Descript now lets you select and move multiple layers at once. Drag in empty space or on the canvas to grab several shapes, resize them together while keeping proportions, or lock layers to exclude them from selection.
Imagine you're unpacking your groceries, but you can only grab one item at a time. You have to walk back to the car for each and every bag. Back and forth, back and forth. That's what single layer selection was like in descript. Now you can get yourself a cart and carry all your bags in at once, unloading everything in one trip. This cart is descript's new multi select. Join me in descript and I'll show you how it works. What I have here on your screen is one of descript's DES default layouts. So it put in several different layers here. There's a placeholder layer in the background, two text layers, and then a shape, this little white line right there, as well as a gradient layer in the background. So if I look over here, there are five layers. Now I can select all five of these layers at once if I want, and I can do that in two ways. So the first way is to click into the white space, click and drag up, and I'm now selecting everything, all five of these layers. And then if I click and move, everything is moving together. And it also, if I grab the corners, it's resizing everything together. So that's great. But what if I don't want to grab the background? Well, there's an easy fix. I can come over to this layers section and if you're not seeing it, open up the Properties button right here and that'll expose the layers section. And so what I want to do for any layer that I don't want to select is I want to lock it. So I'm going to find my script layer. That's the layer with this placeholder. I'm going to come over to the far right with this little lock icon and click on that. And now the background layer is locked. And look at this. If I try to do anything to it, nothing happens. So now if I start my selection, I'm only grabbing those layers and not the background. And look at that. I can drag it around the screen, all of those layers. I'm just gonna put it back where I started. And then the other thing I can do. So I mentioned there's two ways. The first way is the clicking in the white space. I can also click on the image itself and I can drag from any point and select the different layers. The reason I didn't start with that is look what happens if I unlock that script layer. If I click and I try to drag, I'm only selecting that layer. I can't do the blue selection box. Because I'm grabbing this layer. On that note, I have something I call the youe First Video Challenge, where I teach you how to make and publish your very first video in descript. Check the link in the description below to learn more about that. To show you this in just one other different way, I'm going to add some shapes. So I'm just going to throw in a square and let's do a circle. Let me move that into this scene and let's put a star behind it as well and put that in the right scene and just going to make our star bigger so we can actually see it. So there we go. Let's say you got a bunch of layers like this. They're shapes, they could be images. It doesn't matter. The principle is the same in description. So then what I can do is I can do my multi select. There we go. I got all three of my layers selected, and then I can grab the corners and I can resize them and all three resize together. And then if I click it, it's a group of these objects. Now I can click it and I can drag them around the screen all at once. If I click away, it unselects. And then if I just click once without dragging, then I'm only selecting the topmost layer. But if I want to get the group, I just do the multi select and then I can resize them all together proportionally. Now you know how to select multiple layers in your project, but do you want to see something insane? You can actually generate videos inside of descript. Check out this video next where I break down how it works and how to do it.
