Descript Tutorial for Beginners - Learn Descript in 20 Minutes

Assuming you already have a Descript account set up, come to web.descript.com and this is the page you'll see. This is called your workspace view. This is where all of your projects will be. To start your very first project, come up here to this button that says New project in the top right and click on Video Project. It's going to say opening Project. And from here, if you already have something you want to edit, you can drag and drop that file into your project here. Or you can click Upload a file and you can browse through your computer to find the project you want to add. But if you don't have a project, I'm going to assign one to you right now. And we're going to do that by clicking on this record button and you'll see this little preview of yourself. If you don't change your camera to the webcam that you want to use, change your microphone to the one that you want to use and actually let me change it to this one. And then you should see this little bar telling you that you're, you're speaking. It's picking up your, your voice. And then if you want to record your screen, you can do that. And the project I'm going to assign to you is I want you to make a one to three minute video introducing yourself. So say your name, where you're from, talk a little bit about your hobbies. It doesn't really matter what you talk about, but this is the video that we're going to use as we go through this tutorial. I'm going to go ahead and start on mine. Feel free to pause this video record into your project and I'll meet you when I'm done. Talk to you soon. And stop. I hit the Stop recording button. As soon as you do that, it says processing Recording. And I'm just going to give that a minute so that we have something to work with. There we go. It's done processing. First of all, notice that it's been transcribed. All of the words that I said are now written out. Right here at the very top there's an untitled button. And I'm just going to call this introduction. So you can just click in there and type. And now I'm going to click on this record button again to hide the right side, just to familiarize you with this interface. This is the transcript over here is scenes. Right now I only have one scene, but this will come into play later. This is my canvas, which is where I can see what's going to Be on this video. And then on the right side here is what's called my properties. This is my properties bar, where I can make changes to whatever's in my video. By default, the timeline is hidden, but if I click this button in the bottom left that says Show Timeline, it pops up my timeline. And you can see there's sound waves that are aligned with what I was saying. And there's also my words transcribed above my video. So when I'm first coming into this video, like I'm pretending that I'm seeing this for the first time, what I'm going to do first is I can zoom in on the timeline by holding command on my Mac computer and scrolling up to zoom in. Looks like this. And on a Windows, that'll be Control and scroll up. And I can zoom out by hitting Command and scroll down or Control and scroll down. On Windows. If you're on a trackpad, it'll be two fingers. So the first thing I'm gonna do is there's a pause right there before I start speaking. I'm gonna grab the corner and notice. Notice the very beginning, it turns into that bracket that's open to the right side. Whenever I see that, that means I can change the boundary of what I have selected. So if I click on it and drag to the right, it's gonna tighten up that gap. And I can tell that was a gap because there's no. There's no sound waves right there. Notice as soon as I start speaking or I say hello, there's sound waves. So I'm just going to tighten that up. And now it's going to start right as soon as I start speaking. So that's the very first edit I made to this video. Now, if I go to layer over here on the right side, this will open up layer properties. Right now, I don't have a layer selected, but it does show me the layers in this scene. There's only one layer right now, and it's a script layer. We'll talk about layers more as we go. But if I click on my video now, I have different properties here. So these are the properties of the layer that I have selected. There's the how quickly it's playing, which is currently at 1x is just playing at normal speed. There's the volume of this layer. So let me listen to it and see how the volume is. Okay. The volume sounds good. It's not too loud. And descript does automatically adjust it, so it should be pretty good. But if it's too loud or too quiet, you can change this from zero to a negative number, or you can make it louder by increasing the positive number. But what I'm going to do next is add an audio effect. And there's this one right here called Studio Sound. Studio Sound will clean up my audio. So if I have any background noise, like an air conditioner or traffic, Studio Sound will take that out. So I'm just going to simply click it on and then I get this activity Toast, it's called, and it's telling me the progress of that Studio Sound application. And it's already applied. It happens super fast. The only thing you can do with Studio Sound is if I click on these dials here, there's an intensity and it's a percentage from 0 to 100%. So if it sounds a little bit too intense, like it makes my voice sound robotic or flat, then I might want to bump that down. And I happen to know with this microphone in this room that I'm in, 85% usually sounds about right. So I'm going to hit enter and let me just listen to it. With editing, it's all about making a change. Listening to that change. If you like it, keep it. If you don't make another change until you do, that's all it is. It's just rinse and repeat that cycle until how you want it to look and sound. So I like how that sounds. I'm going to keep that just like that. The next thing I'm going to do is do my rough cut of this script. So I can do it manually by just reading through it and finding lines that I want to remove. So like right here I said, and I'm going to repeat myself. I'm going to repeat myself. So I can highlight that on the transcript like this. And with it highlighted, I can press delete on my keyboard. And it's gone from my transcript and it's gone from my video, but I'm going to undo that Command Z or Control Z on a Windows. So that was the delete. But there's also something called ignore with it highlighted like this. If you see this bar above the highlighted words, there's this thing right here with the strikethrough. If I click on that, that ignored it, which means it keeps it on the transcript with a strikethrough on it, but it gets rid of it on the timeline. So it's now gone on the timeline. This is the recommended way to do it. Always ignore over delete because it allows you to maintain awareness of it. So if you don't like that change, you're aware that you got rid of something there and you can bring it back by hovering over it, coming over to this little thing that pops up right here and clicking restore. And now it's back. So that's the ignore function. So go through your project and ignore everything that you want to get rid of. As soon as you're done with that, I'll meet you back in Descript. Next we're going to go into Underlord. So Underlord is this thing at the top, right? And this is going to be all of your AI features. So right here at the top is Edit for clarity. And Edit for clarity is kind of the catch. All of these ones below it, which is like remove filler words, remove, remove, retakes, shorten word gaps. Edit for clarity will do a little bit of all of that. And the prompt that this is going to give the AI is remove filler words, digressions, blather, all the obvious cuts. I'll hit Submit Underlord is thinking this will take just a few seconds to process and it does the ignore feature. So here's what it identified to get rid of it wanted to get rid of the part where I introduced where I'm from and a little bit more. So I'm going to go ahead. If I want to keep those changes, I can hit Apply Edits to Script. So go ahead and click on that. And there it is. It got rid of that part and I'm going to go ahead and click done. And now those edits are in effect. And again with the ignore feature, it remains stricken out on my transcript, but on my timeline and on my video it is gone. Now the other thing I can do is if I'm going to. Let's see if I have any gaps anywhere. Okay, so right here. And I'm going to zoom in. Remember, command and scroll wheel to zoom in. Make your timeline bigger so you can see more detail. There's the word easy and I can see the sound waves. So I know the word is right there. And let me just play this. So there's. There's a bit of a pause there. And let's say I just want to make this a little bit faster paced, tighten up that pause. I can click on this word there and drag it to the left. And you can see that number 2s 0.15s. That's how long the silence is between the end of the word easy and the start of the word there. And you can also cover up words. So if I go to the word so that's a filler word. I don't want that in there. I can click on the next word, go, and drag it to cover up the word. So. And now it's gone. And there we go. Oh, and by the way, I just gave a shout out to my website. If you want to go deeper on anything that I'm going over. I have a complete course on descriptmastery.com you can go to C course, and this is the Descript Mastery course. It's about seven hours of video lessons. Every single lesson has an assignment so that you complete a project just like this tutorial you're watching right now, and then by the end, you'll be a master of Descript. And by the way, I have a discount for you. If you complete the tutorial you're watching right now, I'll give you 30% off, but you got to keep watching it to get to how to redeem that offer. Now that we've messed around with our transcript, we know how to edit that. Let's play around with the video here. So one of the things we can do is this thing right here called eye contact. And eye contact will use AI to make it look like I'm always looking at the camera. Like right there, I'm looking off, and it's not gonna look very good. So it's applying eye contact. And by the way, what I just did is you can make the windows bigger, so you can click on this portion right here in the middle to make the canvas bigger. You can drag this up and down to make your timeline bigger. And you can minimize the properties bar by toggling one of these sections here. So while eye contact is applying, I'm going to introduce you to a concept called scenes. So right there at the beginning, I say, hello, my name is Ross. I'm creating a descript tutorial right now. If I click somewhere on my transcript, my cursor will move to that point. And my playhead. The playhead is this vertical line on the timeline will also move to that point so they move together. And with my mouse right here, if I add a forward slash, notice there's a forward slash right here. And now there's a forward slash right here. That is creating what's called a scene. And a scene is like a slide in a PowerPoint. So notice I now have two scenes, and whatever I do to scene one will not affect scene two. So if I come into scene one, I click on my frame on my layer here, and I make myself bigger like this by grabbing the bound the edges and just dragging it to be bigger. My scene one is now bigger than scene two. And here's how it looks. I am creating a tutorial right now. So as soon as it. As soon as the play boundary crosses into scene two, it gets small again. So that is how you can make changes to one scene without affecting the rest of your video is by adding forward slashes to isolate those parts. You want to have a different effect. And now inside of scene one, I'm going to show you how to add an element. So if I come to this elements thing right here, you can see I have different things like shapes, dynamic text, all of that. For now, we're just going to add this top one called text. I'm going to do this one called title. And I'm just going to write my name in there. And then with that title added, if I click out, I can drag. I can click on the title again and drag it around the image. Like let me put it in the bottom left. And then I get this pop up over it where I can do things like change the color, change the size, change the weight, change the font. So let me just apply a random font and I'm going to change the alignment so that it's off to the left side. That's the alignment. And now it looks like that tutorial right now. So now I have a nice little intro scene. Now with the next scene, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come to somewhere else. I'm going to go to this very last line of the project and let me just zoom in on my timeline. So I'm going to go here where I start saying this is my very first project. I can also start a scene right here. So with the playhead, the blue vertical line right there, I can hit forward slash. And now that's a new scene. And I can see on my left side I have scenes 1, 2, 3. And I also have, right here it says scene 3. So it's also marked down on the timeline. And what I'm going to do to scene three is I'm going to click on the layer. I'm going to click on Effects above the. On the menu that pops up above it. And I'm going to turn on this thing right here that says green screen. And green screen is going to use AI to remove my background. Oops. And I got an error with the eye contact. So that didn't work for some reason. That's okay, we won't worry about that. Hopefully it works. On your project. If it doesn't, sometimes you just need to try it again and it'll work. Okay. And Green screen is done applying. So you can see that my background is now gone. And what I could do is I could come into my media section here, and this is where all of Descript's stock media lives. So there's little GIFs, there's videos, and you can search things. So if there's. You could type in nature. Let me just do that. I'll type in Nature. And it found all these different kind of backgrounds, unsplash images, et cetera. You can open any of these up by clicking Show All. I'm going to add this thing right here, it says importing video. It should just take a second here. And there we go. Now notice what happened. If I look on my timeline, I can see this image, the image of this Antarctica scene. And it's what's called a new layer. So if I look down here, I see this blue layer. It's got a thumbnail to tell me that it's a small thumbnail of this bigger video. But what's happening right now is this layer is on top of my layer, the image of me. So what I need to do is come to this thing that says layer, hit this back button, and then I can see I have my script layer, which is the layer that I'm in, and then this layer, which is the layer with the ice on it. So I'm going to click on that layer, I'm going to hold it and drag it down. And now my script layer is on top and so I can see myself again. And remember, I removed my background, so that's why I'm able to see this view. So go ahead and do that on your project. Apply Green screen and then change the layer order so that you're in front of a background. Once you've done that, let's go back to the beginning of our project, back to scene one, and I want to show you again, this is another layer is the text, the text that I added. That is a layer. You can see this little T. And then whatever I titled it, which is just my name. And so you can see that I have another layer there. Now it's time to publish our project. So if we come up to this publish button, then you have two options. You have an export and a publish. And before I talk about that, I'm going to shout out my course one more time. So I have the Descript Mastery course here. It's on descriptmastery.com course. And for having completed your project, I want you to do something here. I want you to publish your project to what's called a web link. And web link is descript's built in ability to share your project. So if you publish to a web link, you can set your resolution. I recommend leave it at max and then keep access to anyone with the link and then go ahead and hit publish. And now this is going to generate a URL with this copy link. If you copy this link and email it to me RosscriptMastery.com I will send you a coupon code to take 30% off of the Descript Mastery course. Again, there's no pressure to do this, but if you want that's something that you that you can do, hit this copy link, share it with me, I'll send you a coupon code. If you don't want to share it, you just want to download your project, you can hit this download button and that'll save it to your computer. That is the fastest way to download a project to your computer. Alternatively, you can also publish your project to YouTube or any of these different podcast hosts. So that's it for this tutorial. Thank you so much for watching. You're now on your way to becoming a Descript master.