Descript Tutorial - Squadcast & Active Speaker (Automatic!)

Welcome to the February 2024 descript tutorial. Every month I make a workflow video walking you through a different type of descript project. This month I'm going to be answering a viewer question about multicam editing. He asks, can you make a video on multicam editing for podcasts using active Speaker View plus a side by side view for a dynamic podcast viewing experience? Yes, I can. Let's get into it. So I'm going to start by showing you this from taking a remote recording off of squadcast. If you don't know, descript integrates with squadcast, which means that they make it really easy to take a video recording from squadcast and put it into descript. So here's what it looks like from the dashboard. I'm going to assume you've already integrated your account and everything's all set up. And once you have a remote recording completed, then what you'll do is find the one that you want to make into a descript project and you'll click on this little arrow right here, this drop down arrow, and then it'll say take one, there might be a take two, take three if you've done multiple takes. I only did one take here, so that's, that's all we have. I'll hit this dropdown again and then you can select the speakers that you want to add. So if you have two or three or four or five or more guests, you can have up to 10 on SquadCast, then you could add all those and maybe some of them you don't want to add, you just wouldn't select them. So then it opens up this little dialog box in the bottom and then what you'll hit is this Edit in descript button. So I'll click on that and it asks me if I want to edit the MP4 which is the video, or if I want to do audio only with a WAV or MP3, I am going to do MP4 and it says starting export process to Edit in description and I'll be back in a moment when that's done. And it's already done, it says successfully created new descript project. Your recordings have been sent to your Descript drive view. And then when I click Open in descript and now it asks me which drive I want to put it in, which workspace I want to put it in. So if you have multiple, obviously pick the right one and then which language it's in so it can transcribe correctly. And I hit Create Project and Import files and it says welcome to Descript for Web. And it works in my browser, or I can do it on the app. I always recommend people use the app. So I'm going to hit Open Desktop App. And as you can see from this toast in the bottom right, it's downloading the media files. So it's getting all those files off of the Internet, bringing them into my project, as well as it is currently transcribing the files. So I'll just give that a moment. And our files are now inside of our descript project. They're still working on being transcribed. That's okay. The first thing I would do in my workflow is I would apply studio sound. I would do all of my sound effects. I would listen to this, you know, adjust the volume as necessary, add a compressor if necessary. And you can see it automatically split out the speakers. So one speaker's name is Neil. I'll just type that in there, Neil. And it asked me to create Speaker Neil, which I'm going to do. What I should have done is a different one. I'm going to click on the name. I'm going to say Neil. And I'm going to say, replace that entire track everywhere with Neil. So I click that. So I'm going to type in Neil. Replace Neil everywhere with Neil. And then this other one that just says track one, I'm just going to call him Elliot. And then it's going to say, rename track one to Elliot. And now all those instances of track one are called Elliot. Next thing, and this would really be the first thing, but I would title it. So I'm going to call this demo Multicam Project. And now what happened is there's two video files in here. I have one video file for each speaker. And by default, one video file is on top. It's this one right here, this guy named Elliot. So he's the one that I'm able to see. If I want to change the position, I can click on this part that says layers here. Right now, it's called track one. That's Elliot. If I drag Neil to above, now, he's the one that I can see. So this is telling me the layer order. So right now, Neil is covering up Elliott's track. What I could do to create the active speaker effect. And I'm gonna start by showing you the manual way. There's an automatic way to do this, but I'm also gonna show you the manual way just to help you understand this. Right now we have the first speaker that says, all right, Elliot Holland, my man, how you Doing this morning. So that first part I'm gonna hit, I'm gonna create a new scene right there. So this is in its own scene, and Neil is the active speaker. Perfect. That's what I want. That looks good. Then I'm going to come into scene two, and I'm going to take the part where Eliot is talking. It says, I'm doing amazingly well. How are you, Neil? So right here. And I can drag Elliot's scene on top. And now look at this. When Neil's talking, it's. He's active on the screen. When Elliot's talking, he's active on the screen. So that's the manual way to do it is by creating scenes and then adjusting the layer order. Now, there's an automatic way to do this. If I click on the video preview and right here where it says multi cam and it says script, and then Neil, Isaac, if I just simply click on this thing that says active speaker, Notice what just happened in my thumbnails. I now have. It created dozens, maybe even hundreds of scenes. It made 84 scenes automatically for every time that the active speaker switches. So pretty amazing capability. You don't have to manually go through anymore and do this all yourself. So here's what it looked like, the transition between scene three and scene four. So pretty, pretty cool. Once the active scene has been applied, so we can see that Elliot is speaking right here. Right here where it says layers, he is the top layer and he's fully opaque. He's fully visible. Below that is the Neil layer. And he's hidden. So that little eye marker I can show and hide it. And he's behind anyway, so I can't see him. But if I wanted to override the automatic active speaker, then I could make him visible. I can bring him forward, bring his layer in front of track one, and now he's visible again. And notice how it's. It made it small by default. Descript does this. The way to fix that quickly is when you click on the layer, this thing pops up over it, this menu, and where it says position, click on it and click Fill Canvas. And now that layer fills that entire canvas. But I'm going to go ahead and make Elliot the active speaker again. This track one, I'm putting it back on top of. And now he is visible while he's speaking in that scene. Okay, so one thing about having brought this in from squadcast is it's already synchronized the two audio tracks, or if I had three or four, they would all already be synchronized and they're Locked together so that the conversation goes as it did in real time. Now I can make edits if. If I'm bringing in tracks outside of squadcast, I need to manually sync them. I've made videos about that in the past, so go watch those. I won't talk about how to sync the tracks, but the essence of it is if you right click on this layer and you go to edit sequence, here's where you can see your multiple layers. And this is how you can apply edits to each individual track. So for example, let me see if there's any parts where they're talking over each other. Maybe right here, see where it says yeah, on the transcript, there's a little. There's some sort of sound going on right there. If I just want to silence out that background, I can hit S to split the clip. And now there's two different parts, I can go forward a little bit, hit S again. And now this is isolated and any of any changes I make to that will only apply to that selected part, that blue part. And so if I hit this little speaker thing right here to mute it, now we're not going to hear whatever sound that was. If he's coughing or could even be laughing in a disruptive way, I've now cut that out. And when you get a lot of people, like you get four or more people on a single track there, there tends to be a lot of people talking over each other. And that's how you can mute people out, is by coming into this sequence view. Now you can also do things like change the audio levels. So if all the guests on your show have different microphones, which I'm. They probably will. You can, for example, if his sound waves look a little small, if he sounds a little quiet, I can bump his volume up right here with the audio where my. My mouse is. And let's call this 3db. And now it just changed his entire track to 3db without affecting the other track. And if he's a little bit loud, for example, I come back into audio. I could say negative two, hit enter. And now he's been made a little bit more quiet. I could also make changes to studio sound. I could, like, maybe he's got a really good sound already and I don't need studio sound. I could turn studio sound off for him while studio sound remains on for the other speaker. So anyways, you get the idea. This is how you make changes to each individual track inside of your project. You can also add new tracks here. You could Go into new track. You could hit add media. And then this is where you would bring in other types of media files. So once I have that all set how I want, I'll just hit done and I'm back inside of the project. So I won't go into all of the editing details that I would normally do if I was editing this for a client. Like, I would apply the filler word removal. I would go through and strike out the things that I don't need that are unnecessary to the conversation. After doing all of that work, after getting all that stuff set, then I would look for moments where maybe one of them is telling a joke and you want to see both of them on the screen at the same time. So you can see one reacting and one is still speaking. So what I would do for that is I actually created a template. And if I go into my templates, two camera interview, and I click on this, now, that template made it so that they're side by side. They have their label. I made, you know, a little template with their name under their. Under their face and then the sound waves in the background and their social media handles at the top. So, and that's a template. If you, if you wanted to make one manually, you could also let me go into another scene, say in scene five here. You can also just resize these layers in the way that I showed you before. So if I just simply take the, like double click on the layer, I bring in these corners. Done. And I'll just move him off to one side and then I'll grab my other layer. So again, I'll click into the canvas, into this gray part here, and then I can see this layers heading. I'll make Elliot opaque again. I'll make it so we can see him, and I'll drag his layer to where I want him to be first. I'll resize it. I'll make it a little bit smaller. Done. Move him over. I'll make Neil a little bit smaller. And now they're side by side. And then I could change the background color, I could add captions, I could do anything that I normally do to this layer. But at least you get the idea of how this works. You get an idea of how the layers look, how to manipulate them, and how to bring them onto the screen at the same time. So that's it for this month's tutorial. I hope you found this useful. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments. I respond to every single one. And if you have a topic idea, for next month's tutorial. Also leave that in the comments. And lastly, if you want a template, the exact same one that you saw in this video or you want custom ones, go to my website, descriptmastery.com templates and you can get free templates which you can simply open up right here and then download into your Descript project. No cost to you. You don't need to attribute me or anything. They're completely free. And then, if you want custom templates made, maybe ones with your business's logo on it, or your brand, here are the steps to go ahead and order custom templates. Thank you for watching. I'll be back with you very soon.