A YouTube walkthrough of Descript version 70 (released Aug 2023) describing major new features: web-based Descript, UI and timeline changes (default minimized timeline, moved tools), scroll-bar zooming for timeline, enhanced slip tool showing clip start/end timestamps, scene-stepping and replacement recording options, and save-to-template for scenes; the speaker also promotes a free course on Descript. The video is a single-speaker monologue focused on feature demonstration and brief opinions on usability.
I've never seen this in any app before. You can just expand the scroll bar to zoom out and you can shrink it to zoom in on your Timeline. Descript just continues to get better and better. Today we have the Release of version 70 of the software and it's a pretty big improvement. So let's talk about it. First of all, the big one is we have Descript for web. So. So this is my web browser and it looks just like the Descript app. No longer do we have to use the Descript app to do editing. So I could just open this up and I can say it's now available on the web. Continue in. I'm not using Chrome, so it's an unsupported browser. But Chrome or Microsoft Edge is the most optimal way to use it. Well, the most optimal way is the desktop app. Anticipate you'll probably have some bugs if you use this web based service, but it's now available for those who don't want to download the app. So you can do Continue. An unsupported browser and it looks the same, although I do see it says media playback is currently unsupported in this browser. So try a different web browser. So actually you would have to use the other browser in order to properly edit a video. But again, it's just web.descript.com and it just makes the product that much better, that much more options for you. Okay, switching over to the app. The app has a number of UI changes. So first of all, in the, in the top header here, the help button has changed and we got a few different little things we can do there. I won't focus on that too much. The ui, the look and feel of the collaboration buttons has changed. You now have these icons that are always present. So it's got your name or your company or your teammates, whatever it might be. And then you have your comment box and your Properties bar toggle right here. So if you click it, it just pulls up your Comments tab. If you click the Properties bar, it pulls up your Properties bar tab. And if you click it again, it closes it. And then you can do Command Shift D to toggle on the Properties bar. And then we have some changes to the timeline. So by default, when you open up your project in version 70, it's going to look like this with your Timeline minimized. Again, descript tries to get you to not use your Timeline as much as possible. So yeah, it defaults to no Timeline. And then if you hit the Show Timeline button, there we go, it pops up and then in the timeline, once you expand it, we have our tools right here. We have our select our blade, arrange our slip and our hand tool, as always. So that's just changing the position of how that was. There used to be three dots there, and then you would have to expand to pull this out. So just making things easier, just getting better over time. Now, another key thing is down here in the bottom on the scroll bar. There's two dots on either end of the scroll bar. And I've never seen this in any app before, so this is really interesting to me. You can just expand the scroll bar to zoom out and you can shrink it to zoom in on your timeline. So that's pretty cool. And then one other change is the slip tool. If you're using the slip tool, it shows you the start and end timestamps of the clip that you're hovering on. So again, the slip allows you to just click it and then slide it back and forth. And then the next thing you can do is scene stepping. So scene stepping, if you have a word selected in your timeline, you can hit this replace button and then record and then you could replace the selection. So just replace that word. So with whatever you record, like a screen recording your webcam, or you can do this dropdown, you can record into script, which will just add it into your script layer, or you can record a new layer which will record it over your script. Pretty cool. You got some different choices there now and then other little quality of life things that have changed. So if you click on a scene, you can now right click it and hit save to template, and then you could add it into one of your existing templates. So that's a pretty cool time saving feature. And those are the big ones. So as always, this software is getting better, it's getting more complicated, which is why I stay current with it. And I have a course teaching you how to use all the different features of descript. And it's completely free in the month of August. It's about 60% done. And I'm going to need to update some things as the versions keep changing. Descript just keeps pumping out updates, so it's great. Check out my course. I'll put the link in the description. Thanks for watching.
