like this quickly is you can click on a word and simply drag it closer to tighten up a gap. Or let's say I want to get rid of the word and right here I can click then and drag it to get rid of it. Now if I drag the opposite direction, click and drag right. You can see this little asterisk here. This is created a freeze frame. So it took the frame at that point where I made the split animate it. So there's it's not. There's no motion. It's just a still image. And there's no audio. Looks like this. Up, down. So that is a freeze frame. And I'm gonna go ahead and delete it just by selecting it and pressing delete on my keyboard. If transcript is important to you, either because you're gonna publish on your blog or because caption accuracy is important, then let's talk about some ways we can correct the transcript. Because descript does make errors from time to time. So if I click on a word and highlight it, then this menu pops up. I can, I can do things like make it bold, make it italics. I can do this strikeout, which ignores it if I ignore, gets rid of it from my timeline, but it keeps it there. So it's different than deleting because it keeps it visible in my transcript, even though this won't be in the video, it's just there. So you can see it. And if you want to bring that word back, you can put your mouse on the. The scene boundary where it was cut and drag and restore it like that. But. And you can see it's now on our transcript twice because we have the ignored one and then the one that we just brought back. But the other thing is. So if you select a word or even an entire sentence or a big chunk of text as much as you want, you can hit this correct button that brings up this menu and then let's say something was spelled wrong. Then you could just type it or delete it, re spell it the correct way and hit correct to lock in that change. And it doesn't affect the audio, it only affects the transcript, which then affects the caption. The final thing to know is how to publish this thing. Once you're done, you go to the publish button and by default it's going to go to a web link, which is a descript cloud link. So as soon as you hit publish is going to generate a link for this project. And that is the recommended way to publish your video because it processes quickly on descript's backend. And then you can download it from that link. Or if you want to just go straight directly to your hard drive, you can hit this export and then you can change your settings. If you want it to be just the current composition, which is just this video, or if you want it to be just a current selection or something else, line breaks, all compositions, et cetera, you can change the resolution whether you want the audio quality low, medium, high, and so on. And then you hit export and that'll save it to your hard drive. You can also export just the audio as an MP3 or a dot wav that's good for audio podcasts. You can export it as a gif that is no volume, just the video. You can do a timeline which allows you to import it into other tools like Premiere, Final Cut Pro Tools, DaVinci, Resolve, et cetera. Or you can export just the transcript. Again, if you're going to put this on your blog, publish this to LinkedIn. Anything else that is how you would do that. You can do it as a txt doc or you can publish the subtitles. This is with a transcript timestamped so this is what you would upload to YouTube if you wanted to allow people subtitles to turn on closed captions while they're watching your video. The last thing is back to the publish option. In addition to the web link, you can publish straight to YouTube or any of these particular podcast streaming services. That is it for October's tutorial. I'll be back next month.