Friday Free-for-all (Become a Better Creator!)
The host released 12 videos in one day inspired by Nicholas Cole's writing guide, then walks through Descript's editing tools: timeline features like Blade and Slip, fixing bugs when GIFs apply across scenes, dubbing and translation, and how to build reusable templates. Paid custom help is available at descriptmastery.com.
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12
July 20, 2024
Foreign. Okay. And we're live. So let me just make sure you just. Okay. My sound's going perfect. So today was interesting for the channel. I released 12 videos today, and I'm going to do that as long as I can. It's not sustainable, but I'm doing a bit of an experiment, obviously. I've had a lot of different formats on this channel. I've tried, like, long form. I've done a lot of live streams. I've done all sorts of different stuff. Long tutorials, short tutorials. And my inspiration for that is this book I'm reading called the Art and Business of Writing Online. And he basically. He's this guy who makes a living online and he talks about how he just put out volume. He writes 10,000 words a day and multiple articles. He was writing for Inc magazine, and he put out 400 articles in a single year. And he talks about how writing online is fundamentally different than writing 50 years ago because you get so many more shots on goal. You can see the data and you can. There's no limit to how much you can put out, so. Oh, hey, X. Thanks for joining. I'm kind of just killing a few minutes here, but if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in. But. So I was talking about this guy, Nicholas Cole, who is an online writer, and I'm applying that to my YouTube channel. So if you expect a ton of videos. Yeah, ship 30 for 30. That's exactly it. So I'm applying his principle. Like, I'm reading this book, but I'm reading it through the lens of YouTube. And so I'm gonna just put out a ton of content in the coming days. And I'm just trying to get more touch points where people can find me and then just try to, like, dig into that data and see what direction to take the channel next. And on that note. Oh, it's on that. Okay. I think we're still good on that note. Oh, awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He started as a World of Warcraft gamer and, like, blogger as a kid and then turned it into, like, going on Quora and. Yeah, you know his story. That's awesome. So I've been super inspired by that. And the whole time I'm reading it, I'm thinking about it as YouTube. Like, anytime he says writing, I'm, like, making videos. So, yeah, that's kind of my new approach. So I released 12 videos today in that vein. And also this channel is now monetized. So you can leave. I think you can leave, like, tips and stuff directly in this chat, rather than going to buy me a coffee. I had links for that kind of stuff before, so, yeah, just throwing that out for anyone who might be watching this replay or if people join later. So, yeah. What's going on? X? Any questions? Any. Any challenges? Did you take his course or you read. You just read the book? The same book. But I'm gonna. In absence of any questions, I'm gonna start a project. I think you're starting to write a question. Actually, yeah. I came into this without a plan. Let me see. Which. Let me resize this. You said if I have different scenes, is there. Oh, okay. When I try to add GIFs or audio clips or titles, it applies to all scenes. Even when I click current scene. Oh, I think I know exactly what's going on. So it's. It's not your fault. That's a glitch. Let me show you something. If. If what's happening is what I think it is, then, yeah, that's a glitch. And this might be a good one to demonstrate it with. So let me do. So basically, yeah, you're applying a. A gif. Let me just go here and like, I'll just put this in here, whatever. So right now it's looping and it fills that entire scene. But here's what happens. If I add a scene after I've added that gif, like, I added a scene right here. Then, like, if I go. If I change this and I make it so it only plays once. Oh, maybe that. Maybe that does only play it. Maybe it's just a really long one. So this. This isn't a good example. Let me start over. Let me undo that scene. Okay. Let me find a really short gif, like a. Let's just sticker this one. Okay? So it'll automatically fill the scene that was already there. But if I make a new scene after I've added it, this is where the problem comes in. And I suspect this is probably what you did, is you added the scene after you've already added the gif. So if I make this so it only plays once, it's still too long. Sorry, this is a bad demo. Let me just open a new composition and let me just add Kermit the frog, and I'll have him play for like, 10 seconds. Okay? So by default, it fills the scene or the whole video that you apply it to. If the whole video is just one scene. And then if I had a scene in the middle, hopefully it's gonna work this time. Change this to play once. Okay, there we go. When I set this back to loop, what you would expect it to do is to only fill. Go to that scene. But since I added it after adding it for the first time, it causes problems. So what I have to do is delete it, start over. So if I go to. Where was that? I already lost it. Yeah, I think you understand. I can't find that exact one, but maybe I can find it. Let me just try another one. So now, see, it only fills this scene. So basically that shouldn't be happening. But that's a common thing I've run into, and I think that's probably what's happening. Did it work? Did you try it? Did you delete your. Your GIF and then reapply it and did it work? Let me know. Otherwise, could be something else if it's not that. Yeah, so what else? And yeah, once you loop something, it's kind of okay. Yeah. So you're able to figure it out. Once you loop something, it's hard to control. Like, for example, you can't control it like a scene. I can't make it shorter. I could change the duration of it. But even that, if I select that gif and I make it 2x, it's still gonna loop throughout that whole scene, but just play it at double speed. So GIFs are. GIFs are a little finicky. They're a little hard to do what you want. Yeah. Okay, perfect. Glad that worked. So, yeah, and then. Yeah, you would think you'd be able to just say, like, selecting current scene. And then I guess you could after adding a scene. Oh, no, that won't even work. I was gonna say split it and then just delete the back. Back half, but you can't do that. So. Yeah. Anyways, no worries. Oh, hang on. I'm getting a Google security verification. This might kick me off the live stream. I'm not sure. Okay, I gotta verify with my phone. Sorry, everyone, one second here. Don't know why this is happening in the middle of the live stream. Okay, there we go. We're back. Could you also go through what you order when editing videos in terms of tools, referring to the select tool and Blade tool, but I don't know when to use the other tools. Yeah, so as far as the. You're referring to the timeline tools here, like your default select tool. I've had clients who've been using descript for months and they've edited tons of videos and they don't even know what these are. They're like, we'll Be. We'll be like in the middle of a lesson. And they're pretty experienced, but they're like, what are these things, by the way? So you, you. They're not required by any means. Like, you can do a lot without even knowing what these are. So I'd say 90% of the time I'm in Select mode. I rarely ever use Blade Tool. In fact, I don't use it at all because I use S. If you, if you type S on your keyboard, it'll split the clip. So let me go back to another thing here. So like this, this ellipse layer right here, you could click on Blade Tool and then slice it like that. But what I do is just use the Select Tool and. And press S on my keyboard. Oh, and that. That selected the script layer because I didn't have it selected. But if I. There we go. If I select the right layer, I hit S. It'll split that layer. So. So it depends on your workflow. If you like the Blade Tool, use it. Personally, I don't. The Range tool I use a lot now, especially when I'm doing my descript tutorials. The Range Tool is awesome for. In the case of my tutorials, just selecting a range, like, let's say I'm showing something on my screen and underlord is loading, and it takes two or three minutes for Studio Sound to apply or some other AI effect. I can select the range where it's loading and then go to Duration right here in the top right. And then I can bump it up to like 5x. And then what. What was going to take 2 minutes now takes a few seconds and this number goes all the way up to 30x. So, yeah, they do S Tool and Blade Tool do the same thing. So Blade Tool just allows you to click it with your mouse, but S allows you to just from Select Tool in Select Tool, then when I hit S, it splits it. So Blade splits it by clicking S. Splits it by keyboard tap. So. So, yeah, so duration. Back to duration. That's how I use Duration. And it's also extremely useful for podcasts if you're editing in a sequence. And like, let's say one guest, one layer has crosstalk. They're talking over who's currently speaking should be speaking. You can select that range where they're speaking and. And then just mute that particular part. And so Range Tool is awesome. And also for just deleting, like, if there's a specific part you want to delete, you can just delete that specific range. Let me know if any questions about that. And again, the way it works is you just with Range tool selected, you just click somewhere, hold and drag and it'll select that entire range. And then the next one is slip. And this one is hard to explain. Slip. Let me see. It won't really work here. Well, actually music is a pretty good example. Let me do some music here. So let me unmute this layer. So this music layer that has these big sound waves right here is. Goes from. What is this? From like half a second, it starts on the timeline to six seconds. So it's like a five second clip if I'm in Slip Tool, this one right here with the two arrows facing outboard. Then when I hover over the, the current, the clip that I my mouse is on, it tells me that that little 04 to 00:10, that's where in this full music file that range is showing that the, the range that's displayed that will play is from 4 seconds to 10 seconds in the original sound file. What I can do with the Slip Tool is click and hold it and slide it. So it's not changing the length of what plays, it's just changing what part of that file plays. And so the first number is in this case right now it's at 8 and it'll play until 14 and I'm just sliding through. And so with music it's useful if there's like maybe five to ten seconds at the beginning that's building up and you want to start it right at the drop or right where the music starts getting louder, then you can slip until you find that exact point. And then, and then it'll, it'll work out like that. You can also use it to sync up different tracks if things are out of sync. And yeah, there's a lot of different uses for that. And then the last one is really easy. It's the hand tool. All this does is navigational. You can just click and slide left and right. This will not change your layers at all. You can't move anything around. It's just purely what you see on the timeline. So you slide left and right. So personally, blade and hand, I never use. Never, never. Range tool and Slip tool I use fairly often. But 90% of the time I'm in select. But your workflow will be different. Whatever you prefer is totally valid. Okay. In the chat I do podcasts featuring two or three audio recordings imported into descript emerges them into one lane. Is it possible to divide the speakers into separate lanes? So, okay, what's happening is it's putting the tracks into a sequence and. Yeah, so, so for what you're talking about, let me just do this, do a video project and let me just upload some random files into here. Let me just grab, I'm just gonna grab these three. So let's say these are your three audio recordings and actually let me do actual audio recordings. I'm going to switch this to audio composition and then I'm going to take these two MP3s, I'm going to drag them in and then as soon as I get the transcript box. So if it's, if it's merging them into one lane, what you call one lane, I think what's happening is it's putting into a sequence and it's because you have this selected. So if you wanted them to be separate, then unselect that there's a big advantage to keeping it selected. I'll show you why. So if they're all in sync, then like let's say you got Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 and then you merge them into a multi track sequence and hit Done. This is your sequence. And then I right click on it, I hit edit sequence and then there's my two tracks. But you can imagine if you had like two different speakers or even three different speakers, then you might need to tweak these depending on the software it's coming from. If it's coming from squadcast, then it'll automatically be synced for you. You don't have to do anything. Even Zoom, if it's coming from Zoom, it'll be synced and you don't have to worry about lining these up. But some other softwares, you might have to line it up so that, that it all stays in sync. But sequences are extremely important for, for that. So I would suggest you keep them in the sequence. Because the advantage of the sequence once you have it all synced up is that if you make a cut somewhere on this timeline, it'll keep all the tracks inside of that sequence synced up. If you don't have it in a sequence, you would have your like, let's say we got our script layer and then you would have like guest one, guest two as separate layers, three separate layers. And if you wanted to cut like let's say this word, a new project, so we get rid of that and then what happens is I only change this layer and not the two layers above it. So now the whole project will be out of sync with sequences. We don't have to worry about that. Everything stays in sync and it all Moves together. So that's. That's the preferred way. Let me know if you have any questions about that or if there's something else happening. But I suspect that's what's happening is there's sequences and maybe you just haven't used them yet because they are. Sequences are definitely more advanced, but extremely important if you're going to do podcasts. Right. And if you go into your project files, then I gotcha. Easier to make one edit to multiple tracks at one time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly the purpose of the sequence. So. And then to. To work with, to understand sequences a little bit more if you go to the project. Oh yeah. Coming from Camtasia. So some of the Descript ways of doing things is just weird. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, and I feel the same way about Camtasia. I just recently, in the last couple months started using Camtasia. So I have the opposite, but they both have different areas where they. Oh, man. Thank you, X. I appreciate that. First. First tip of this channel. That's awesome. Thank you so much. So, yeah, with Camtasia they have the thing where you can do like cut all layers at once. We don't really have that in descript. And then. So, yeah, so sequences are the way to do it. But if you come into your project, this is where all your files from your whole project live. And so these ones are just the MP3s I added, but then the sequences get added to its own folder. And so here's the sequence that was created. And then if you wanted to create a brand new sequence from scratch, you click those dots, click Create sequence. And then. And then. Yeah, works like that. So yeah. Anything else on sequences or any questions? So we got six people in the chat. Anything else weird coming from Camtasia? Maybe something you haven't been able to do or you feel like you're not doing it correctly? The biggest thing I wish descript had that Camtasia has is the automatic zooms when you're showing your screen and the automatic mouse clicks. Like that is such a nice feature. And I have templates for that in descript. So I add it all manually. But yeah. Oh yeah. And this. The title of this is in Spanish, actually. This is a good thing to go into. So this week descript rolled out the translation feature and this thing right here, translate. And it. There. This feature was here, but it would only do the transcript until a couple days ago. But they just added this thing, the dub speech. And this is like mind blowing. Like there's been A couple times where Descript rolls something out, like eye contact or I don't know, I guess Underlord when it first came out, that type of stuff. But this is like another like insane mind blown moment where you can literally change this audio from English into Spanish or any other language. Like, I can turn on dub and then it wants me to label the speaker, so I have to turn it into an AI speaker. So I'll give it one of the ones I trained it on. I could also do the stock speakers. And so I'll hit that and then I'll hit submit under load is thinking. And so. So it does the transcript translation right there. And then it looks like there was an error when it throws this little red dot. Oh, I had this problem when I made the video the other day. So this feature did not work for me on the desktop app, which I'm on right now. But it did work. Let me make my screen a little smaller. I think you can't see it on the live stream. Yeah, there we go. So it threw this little red dot, little error, but when I switched over to the browser, it worked fine. So for what it's worth, give that a shot and you might have different results, but I don't think I'm gonna be able to demonstrate that right now for. For that reason. And when you've translated it, this button appears at the top and then you can scroll through, switch through the different languages that you've already translated it to, and then. And then you can export the transcript or export the audio with the dub. So pretty cool. Okay, some new stuff. New activity in the chat. I've been working on a video podcast for a couple weeks. Everything worked fine until yesterday. Now I'm getting the following message on the canvas side of the screen. Your computer does not have the web GL support required for media playback. Please check your GPU drivers or contact support. I think. I think I was messaging. Was it. Were we messaging about this, Rod? On. On the chat? On my website, I think. Did you try the browser? Are you on the desktop? And it sounds like it's a hard drive issue if it says something about your GP GPU drivers. So the first thing I would try is to switch over to web. Descript.com and it'll look exactly the same. So just find your project, open it up and see if it'll play back. So give that a shot and let me know. Otherwise, we could try a couple other things in the chat. Can you talk about how to use voice dubbing using your voice to correct the transcript descripts commercial from a long time ago made it look easy. But when I overdub, it skips and sounds jarring. This is simple overdub. I'm not sure if it, if it. When you say it skips and sounds jarring. The quality of the AI voice often comes down to the quality of the training that you gave it. Like if you have a decent microphone that you trained it on and quiet environment and, and it matches the rest of your audio. So I usually tell people to do multiple. If you record in different locations. Like if you record in an office and you record at home, you record in the car, then have, have a record in AI training for each of the locations so that you can match the ambiance sounds and the mic conditions and stuff like that. But I don't think that really helps for what you're asking for. So to be honest, I don't use overdub a ton. So it's. I just, it just tends to not work great like you said. So it could be that just that the limits of what it can actually do. It also it's got issues because if you have a sequence, it doesn't work for sequences. So if it's like a screen recording or a, an interview, any type of sequence, it'll just add a black. It'll turn the video into just a black empty scene. And if it's just one layer, if it's just one video, then it'll put the layer, it'll put the video layer that it overdubbed as a new layer and it kind of works. But your voice might be a little bit off. Off from the mouth movements. So. So yeah, typically I don't use. It is where I'm going with all that. But for best results I would say, I would say that. I mean make sure you have it trained on the proper like environment for what you. Where you're currently recording. And then you can also run it multiple times. Like, let me just do. I'll do like a record with the app. I'll change web to app and let's just see how this does. Oh, and look at this. This little notice is new. The overdub button is going away. Soon you'll be able to change words and recorded audio using regenerate. So you. Yeah, and actually if it's just two to three words like you said, have you tried regenerate? Regenerate is more meant for that. For like if you're not replacing something, you're just like fixing some words. Maybe you like, kind of mumbled a few words or it didn't transcribe it right or something, or didn't sound right. Then you could just do regenerate and it'll. Oh, yeah, yeah. So regenerate's probably a better option. So if you. If you select it, same thing, replace and then regenerate and regenerate. Doesn't matter your AI voice at all. It'll. It could be for somebody who's just like a guest who doesn't have a AI voice in your descript drive. And it'll just use the videos. It'll train it from within the video to match the ambient sounds, their mic conditions, all that stuff, and then regenerate, just that one word. And let's see how it does on this one. It's still loading. Oh, and this is my Spanish. This is my Spanish translation. So that's interesting. The transcript is still in English, but it's the. It's me talking in Spanish. Yeah. Okay. And that doesn't even work because in the. In the Spanish version, I was saying. And then it changed it to now in English. So that's funny. But when you hover over it, you can play it right there, preview. If you like it, you can hit this regenerate to run it again. Sometimes you might have to run it two or three times for it to. To work. And then if you hit keep, that'll, like, save that change. It's basically in draft mode until you hit keep. Awesome. Glad to hear it, Rod. Yeah. Yeah, the. The web version's gotten a lot better recently. And. And my. I used to always recommend the app version that's changing, and it seems like this is yet another example where the web version is better. So my new recommendation is like, if one's not working, switch to the other and just see where you get better results. And I use a hybrid because the web version is faster for some things, like it's faster for processing AI stuff and faster for publishing to YouTube and things like that. But the desktop app still has a couple of features that the. The web version doesn't. Oh, and this translation feature, for example, doesn't work in the desktop app, but it does work in the web app, so a little frustrating, I know. And actually there's. There's a new version of the app called descript Preview, which I can pull up right now, and you won't even be able to tell the difference because it. It looks identical. But this is descript Preview, and essentially what it is is it combines the best of both. So it's an app that you download so it can take advantage of your computer's gpu, cpu, all that kind of stuff, storage and then. But it uses the, it's. It runs more like the web in the sense that none of these are downloaded to my computer's hard drive. They're all stored on descripts cloud and so things like that, where they're, they're. This is the future of the app. And you can download this on descript's website. It's called Descript Preview. And probably in a couple months this will just be the only desktop app. So. Yeah, and curious if anyone's tried it. I've been using it and it's, it's got a lot of issues so I haven't been using it much because I, I just get frustrated. And it's also limited. Like you can't, you can't publish to YouTube. If you try to publish to YouTube it just says coming soon or publish from descript in a web browser. So there's certain things like that that you can't do. And yeah, descript's all about just, you know, pushing things out before they're ready and sometimes that causes a lot of frustration. But it also means they, they move fast and every few months you get brand new features and, and it's always changing and improving. So. Yeah. Anything else, Any other questions that you have, let me know. Otherwise I could talk about a little bit more about. Oh, in the chat, could you show how to use regenerate? Just tried it three times. I use the correct option to change some words and add some words. Didn't create anything. So the. Yeah, Regenerate will only fix existing words. So that, so that's the limitation and the difference between regenerate and overdub. Overdub is for creating brand new words. But regenerate will only fix parts where like I said, you, you're mumbling or a word gets cut off or something like that. So. So yeah, it depends what you're trying to do. It sounds like you're trying to like change the text. If that's the case, then you will have to use overdub. So like you'll have to highlight the words, hit correct and then correct the words that you want to. To fix and then. Or sorry, you won't go to correct. Do overdub. You do correct if it was already an AI voice. But in the case of something already being recorded, like this one is, you can hit overdub and then it looks like the correct window and then it Says so this box that says record, I'll change it to that says delete. For example, I'll hit overdub. And it's going to re. Overdub that whole selection even though the words that and says aren't changing. And I think it's. Oh, oh, it's not working because I don't have my. It labeled. So the important step is I didn't have my speaker label up here so I have to select that. And as soon as I do that, we can see it pulsing. That's telling me that it's processing. And then in a moment it should turn into words and it'll work the same way as regenerate where you can kind of. It's kind of in draft mode until you hit keep. So let's see what it does. Still processing. And this is. Okay, there we go. Oh, and again, this isn't a good example because my. The rest of my video is going to be in Spanish and then that three words is going to be in English. Delete. It says it in English with like a Spanish like pronunciation. But that's the process. So hopefully that helps. You can click this to rerun it. It's and it labeled as regenerate. So it'll actually just do another pass at the. At the same time, same instructions. But beyond that, I don't really have anything to any other best practices other than like I said, like making sure the recording is matches the AI speaker recording and then, and then running it until it sounds good. Hopefully that helps. Let me know if any other questions around that in the chat. Asking. Sometimes when I edit using the transcription, the words look fine on the left, but the video cuts off my intro or I mean because of the first word of the clip. Ah, yeah, I think I know what you're talking about. So if, if you see the word on the transcript, like this word if and let me just check the live stream that you're able to. Okay, yeah, that should be in view. So this word if down here, like let's say that's showing up on my transcript but it's not actually playing in the video, then all you got to do is put your mouse on the boundary so you get that bracket and then click and extend it. And in this case I'd probably just have to extend. And that might have been a good fix actually because you see how you. You'll develop a feel for the sound waves. So like that sound wave right there, right before it, there's just a brief moment of silence and before it was like chopped off a little bit. So that would clip that word. But if you restore it until you see that sound wave taper off, then that's probably a good edit. So if that's what I'm, if that's what I understand is happening, that's probably it. You probably just need to restore a little bit of the, the beginning of the video. Okay, cool. Yeah. So I know sometimes, like Descript is all about putting your mouse in the right place. And sometimes a really, really, really tiny surface area is to find something like the fade button, for example, which I can't fade that one. Oh, and I'm on a audio only, so let me switch this to video. So in the top corners of any clip, like there's already a fade right here. This little white dot, super hard to find. And when I'm trying to coach a client through how to add a fade, I'm like, okay, move your mouse a tiny bit to the left. Tiny bit. Okay, tiny bit up. Tiny bit. Okay, there it is. And it's just like this little tiny white dot. And if you slide it into the adjacent clip, it'll create a crossfade where it'll fade out of the current clip and into the next clip. But if you do a fade like let's get rid of this crossfade and I fade to the right, this is going to be a fade in. And if I grab the white dot on the left side of that split, it's going to do a fade out. So it's going to do fade out from that one fade into the next one. And that applies to audio and video. So it'll, it'll fade out the audio as well as a visual component. And if you want to separate those, you can click on the white dot. Oh, and there's no visual component here, but if I wanted to only fade the audio. Yeah, yeah, crossfading is super useful. Just drag it into the adjacent clip and. And it'll. It smooths out jump cuts and it's, it's good for covering up bad edits. And then, so, yeah, so if I had a visual component to this, like, let me find. This will be better if you can see it did a Descript preview. So right here, let's say I add a fade in. If I click on this dot, there's a visual component to the fade in and I could separate how long these are. I can make the, the visual fade in only half a second and I could get rid of the audio fade altogether. I could just hit that little minus Sign. And now there's gonna be no audio fade, but we'll retain the visual fade and then it'll look. Find the Descript project that you want. So, yeah, so that was a tangent off of saying that Descript is like, there's a lot of little things where you got to get your mouse in the right place, like precision movements, like resizing something or changing. Changing the layout of these windows here. And with the. The latest version of Descript, as of the last six weeks, I guess you can scroll up and down through layers. I don't have multiple layers in here, but let me see if I do. No, I don't. But if you had multiple layers stacked on top of my script, I could scroll through them up and down. And you couldn't do that before the season six, they call it. And so that throws a lot of people off. They're like, I can't find my music layer anywhere. Where the hell did it go? And they just need to scroll down to be able to see it. And then you can change the size of it, too. With this thing, there's the default and large, which will make them like extra wide, extra tall, just a little bit easier to work with. And the layers are different sizes. Like if you have a text layer is the thinnest, but then music and videos will be bigger. There'll be thicker layers, so they're a little easier to see. I did a video today about these dots. A lot of people don't know what these are, and those just represent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a. Descript is super limited. In the chat, someone said what I didn't know about the default enlarge. Descript is super limited on the UI stuff, which is really annoying. But if you ever use like Cap Cut, there's way more options. For example, like the canvas here, the display window in Cap Cut, you can press a button to pop it out. So if you have multiple monitors, you could put it on the canvas, essentially on one monitor, and then have your editing window on the other, or whatever you want to do. There's all sorts of way more modularity to it than Descript currently has. They did add. I suppose it's getting better because until the recent version, this was all you could do was the transcript and then the. The side by side, they call it. But they added stacked, and then I guess that was all they added because Canvas only had been around for at least six months now. It's been around for a while, but I honestly don't use that much until final review. When I need to see the most amount of detail. So yeah, I was talking about these dots. So these represent parts that couldn't get transcribed either. There's no words there at all, which I think is the case on this. I don't see any sound waves or there was sound waves, but there. There's something detected, but it wasn't audible. It wasn't either English or it wasn't picked up by the microphone well enough to be understood. Let's see if there's any examples of that. Not on this one, but if it had. If it had music to it, these would be different size. These dots would look like sound waves and then that's what they are. And you can turn them off in your settings. So you can go to settings. I'll just do it. Where is it? I thought it was here. It might be in the view. I think it's snap to guides. It's called wordless Media. I'm not seeing it playback. Well, anyways, somehow you can turn them off and I'm forgetting where exactly it is, but I leave it on, they're fine. And they're. They give me a way to see where to delete something. Like if I have a big gap like this, then you can select it, you can ignore it just like normal, where it'll take it out of the video, but we'll say stricken out in the transcript. And yeah, someone in the chat, I like the fact that they're always updating. Means they care about getting better. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. It's like different preferences. Like some people prefer stability and just like something that is never gonna change. And if that's the case, you're probably not gonna like descript. But if you're willing to deal with like a button moving around or changing names or hotkeys changing, then. Then Descript will keep you on your toes and you'll like it. So yeah, okay, so yeah, those dots are like right here. That's a 1.4 seconds of silence. And then it tells me that right here. And. And I could go into correct mode. If there was words there, I could add it so that manually like override the automatic transcription and prompt it like this is what was supposed to be there. Yeah. What else? Any other questions? Could talk more about the. The ui. So also the timeline is hidden by default, so you gotta click on the show timeline. It's probably pretty obvious to everyone watching, but for the beginners it's. It's not obvious. They're like just looking at the timeline. Like what do I do where's. Or looking at the transcript, where to go from there. And then we talked about the. All these different tools. Like I said, you can do everything. I've seen a ton of people who aren't even aware of these and they're able to do everything with just the select tool. So depending on your preferences, if you like to use your keyboard, which I do, you know. So that's why I like staying in select mode and hitting S instead of always coming into blade mode. And all of these have hotkeys though as well. So there's select is just A anytime you hit A or return to select mode. B for Blade, R for range. Slip is Y. I'm not really sure why, but it's Y. And then hand tool is H. And then yeah, since Camtasia was brought up earlier, there's a lot less going on here. And. And cap cut as well, which is. Those are kind of the main three softwares I use. Capcut has like a bunch of features here. There's all sorts of like snapping into position stuff and things that'll magnetize layers where it'll like if you, if you drop a layer somewhere, it'll snap it all the way to the beginning of the scene. That is currently in Descript doesn't have that much more simple in that sense. And. And some of that behavior happens automatically like. Or. Yeah, it happens automatically and you can't change. You can't toggle it on or off. Like if you have a scene right here and we saw this with the gifs. If I add a GIF in here, it's going to fill that entire scene by default. I can't start it two seconds into the scene, I can't end it two seconds towards. Towards the end of the scene. That kind of stuff. So yeah, you get a little bit less control. But that's why it's important to understand how to use scenes effectively. And the other thing that's changed recently with scenes is this thing that says selected in the current and all scenes thing make it bigger here. So before it was harder. Is much harder to tell if the change you were making was only in the current scene or if it was going to select affect everything that that layer, all the scenes at that layer applied to. But now they make it a little bit more explicit with this toggle. So you can set whether to select an all scenes or current scene. And on that note, in the captions it defaults to all scenes. This has thrown me off a few times. I wish it. I. I guess for maybe for most people's workflow, that's what makes the most sense. But I kind of wish it defaulted to this scene because sometimes I only use captions for one scene. I don't put it throughout an entire video. So the problem is like multiple times. And I'll show you why this has been a nuisance for me. If I create multiple scenes, like I have four scenes here and then I add a caption with the default to all scenes. Go ahead and apply does a separate caption layer in each scene. So I had a time where I had like 50 or 60 scenes and I didn't mean to add a caption to every single one, but it did and so I had to go through and. Well, now that I think about it, I don't know why I didn't just click undo, but I. I ended up pressing delete. Oh, I think I didn't find it until I assumed it was all just one layer, but it was in fact a different layer in each scene and so I had to go through and delete each one. And yeah, just, just be aware of that. That you could get yourself in trouble if you have like a hundred scene video and you accidentally apply captions you didn't mean to to the whole thing. On that note, most people aren't aware that descript has a version history. So if you go to file. So again that was settings file and then right. Oops right there. Version history. This will restore any point in time of your. Yeah, that caption thing will get. You gotta be careful. I wish it just defaulted to this scene or else made it one layer. I don't, I don't know that that's. That's a, that's a bug to work a kink to work out for descript. I'll have to send him a note. Um, so version history. It'll have all the like say like this is like the version history in Google Docs or anything else that you might be used to and it shows like at July 10th, at 8:47am nine days ago. Well, there was nothing there. But that's what it looked like at that point in time. If I go to 9am started to add some stuff, started to make some changes and you could restore to any point in time. Yeah, someone in the chat, I think I've used version history more often than any other feature so far as a rookie. Totally. Yeah, it's. It's a lifesaver. And so yeah, if you, if you just totally go down the wrong path, you can just back up to any point in time and click Restore. And if you don't want to restore, you can click Return to the latest version and we're back where we were. And if you click show all revisions, this is like literally everything. I'm not sure what the other one is, like, how they determine when to take that snapshot, but it looks like it's about every 10 minutes. Not even. No, not consistently. So I don't know. I don't know how it determines when to take that particular snapshot at time. Yeah, version history is great. It might get you out of a bind couple times. And. And I mean also things like if you accidentally delete a sentence, like if I delete this sentence right here, it's not truly deleted. I can put my mouse right there and drag it to restore it. So there's nothing you can do to like break your project ever. It's all. It's all recoverable and in some way between version history, clicking undo, restoring things if, if a file breaks, this happens sometimes, but maybe it's worth mentioning, you can right click on it and click Repair file or you can click Replace. So I've had like really, really big files, like 40 gigabyte videos that don't finish uploading and then they cause problems. They're like displaying in my video, but they're not fully on descripts cloud yet, so there's a bunch of errors and it. And it hasn't finished. It won't finish uploading. It just thinks it's done for some reason. Then you can click on those three dots, click Replace, Replace file, and then upload it again. And that'll usually manually prompt it to. To upload it again. And then you can also do. This has saved a lot of people when I show them this. If your transcription is out of sync or. Oh, as I say that, I just remembered something that descript used to do a lot, and I haven't seen it lately, but it used to do this weird thing where this AI would hallucinate and like you'd get nonsense words in there. Or it would say like, this transcript is provided by Eleven Labs or OpenAI or like whatever company they're getting it from. And it doesn't do that. I haven't seen that lately. But if that ever happens, there's an easy way to fix it, which is to just retranscribe it and kind of like we saw with the regenerate for the AI voice retranscribe will just manually prompt it to like run it through the AI engine again and hopefully give you a better result. And then, oh, you can access detect filler words from here. You can also get that from Underlord, of course. And Detect speakers. If you have multiple speakers, like it's a podcast, bunch of people are being interviewed. You could select how many people are in it so you can label them all and that'll, that'll take you through the Detect speaker wizard, which is where it'll play like a five second clip of someone in that video talking. And then you'll say, okay, this is Steve, this is Jim, this is whatever. It gives you a chance to label each of those speakers and it'll automatically do that for the rest of the podcast. Add new layer would put that currently selected file as a new layer in the project. Insert into script would put it into the script layer. Create sequence. We talked about that earlier in this live stream. Create composition from file would open up a brand new composition with just this file in it. Or I could rename it just for internal purposes. I could call this like track one or something. And then, yeah, you can also change the back to like UI stuff. If you click those squares, you can get this view where you have thumbnails of what each of these items are. And if it's audio, it'll just be sound waves. If it's like a logo, it'll show that. And this was a video I did reviewing Descript Preview. The thing I was talking about, the new version of descript. So if you have questions about that, it's not that it's. It's just the web version in an app. It's not that like special. I, I don't. It's kind of a weird choice that they decided to roll it out, I guess, I guess just to get a lot of more feedback and beta users and stuff. But anyways, probably not for everyone because it's got a lot of errors right now. But yeah, you can import a video from an external link. This is something that has only worked for me once. This was another one. I think it didn't work in the desktop, but. But it worked in the browser. And what it does is it lets you paste a YouTube video in or Giphy just from the link and then it'll automatically put that into your project. I could try it right now. Let me see if I have a video pulled up. Let me go to my channel. Pick one of these. Okay, so I got a YouTube video. Paste the link in Add file. See what this does. See if it'll work. Importing YouTube videos may take a few minutes. This failed on a. I think I've tried it on the last two live streams and it's failed. But the one time I got it to work was on the web app. Oh, media added. Cool. I think we're good. See if it's in here. I don't see it. Let's go back to the list view. Oh, there it is. So this is a video I just brought in from YouTube and then now it's treated like any other video file. I could, I could insert it in a script, I could add it as a new layer. But the one thing about this, this is. Let me look at the. Yeah, super low res. I don't know why this should be like on YouTube, it's 1080p. But very, very important to know like you're going to lose a lot of resolution and I don't know of a way to, to import that at a higher resolution through this method. You could use a third party tool to pull something off of YouTube and then import it into descript. Like I found. I was told about a tool this week called Streamable. That's free and you can select specific ranges in a YouTube video and download it at. I think it's 4K. I'll have to check on that. But yeah, super handy because very rarely will you ever need like an entire YouTube video. Probably you're making a short out of like a small section of the video or someone's being interviewed or something. So in the chat, if there's time, can you show us a complicated template you made? Templates I'm using keep titles and colors and sizes, but not the studio sound settings, for example. Yeah, I. That's better. Honestly, simple is better because you, you'll run in. The more stuff you add, the more problems you're gonna run into. So I'll show you my Descript Mastery templates. So I don't have any really, really like crazy complex ones that are like that come to mind. But if I go to Descript Mastery, what I would recommend if you do have like complex needs, I mean it depends like so many different use cases and scenarios. But if it's a template that's just adding layers, then that's the simplest, that's the easiest. Like whatever you can add unlimited layers. Like this right here is a template. Or these are all templates. I'm in my, in my template folder. So what this one does is over whatever video I have, whatever the script layer is, the part that'll change when this gets applied. It'll Add my logo. It'll add the module name, this is for my course. And it'll add rectangle, which is. It's like a slightly opaque. See this thing? 71% opaque, white background. Basically. Here's what it looks like if it's fully. So I have it. So it's just like slightly previewing what's coming in that module. And so that's all it is. This template adds three layers. And then if I go to. This is my outro. This one adds the music layer, the background and the logo. And then what else? Action item. This one has a lot of, A lot to it. Like a lot of layers, but still not like, maybe, I guess, I guess it's kind of complicated. This one, each one of these lines and I didn't make this. I've showed this before on live streams. How I made. I made it, but I based it off of a descript, an existing descript template. So I'll show you what I mean by that. But each one of these has an animation where it slides up and fades in at the same time. So it's got that kind of cool like, like it's rotating up effect. And then a white background, a little bell sound. And then the text layers and they're staggered. So at around the three second mark, the part that says questions comes in. And then the last one you mentioned specifically Studio sound. So this one has Studio sound applied to it. You can see that. And this is what I use for pretty much everything. Now you probably, if you've been watching my channel, you've definitely seen this. And this title right here is the composition name. So whatever video I plug this into, it automatically takes the composition name. In this case, it's webcam with title. So I never change that. I never type anything in. It does it automatically. And then I have Studio sound apply automatically. I have green screen apply automatically. And I have it put me in the bottom left corner as the webcam. So this might be kind of what you're talking about. Like this is probably my most complicated one. But yeah, generally the simpler you can keep your templates, the better if you have too much going on. Like if I applied this and then applied another template over it, for example, or just forgot that I had Studio sound as part of this template and I didn't mean to have it, but it then goes ahead and applies it to my whole project. There's, there's all these little like nuances that can get you in trouble. Oh, a big one with this is consistency of the. The background So I have it at 1920 by 1080, which is standard. But if, when I'm going to start the recording, I accident, I make my recording a different dimension than exactly that, it's gonna change it to that. So that causes problems too. If it's like I only meant to grab like a small square or like a, even a bigger area. So, yeah, so things like that. The, like, the simpler you can keep your templates, the better. And I made my entire course with these three templates. That's, that's literally all. And yeah, so I have like ones. This webcam one goes at the beginning of every single lesson and I use it now on my YouTube channel. So every single video since middle of June has had this template applied to it where I'm showing something in Descript. Every single lesson in the course has an action item. So I would just like, if I, if there's only one action item, I would just like delete all the rest and then type in action item one or whatever was supposed to go there. And then, and then the module intro that you saw, that one would start at the beginning of all the modules. And then this one is probably familiar for my YouTube channel. That's my, my outro. And yeah, yeah, yeah. Question in the chat is making audio effects out of templates? Yeah, you can absolutely. And I'll show you some more with that in a moment. But yeah, so like my outro has a music track that's always with it and then it's got my logo that does like a slow zoom. And then the, the way that I use this is inside of YouTube studio. I put the next video that I want the viewer to watch right there. And that, that part has to be done in YouTube studio. So yeah, that's, that's basic there. I have this thing called top 10 sound effects because you're asking about sound. So these are just like things that I use often, like whip whoosh. So it's a descript sound. But rather than going to find it every time, finding this exact one because there's like 30 different whip whooshes, I found the one that I like and then I saved it as a template so that I can quickly access it. And then mouse click, for example, same thing. There's like 50 different mouse clicks. But I just picked the one I liked, made it into a template and then it's super easy to, to get to when I need to. And I was mentioning with Camtasia how Camtasia has the automatic mouse click effect. This is what I do in descript, this is my workaround. I add the mouse click when I want to illustrate something. Like I'm. I haven't been doing that lately because I have this big circle around my mouse and that has this little bounce effect when I click. So that's kind of been my. My workaround there. But by the way, that's good opportunity to shout out one of my things, which is on my website, which is descriptmastery.com I have that template, the audio ones, top 10 sound effects and more for free. So if you go to Resources and then descript templates, then you can download a bunch of my templates. Like I think it's over a hundred and it'll just go straight to your inbox. So here's what they have like YouTube intros, YouTube outros, YouTube, like and subscribe button. There's the sound effects that we just looked at. Two Camera interview. That's for like if you have two people in the same frame. It's got some templates where it'll like do a pan across the. The video. So. And then the D Script mastery templates. We. I showed you that as well. The whole course is made with those three. So yeah, that's free on descriptmastery.com freetemplates and yeah, what else? Yeah, the whip woosh trick is great for sure. It's all about finding ways to save time. Anything you find yourself doing repeatedly in descript, like, you're like, I'm always adding this particular gif or I'm always adding my logo or I'm always adding like, I don't know, transition. That's another one. I have a transitions template. Make it a template. And then so like this temp. This transition, it does the. The cross zoom and then it has a whip whoosh sound with it. So it's like as it's zooming out. But I never use this one anymore. I don't have this as part of my, my pack. I don't think I do anyways. Let me see. Oh, I guess I do still have it in there. But I don't use this anymore because descript changed their transitions. The transitions used to be a default of one second and it was like super slow. It was like. So I would always manually Change it to 0.4 seconds, which is why I made it a template that I could just like easily quicker apply it. But then they changed their default to 0.4, which is what I already used. So it was perfect. What else do I have in there? Oh, title B roll Landscape. This one's are popular. These are like different themes. So there's like stars. And it's just got like a starry background with title. So like, obviously you would change that with your title, change it to your color, whatever you want. And it's just got that little bit of movement behind it. And then I have one that's field. They're just like very explicitly labeled. Well, I guess these ones are just like what they are. So sports. It's a sports stadium. But I have some that are like. Like my zoom pack. Where is that? This is the one where I was talking about, has different stuff for interviews. So that one's just a center zoom. Just super simple. But if I go down to like these interviews. So this is what I was talking about. If you have like two speakers in a frame, then there's one so that. So I label it like interview zoom in left. So very like explicit about what it does. And then I have one that's like interview zoomed in, pan left to right. So it's already zoomed in. It pans from speaker A to speaker B and then Speaker 1, same thing in reverse, right to left, like that. And so that's super useful for that type of scenario. And then what else? Landscape Netflix. This one is just titles like a very, very simple subcaption sub closed caption for trying to replicate the same font and size that that Netflix uses in their programming. And I also. I don't shout this out often, but do I still have my templates? Not there. Okay. On this page of my website, d3d mastery.comtemplates. i do custom templates. So if you go to custom templates the way I've been doing these, and I did three yesterday, actually, which was unusual because I usually don't get these. Often I get on a call. You can book a call with me right here. Just click Schedule Workshop and then go straight to my calendar and then we'll share screens. Either I'll do it or I'll walk you through it and help you make a YouTube intro or outro. Like text styles for captions. Whatever you want. Like, whatever template would be useful to you. If you're stuck on it, I can help you make it and might only take 15 minutes, 20 minutes. And I charge $25 per template that I deliver. If you decide not to buy one of the ones we make, then there's no charge. So yeah, that's a great option if you're looking for like starting a YouTube channel or something. And I should say descript is super limited on the templates. Like the, everything I've shown you is kind of the extent of it. You could get really crazy with, with like some animations. If you had a bunch of layers and shapes and you had, you're playing with the opacities and fades and, and stuff like that, you could brute force interesting animation. But compared to like even Canva, you can do more complicated stuff in Canva. And so sometimes I tell, I tell clients that like the guy yesterday, there was one template we ended up using, but there's a couple that I was like, I'll be honest, Canva is going to be better for you. Just go to one of Canvas templates, change the wording and then save it as a video, put that into a Descript template. So what I mean by that is like you could start a new template, drag the MP4 that you downloaded from Canva and then drop that into your Descript template, save it and then you'd be able to use that for all your projects. So. Yeah, and you can also, like, if it's the case of a YouTube intro or something and you want something really cool, really interesting, then you can commission a after effects designer or something on Fiverr for, you know, not much. It would be, it would be a good investment if you're serious about your YouTube channel, but within the scope of what Descript can do. I would love to make a template for you if you want descriptmastery.com templates or I can teach you how to do it if you go to descriptmastery.com tutor. That's where I. We get on a one on one call on Zoom and then I can help you out with anything you're stuck on or anything you want to learn or audit your workflow. If you're like, I just want to figure out how to get better and faster with this, then we can do all that. Any more questions? I've already gone over time and I, I can keep going if I get more questions. I'm having fun if you, you guys are. I see we got four people on the call. Otherwise I can wrap it here. Let me think if there's anything else to show. All right, cool. Well, I do this every Friday, so same time, same place. You can find the link on the channel page as well as if you're in the course, email automatically goes out saying that like the live stream starts in one hour and then. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for joining. And yeah, I have this new membership, so I have. Oh, hey, Patricia. Patricia. I didn't know you were here if I have this new membership, so you can subscribe for a monthly amount. I haven't figured out what to do with it exactly yet, but probably I'll have a few videos that are like exclusive to people in the membership community. Or you can leave a tip as X did. Thank you very much, I appreciate that. First ever tip. And yeah, we'll see where it goes from there. All right, thanks for joining and talk to you next time.
