A single-speaker YouTube tutorial ("Descript Vocabulary") introducing key Descript terminology and UI elements. The speaker demonstrates workspace vs. drive (private vs. team), creating projects/compositions, timeline and layer views, automatic transcription, scenes and markers, Studio Sound for audio cleanup, Overdub voice creation, ducking, the Media Bin, publishing/exporting options, and the canvas as the editing area.
The next thing we're going to go over is the descript nomenclature. So descript uses a lot of similar terminology as other editors, which you might be familiar with, but it's also got a lot of unique stuff, stuff that's unique to this software. So when you open descript on your computer or on your browser, you're going to come to a page similar to this. And the first thing, the first term we're going to go over is workspace. So this is our private workspace, which means that this is on our hard drive and only we can see it. We also have a drive, which is this one. And if I had team members in here, in addition to me seeing it, my team members would be able to see it. And to add people to your drive, add team members, you need to add a seat. And you do that by clicking that plus button right there, adding their email, and then sending them an invite. And you can set if they're going to be basic, which would be a free tier editor, or an editor sheet, which costs $288 per year. And you send them that invite and they have that link. And then you can make folders in here, there's a new folder button, so you can make folders for different clients for different projects. However you want to organize it. It's up to you. And then we have a new classic project button. We won't even talk about that in this episode because that's the old version of descript, which has been. It will be deprecated. And then there's the new project, which is the current version of descript, which they originally called the storyboard version. Once we hit new project, this comes up and we have a blank editing space here. But I'm going to show you a project that I've already done with some video already in it. So this was an interview that I did. This is the timeline down here, probably used to that from other editing softwares. This is the timeline view, but we can change it to the layer view, which is like this, where we can see the music, the microphones, sound effects, other layers of visual or video. This here is the transcription. Descript automatically does this for you. When you add the video to your canvas, it automatically transcribes it like this. This here, these are called scenes. These are the individual components of your video. Within a project, you have compositions. So this is one composition you can click on the project tab. This dropdown comes and you can start a new composition within this project. And I'll show you how this can be useful. You can copy and paste from one composition. Hit copy and then paste it into a new composition. So you could have like a long video as one composition and then a bunch of shorts, separate compositions. You can add markers to your transcription by hitting the M button. Pulls up this marker and you can call it whatever you want. Scene one, etc. With the audio, there's a feature called Studio Sound. This is what makes it sound like your audio is recorded in a professional studio. It can take out echoes, background noise, dogs barking, cars honking, all sorts of stuff. Let's try it. Let's listen without. All it is is this toggle and then you can control how the intensity of it. So let's leave it at a hundred percent. But it's off right now. I just toggled it off. So Gallery and studios rear space. So there it is without it turned it back on. Gallery and studios. We're a space that has co working There it is with it on. And then there's a feature called Overdub which from your main menu, if you go to voices on the left hand side here, you can hit Create new Voice. Name it. You can only do this for yourself or somebody who has given permission for you to use their voice. Because what this is, is you are going to read a script. The more that you can provide, the more of your voice that you can provide it, the more accurate you will train the AI to be. And this allows you to input your AI voice over certain words. So that's Overdub. Next we have ducking. Ducking is a feature where if you have audio, somebody speaking and background music, it'll automatically lower the background music so that the voice can be heard more clearly and it's not being overpowered by the background noise. So that's ducking. Then we have the Media Bin. If you can see where my mouse is at the top of the screen here, this is your Media Bin. If you click it, this is where you add files. This is where you can add stock footage. That is your Media Bin. We'll spend a lot of time on that. Then we have publishing and exporting. This button at the top right here allows you to publish it to the cloud. The video that you're watching right now is hosted on the cloud, or you can export it as a file to your hard drive. You also have the option to export audio as a gif, as a timeline, to be used with other software as a transcript or as subtitles. That is publishing and exporting. Next we have scenes on the left hand side. These are your scenes. We have these little slash markers, which also indicate a scene on your timeline. And these are how you split up pieces of video within your project. These are the different scenes here. Next we have a canvas. This is your canvas, this gray box in the middle. And this is your working space. This is where you can change the layers to move things in front of another. That is your canvas. That is it for descript nomenclature, the descript vocabulary that you need to know to use this software. And we're going to introduce a lot of other terminology throughout this course, but that is at a very high level, the most basic terminology.
