Edit with Descript SO good, they can't look away!

There's a few simple video editing techniques that you can use to get people to watch your videos longer. So if your retention graphs look like mine used to, like this, people are clicking off of your videos almost as soon as they start. So why spend all of that time making the video in the first place if no one watches it past the first 30 seconds? In this video, I'm going to show you three simple descript techniques that I started implementing in every every video. And suddenly my retention graph started looking like this. So how can you fix retention? Perhaps the simplest way to add intrigue to your videos is to add zooms. I'm going to demonstrate by showing you the same video of me reading a line two times.

It's the same video, but in the.

First playthrough, there will be no change to the camera. In the second playthrough, there will be a zoom added. Pay close attention, and I want you to tell me which one is more effective and which captures your attention more. Ready? Here we go. Dscrimastery.com is where people go to learn how to make great videos. Dscriptmastery.com is where people go to learn how to make great videos. Do you see the difference? Adding the zoom makes the line way more captivating. But how do you make those yourself? Join me in descript and I'll show.

You inside of this project. To add a zoom to this layer. And this is the exact same video that I just showed you in the example. I'm going to select the layer I want to add the zoom to. So I'm going to click right here on the video of me. I'm going to come over to this button on the right side that says layer. Click on that and down at the very bottom, you can scroll up and down in this Properties menu, the very bottom, click this plus button next to Animation. Click on that and you'll see there's a zoom in pan and there's a custom. You're welcome to use zoom and pan. That is a preset one. Personally, I always use custom. It gives you the most control. And once you understand how to do this, how to use it, then I think you're going to find that custom's a lot easier. So select custom. And now, if you notice on the timeline, on my script layer, the one that I added it to, something just got created. There's this blue line, this thin blue line. And on either side of it, there is this white diamond. If I hover over it, it has a blue outline around it. And then five seconds later. So right here, this is at the very beginning.000 of my project. Exactly five seconds later is the second diamond. So the distance between those two diamonds is how long this animation is gonna last. And the way that the project looks at this first diamond is how this animation will begin, how the zoom will begin. And how the layer looks at the second diamond is how this animation will end. And our animation itself, our zoom is everything that happens between those two diamonds. So if I click on this first diamond and I come to the size and position properties right here, my default height and width is. This is shot in 1080p, so. So it is 1920 is the width by 1080 is the height. And if I click on the second diamond, then my height and width is still the same, but I can change this number. So here's how I usually add the zooms. I'll click on the width and I'll type in something about 10% bigger. So I'll type in like 2100 for example. And I hit enter. And you can see that the canvas just zoomed in a bit. And if I type in a bigger number like, let's do 3000 now it zooms all the way in like that. And I can drag around in here. And you can see that my X and Y numbers are changing over here in the size and position box as I drag it around. And I want it so that my head's not getting cropped off. And I'm gonna go ahead and play this just to show you how this is gonna work. So remember, at our first diamond, our width is gonna be 1920 by 1080. And then at our second diamond five seconds later, it's gonna be 3000 by 1688. Okay, I'm gonna hit this left arrow to return to the beginning of the project. And I'm gonna hit play and watch and pay attention to how this zoom looks.

Dscrewmastery.com is where people go to learn how to make great videos.

So there we go. And now just to do one last thing to this, I'm gonna grab this keyframe. And I mentioned that the distance between the two keyframes is how long this animation takes to occur. So I'm going to drag it to the left and if I put it about right there, that's going to be about a 2 1/2 second animation. So now let's see how this looks.

DescriptMastery.com is where people go to learn.

So now it's much faster. And so between those two properties, the distance between the keyframes and the number of the height or width is how you can control how this animation is going to look. And if you want to find your animations, notice how I clicked away and the diamonds disappear down here. If I scroll down on this properties bar, you can see under this animation section there's a thing that says Custom animation one. So that is the animation that I added. And if I added a second one, it would be custom animation 2, and so on. So to bring up those diamonds again, I click on this and now my keyframe diamonds are showing once again. And if I click on these dials, I can change the easing. So right now it's natural. And I've done a video about this in the past, about the these different speeds here. So click on the link in the top right corner to watch that. I won't go into it here, but you can choose different speeds. And then if you want to remove the animation, simply click on this minus sign and that'll remove it.

Now your video is looking a bit more interesting with those zooms. This next technique will make your presentation clearer and easier for your viewer to remember. Did you know that slide based presentations made using tools like PowerPoint, Google Slides, whatever, are used by approximately 90% of companies? Why? Well, we all love to complain about PowerPoints, but the truth is they are so widely used because they're effective. People don't like to just stare at people while they're talking. That's boring. We like to have text, charts and graphics to supplement what we're hearing while we're hearing it. It's more active and it appeals to people who learn in different ways, which makes the presentation much stickier in your memory. As such, this next technique takes what works about PowerPoints and applies them to your videos. For example, when you're listing something, it could appear on the screen as bullet points like this, this and this. It could be a complete quote like this, or maybe it's a chart to supplement what you're saying, like this. So how can you use text and title pages effectively in your videos?

Here I am inside of descript and the first thing I'm going to do is find the part of my video that I want to add the title or text to. So right here I'm saying, but if you get this right, people will consume every second of your videos. I want to add text right there to emphasize what I'm saying. So I'm going to add a slash and move my playhead, this blue line to right before where I'm Going to add the text and I add a scene right there. Or I create a scene by adding a slash, a forward slash on my keyboard. There it is. And then I'm going to come to where I want the text to end. So I'm going to do the same thing on the backside, move my playhead there and hit another slash. So now I've isolated this portion of the video where I want to add my text. Then I'm going to come over to the right side to elements. Click on that. And up here you have text, subtitle, and title. These are just different starting points with all of them. You can change the font, the size, all that kind of stuff. I'm going to add subtitle. So there it is. And I'm going to type in there. Don't mess this up because I'm giving an important instruction. I want people to add some emphasis that this is important. So there we go. I've added my text. Now this is just static text. It's not going to change. And it's just appearing over my existing video. If I want to convert this into a title page, I can click on my main video, my background here. In this case, I can come to layer, and I can click this little eyeball and that hides my video. And then I could go to scene. I'm just giving you ideas here. You know, you could do whatever you want, but I go to scene, go to background, and I could change the color. I hit that little plus button to add the background color. I could hit this color and I could make it red, for example, to make it pop a little bit. Now I have a very basic title screen. You could also use an image or you can put your logo back there, whatever you want. I'm going to click on this text layer and I'm going to turn this into a captions layer. So I'm going to go to layer, and right now it's freeform, meaning it's not going to change. It's just exactly what I typed in there. But if I click on this dropdown and I click captions now, it's going to go off of my transcript. So here's how it looks when I play it.

You get this right, people will consume every second of your videos.

And so that's a very basic way to add text and turn it into a title screen.

In a recent video, I showed how you can save a title page like the one you just made as a layout so that you only need to make it one time.

Check out the video Linked right here.

In the top right to learn how to do that. This next technique for increasing audience retention is the most powerful of all. It takes a bit more effort, but if you get this right, people will consume every second of your videos. Video is a visual art, and humans are visual creatures. That's why we have sayings like a picture is worth more than a thousand words. In your videos, you want to show, not tell as much as possible. If you can explain a point by showing a visual of it rather than explaining it, that's always more powerful. So how can you do that in your videos? Let me introduce you to something called B roll. B roll is video where you are not speaking, but rather showing what is being talked about. This is as opposed to a roll, which is what you're saying. Seeing right now where I'm both speaking and I'm on camera. For example, if I start talking about how the best way to learn how to make videos is to go to descriptmastery.com in your browser and I show you a video of a browser while I speak about it. That is B roll. Broadly speaking, there are two types of B roll. There's B roll that you shoot yourself, and there is stock media, meaning you've bought the rights to use someone else's photos or videos from a stock media company. My recommendation, to the extent possible, is that you want to shoot your own B roll. It takes significantly more effort to shoot your own B roll. But in the age of AI generated nonsense, real, authentic human B roll will set you apart from everyone else to implement B roll in your videos. While you're writing your scripts and planning your videos, create a list of the B roll shots you need. Here's my list for the video that you're watching right now. Then on filming day, film all of your B roll while you're doing the rest of your shots. But if you're not ready to film your own B roll yet, and you want to use stock media, that's a great option.

And if you're using a video editing.

Software like descript, you have a giant library of stock videos and photos built into the tool and included with your subscription.

So here's how to use those. Inside of my descript project, if I identify a part where I want to add stock media, like this, where I'm saying video is a visual art, that's a perfect place to add B roll. So what I can do is find that part that I want to add the image to. I can highlight it on the transcript. So where I say Video is a visual art. I'm just going to highlight those words and then in this menu that pops up over it, I'm gonna select add layer. Click on that. I'm gonna come down to where it says videos and I get this view and I can search through here. I could just scroll through, find all the default videos that are in here, or there's also this search bar at the top. So I'm gonna type in video and let's see what comes up. I'd like to find a video of someone filming. So let me say video camera. Cause video didn't quite do the trick. And I'll pick this one. It's like a film crew. So I'm going to click on that. It says importing video and there we go. So just over those words I highlighted video is a visual art. It has added this B roll. And you can do that same thing with any part of your video you can even add. If I do the same thing, I select humans or visual creatures. I say add layer, I go back. If I click files, I can add my own pictures off of my computer, off of my camera, or I can go to images. These are gonna be descripts, stock images. And I have all sorts of resources here at my disposal.

These techniques are huge level ups for making your videos more interesting than ever before. But they do you no good if you're not attracting the right audience in the first place. Click the video on your screen to learn how to make content that appeals to your desired audience.