Friday Live AMA
Ross walks through Descript's core features: building intro templates with layers and fades, timeline controls, audio handling, aspect-ratio conversions for social clips, caption styling, and multi-speaker workflows using Active Speaker to auto-cut between speakers.
All right, Test, test. Okay. All right. So until anyone joins, I'll just talk about my idea with this. If it works, if people like this, if people join, then I'll do this once a week or so, as often as people are interested. But my name is Ross and I run a company and this channel called Descript Mastery, where I teach people descript and I do tutoring, one on one tutoring. I have a course and I, I also make templates for people. I get requests all the time for people that want, you know, a YouTube intro, a YouTube outro, some sort of voiceover intro for their podcast, things like that. I've done just about everything you can do with descript and I post every single day, I post one video on YouTube. Just usually it's a tip, like one quick feature in YouTube in descript, how to use it. And yeah, it's. The channel's growing. I got something like 700 subscribers now. And yeah, I see we have one person in the call if you're. Feel free to chime in with questions as we go. Leave a question. If you have like a specific thing you want to see in descript or learn, then I can pull that up. Otherwise I can just riff on different things. There was an update yesterday. Usually I release a video every single, every single time that descript has an update. And it's just like a short, like three to six minute update about what's new in the software. And that's usually. What is that? Okay, that's usually like some new feature that descript has added. It's some sort of new change in the ui, change in how it works in some way. And so I make a video about that. There was an Update yesterday, version 86, but it wasn't a true update. Usually there's like I said, some change to the ui, some new feature. This one was just like a back end update. So I didn't do a video about it, but I will. They're supposed to get back to the normal update cycle for version 87. I see we got three people in the call now. Feel free to leave your questions in the chat. If you want, I can share my screen here and we can start diving into some descript stuff. Let me just share my window. Okay, awesome. I just got. I see. I see you, Terry, in the chat. Thank you for purchasing the template course. And for any other two people watching this, you can go to Udemy. I have a template course. It's only like they change the pricing based on where you are, but I think it's around 13 if you're in the US and when you say control the timeline, are you referring to layers there? Or if you kind of. If you can give me a little bit more specific to go off of there, I can help you out. Related to templates or just in general controlling the timeline. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, maybe let's create a template together. So of course we'll go into our templates. This is the way that you create a template from scratch. Come up to new template, and it looks exactly like a project, which makes it a little bit confusing. But this is in fact the same view or this is how you create a template. And. Yeah, so we can go ahead and give it a title. I'll just call this. I'll just call this intro, template, whatever. And we'll. We'll pretend this is a YouTube intro scene. So let's just use some B roll. I'll come up. So my media bin, I go to videos, and then I could just find something nice that I want to use for my B roll. I'll just click on this one here. And now I have my first layer. So it's this blue one here. And then if I add another layer, like a title, like, this will be my. The title for my channel or whatever I want it to be. I can hit title, and there it is. It pops up over it. And now I have this is my title layer. And then below it is that video layer. And Terry, feel free to chime in with questions if you have, like, a specific direction you want to go or the specific thing that is confusing you. And then I'll just say, like, YouTube intro, something like that. And what I like to do with the title is, of course, you can change the font and all that stuff over here on the right. But down here, this one called Shadow, I like to add that it just makes it pop a little bit more. Especially if the title of the color or the color of the title and the color of the background are somewhat similar. There's not a real big contrast there. Helps it pop. So that is the very basic template making it stick. Oh. Oh, okay. I think I know what you're talking about. So if you're. So Terry, put in the chat. How am I controlling the timing and making it stick? And I think what you're referring to is if, like, let's say the title starts a few seconds into the intro like this, and then when I apply it, that might get pushed to the beginning of the scene. So, like, let me try. Let me test this out. Intro, title, publish. Yeah, and unfortunately there's. There's a few things we could do about it. But let's see here. Go into my. Let me open a new project. And this, this brings up a good point, Terry. Thank you. I think this is something I could add to my course. So where did I just save that private and then intro template. Okay, that one stuck to the. Sometimes the layers. Is this what you're talking about, Terry? Where if I'm understanding you correctly, like one layer, when you apply the template, it gets pushed to the beginning by default. It didn't happen with this title layer right now, but there's some layers. Layers always behave differently and so that's why templates are finicky and the UI has a lot of room for development here. But. So that one happened to work. But do you have an example of specific type of layer that did that? Was it an image maybe? Let me try an image. Let me add an image to this. Like if I make it shorter. Yeah, and. And one solution with that. If. Here, let me. Let me see how this one works. What was the one I just made until project. Okay, I'm just going to delete this. And templates are. I'll finish that thought in a second. Let me just apply this. Okay, so the image one stayed in place as well. But I know what you're talking about. Where sometimes the layer will get pushed all the way to the beginning. Because templates, you can think of them as like a series of layers. So when I apply this template, it's three layers and there's some layers that like, if I apply a sound effect, my playhead is right here. And sometimes the sound effects. Okay, I played it right there. These aren't good examples. Okay, let me go back to the template one second. Intro, template. Okay, so if the template's getting pushed to the like. Okay, you want it to start five seconds in. Like this one that's titled YouTube Intro is what you could do is put a placeholder in front of it so that it doesn't default to getting put at the beginning of the scene. There's a few ways you could do that. The easiest would probably be to just add a. Let me just copy this. I'll just copy and paste it. Put that at the beginning. I'm just dragging. I just made a copy of that layer. I'm going to put it at the beginning and then resize it. Okay, so now. And I'm going to make this one invisible so it doesn't actually show. So that's just Like a placeholder layer. There's nothing there. And all this is serving to do is make sure that this next layer, the one that I actually want to show, which is covered up by the image. Hang on, let me delete that. Why is it so laggy? Okay, there we go. Took a second to delete that. So this, this first one that I made a copy of and then I made it so it's not visible by clicking off the opacity. So I hit it is like a placeholder to make sure that the one that is visible only plays when I want it to at the start of the six second mark or so. And then. So yes. Are you just clicking the line? How do you make it start and end? So the layer. I think you're asking about resizing the layer. And basically you can just put your mouse on the ends like this so it becomes that bracket. It's like an open C. If it's open to the right and you click it and you drag to the right, it'll shrink it. Is that what you're asking? And then if you click and drag to the left, it'll make it bigger. And then same thing with the other end. Now it's a bracket open to the left. If I click and drag to the left, it shrinks it. And if I extend it to the right, makes it longer. And then it starts obviously on the timeline, right. Where if you put your playhead, that gray line, it'll tell you the point where it starts, which in this case is 5 seconds, 0.88. And it plays all the way until 14.14. And I see that number at the top of my. My gray playhead there. Does that make sense? Sorry, I was kind of. I. I was clicking around and not explaining everything as I was going. But hopefully that helps something to make sense. So that's that. Let's see. What else could we do to this intro? So we could add fades. And fades are really easy. They're at the top, at the corners of every layer, there's this little white dot. So right here, this little white dot, if you click on it and drag to the right, it increases the length of the fade. Yeah, sounds good. Terry, let me know if anything else, any specifics or if there was something else. If you tell me which layer specifically was. You're having trouble timing. I could try to. Was it like an audio layer? Was it a image? Like, I could add one to talk you through that. So yeah, added a fade here. This one, if you hover over the white dot, or if you click on the white dot, you can see that when you create it, it's a video fade and an audio fade. So it'll fade from black to full opacity and it tells you the duration. It's 0.65 seconds. And then the audio is also fading in. So it goes from completely silent to the full volume setting. And it takes the same amount of time. But if you want to change these where maybe only the audio fades but the video doesn't fade, then you can change these individually. So you can make it so the video has a zero second fade, in other words, no fade at all. And actually it defaults to 0.01. So a better way is to just remove it with this minus sign. And now it goes to zero seconds. So there's that removed the video fade, but there's still the audio fade. And then if you click on this dropdown, if it was between two scenes, two adjacent video scenes, you could add a crossfade, but that's not an option because this is at the beginning of the video. And then again, every layer has a white dot on both corners, the beginning and ending. So you can do the same thing in reverse. Grab the end dot, drag to the left, and that adds a fade out. And we can see how that looks. Awesome. Okay, so yeah, that's one fancy thing you can do. I would also probably add some music to this so you could come to audio in your media bin. You could preview some of these with this. I'll go ahead and add that. And there it is. If I click out of that layer. Notice how. Hold on, there it is. Notice how it's green. So audio layers are green on your timeline. And you have the same settings as before. You can do. You have it fade in. In this case, there's no video, so it'll only be an audio fade. And you can change the length of it by putting your mouse on the boundary. And you get that the C bracket facing inward, opening inward. If you put it on the beginning of the scene and then if you put at the end of the layer, it'll be open inward like so. And you can resize it as you wanted. Now the, the way I would use this is I would probably want that music layer to extend into like, let's say this is my intro for a podcast. I would want that audio layer to extend into the next layer where the podcast actually stops, starts. And so when I apply this scene. Let me go ahead and do this. Let me explain what I'm talking about. Okay. So let me go back to a project. Actually, let me open a new window so you can have another learning point. I'll just try to explain everything as I go. You can have as many windows open as you want. And this might actually, this might mess up my. My window sharing here, but you can go to file new and then you can say new window or new project or even new composition. I'm going to say new project. Okay. And you're not able to see it. So let me reshare my screen so you can see the whole thing. Okay. Window and entire screen. There we go. Screen two. Okay, so, okay, now I can see my screen. So this is my new project. Let's say this is the podcast that I'm going to add the intro I just made to. So I go up to my template, I go to find it, where I made it. Intro, template, add it, show my timeline. Oh, and see, look at this. It made. Okay, so this is what. This is another, like, subtlety weird thing about templates. The one I created is 14 seconds long, but when I applied it, it's 2 minutes and 52 seconds long because that's the length probably of the audio track. If I scroll all the way to the right and I'm zooming out by holding command and using my scroll wheel on my mouse, or if you're on a laptop, it's two fingers. Even though my template that I made is 14 seconds, when I apply it, it extends that layer for the entirety of that audio track. So, yeah, stuff like that happens. And so what we need to do is resize it again. I click on the end of that boundary, the end of the layer, and I just drag it until it's the size I want it to be. And you might have heard the term that descript is non destructive. So I just reduce that audio track from 2 minutes and 52 seconds down to 12 seconds, but nothing is deleted. I can restore it. And I'll show you how the best way to do that in a moment. So I just added a scene two. And let's say in scene two, this is where the interview starts. Let me just add, just for a little bit of realism, let me add like two people talking on a podcast. All right, here's our podcast. So we have our, our intro play with the nice nature scene and the words. And then I want the music to continue playing about five seconds into the next scene. And I'm just going to expand this so about five seconds. And let me make this longer as well. Make the whole scene like so, okay, so now this, I can see that this scene starts at about 13 seconds and then the music plays until about 20 seconds. So I'm just going to take this white dot and I'll do a fade out over like, over like eight seconds. So now it'll look like this. So then it goes into the scene where the podcast is actually starting and you're saying, welcome to my guest, how are you doing today? And then the podcast starts, but the music is going from full volume and then fading gently to nothing. So then you can then focus on the content of the interview. Awesome. And I don't know if you're able to hear that through the YouTube streaming software, but hopefully you can. The music was, it's not loud, it's negative 8 decibels, but it goes from full volume and then fades into nothing over the course of that seven and a half seconds or whatever I set. So that's a start. That's to give you a quick down and dirty on templates, making a quick template and applying it. And then I got a question recently about how to delete a template. And this is why I mentioned at the beginning that templates, you can think of them as like a container of layers. So this template is 1, 2, 3 layers. And so if I want to delete it, I don't delete the template, I have to delete the individual layers. So I'd have to delete all three of these in order to get rid of the. Any sign of it, any remnant of that template. And of course I can. And now that they're in my project, they're just like any other layer. Just, just because I they started as a template, I can now edit them in any way I want. I can add fades, I can do anything that you normally can. So hopefully that'll make sense. Let's see, I'll just keep making templates and kind of riffing on things. Unless anyone has any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat. So let's make a new. A new composition. And by the way, let me explain this because a lot of people get confused about the hierarchy. Folder hierarchy. I explain projects as like folders and within a project is your composition. So every project has at least one composition, but it can have multiple, it can have as many as you want. So this project, and it's a template, so it's confusing. Again, I apologize. But this is effectively the project is called Intro Template, and then the first composition is also called Intro Template. So that's why it says Intro template slash Intro Template. And the second Intro template won't be there unless you click Enable Multiple Compositions, which I just did. And now when I click on it on my composition, this dropdown is all of the compositions inside of that project. And if I hit New Composition, then you can see I now have two compositions, Intro Template and Untitled. Just Untitled is the name of the composition inside of Intro Template Project. So I feel like I'm not explaining that super well, but hopefully that that kind of makes sense. And it's the kind of thing where you gotta play with it to really have it click and make sense. And the reason for that or the way that you can use that is like, let's say that this project right here, this composition is. Let me rename it, let me call this Podcast Episode. And then if I click on it again, there's that Enable Multiple Compositions. So now I have a composition called Podcast Episode inside of the project called Podcast Episode. And then if I hit New Composition, I could create, for example, social media clips. If I created social media clips off of this one right here, like, let's say I take scene two, Echo, right click, and let me see, there's a better way to do this? Actually. No, this is fine. Okay, right click, hit Copy Layout, come back to your compositions, go to Untitled, and hit Paste. So Control V, and it will take the contents of that entire scene, in this case that I copied and paste it into there. So if I. If I just wanted a scene that I previously identified to become my social media clip, then that's one way to do it. And then this second composition, the one that's currently called Untitled, could be Social Media clip number one. And then whatever changes I make to this one in this composition called Social Media Clip number one, it won't affect the original one. So this is how I often use it. Like, the first one in my project will be like my raw footage. That'll be where I just throw everything. And then from there I'll start chopping it into like the smaller pieces that I'm going to publish elsewhere or however you do it. Like, okay, here's another example. If I'm making a course, then I'll make a project a module. And a module will be like one distinct topic. Like for my Descript course, it'll be AI Features, a module called AI Features. And then inside of AI Features, there are five different compositions with Composition number one is Studio Sound. Composition number two is Green Screen. Composition number three is Ask AI. Like that. So just depends on your particular workflow. If that makes Sense for you. Okay. So the other thing is, if this was a social media clip, I probably want to use it on YouTube shorts, on TikTok, something like that. I can come up to this little box in the top left and that's going to be my aspect ratio. And it's default to landscape because when I copied it it was in landscape mode. But I could change that. I can make it square, which is good for Instagram reels. I believe. I'm only an expert in YouTube. I'm not as deep on the other platforms, but I believe square is what you want for those other like Instagram, Facebook. And if you click on it, you'll notice there's a black bar around the top because the video aspect ratio stays in landscape, but the entire video is now square, so there's black bars. So the way we can fix that is we can grab the edges and we can drag it like this. And that might make sense to do if for example, you wanted to add captions down here or like a waveform, like, you know, do some certain things in the background to make it look nice or I. What I most often do is click on it, come to this one that says position and hit fill canvas and then that gets rid of any black space. So looks pretty good. And then you could change it again to say portrait mode. Once again we have black bars up above you hit fill canvas and then you can click on the image and you can drag it to position the subject in the middle like so. And notice it's playing in slow motion. And that's how the B roll is. The original B roll came from Descript in half speed. That's just how they made it. So we could speed it up if I wanted it to be more of like a normal speed, like a natural talking speed with this setting that says duration. So again with the layer selected, I go to duration and I'm just going to type 2 on my keyboard to make it 2x hit. Done. And you can see it shortened it because it's now going to play twice as fast. But there might. Nope, that's the entire clip. So let's see how it looks now. So it's faster, but I think it's too fast. I think that's probably like a 1.5x. Let's see how that looks. It's still a little choppy. I think they might have used a different frames per second or something because doesn't quite play smoothly. But that's okay, you get the idea. Duration. Super useful to know about below that is once or loop. And once means that clip is just going to play one time loop means it'll play as many times as necessary to fill the scene that it's in. So right now the scene that it's in is 13 seconds long. This is a about 9 second clip and it's only playing once. But watch what happens when I click loop. It'll repeat itself to fill that scene. And if I extend it, if I extend the scene, it'll also create new loops to just on the fly. Keep filling the entirety of that scene. All right, what else? Again, feel free to leave comments in the, in the chat to help guide this. Otherwise I'll just keep adding things as I, as I think of them. So I just made this scene a little bit shorter to or smaller. That made the aspect ratio smaller to add a little black box to the bottom. And I did that because I want to add here in the shapes section at the top of your window, this thing called waveform. And waveform, I'll show you how it looks in a moment. I'm just going to resize it to fill this black space. And then it's currently in circle format, but I want it to be in let's do line and let's make it green. Okay. Oh, and nothing's going to happen because there's no audio. There has to be audio for it to sound waves that it will mimic. So I'm going to add an AI speaker and I'm just going to start writing. Actually, you know what? I'm going to use Ask AI to generate some something. So I'm going to go to actions, say Ask AI. I'm going to say write me a script about podcasting. Add to script. Okay. And it's only like one sent, one paragraph, but that's fine. I'll hit add speaker, browse talk speaker and let's make it Alan. Okay, so that's going to. You got that pulsing and that's going to become text to speech. It's going to become audio. And it's still loading. Sorry. I know this is thrilling. Live streaming. Okay, there we go. So notice we now have the audio waves and we can hit play. And you can see the waves that we added, the waveforms are moving in sync with that audio with the inflections of the AI speaker's voice. And there's one more step. If you want to treat this as an audio file, to be able to do certain things to it, including to just be able to change the length of it, you have to convert it to audio. So it's kind of like in. It's not. It's not permanent yet until you click this button that says convert to audio. And now you see that I can make it shorter, I can make it longer, etc. And then so it's just. Now it's just an audio file just like any other I can play. And there's my waveforms. Super cool. If I click out, if I click into the gray area into my canvas, I can change the background color. Currently it's black, so it's just showing me that little strip of black. And if I hit this plus button, I just made it white, can make it anything I want. Like so. And then what else could I do to this? Got our dialogue. Now we got our waveforms. We can do a progress bar. So these fill the scene that you apply it to and it shows you, it shows the viewer how far into that you can do anything you want. You can make it span the whole video. You can make it span just one particular topic. If you've ever seen like that ESPN show, I forget what it's called, but they have 60 seconds to talk about like a play of the week or a certain athlete. And it's got a progress bar to indicate how much time the analyst has to talk about that topic. And so it's just a way to keep the viewer engaged and know how much is left on that particular topic. So that's how you could use that. And again, you can see how that would be useful for a YouTube short. And if you click on it, you can change the color, you can change the style. It could be a. You could do a pie where it's like a circle with a filled in section. And you can change the color of these. So the part completed, you can make it red, for example, the part uncompleted could be green. You dial down the transparency. So all sorts of stuff you can do with those effects. Okay, so yeah, that's social media clips. And if you had a really long podcast episode here. So if you remember, we just right clicked, hit copy layout and then pasted that into our clip, which was composition, our second composition. If you had a really long podcast, you could highlight, you could do a first rough cut, like just go through your project for the first time, highlight all the sections that you think would make for an interesting standalone social media clip, which would be like, you know, 30 seconds to 60 seconds, just one distinct story or point. And you can highlight those by selecting it. Let me go back to the composition. I Can just click on. Let's say this word right here. Let's pretend this is my rough cut. This is where I'm finding social media clips. In the menu that pops up. I could highlight those standalone stories or points and then in AI actions at the top I could type in copy. Just start typing copy and then the first thing that pops up will be copy highlights. And when I click on that, I only have one color of highlights that I made. But if you made multiple then you would see them all here and you could say all highlights or just break them down by color. Like I only want to copy the red highlights, only want to copy the yellow highlights. In this case I only have yellow. So I clicked on it, copied one yellow highlight and then what I could do with that is make a new composition come into it. Hit command V and there is my highlight. Just that one standalone point or story that I'm going to make my short out of. And for some reason I lost my video which I I think because it's on loop it should copy everything from that section. Let me see if I do it the whole thing. And we'll go back to actions, copy highlights, yellow. Let's go to a new composition. Weird. For some reason it's only doing the audio but it should copy everything inside of that selection. I'll have to look into that. Why it's not working. But what else? If you wanted to add more B roll, if you wanted to add some GIFs. So for the sake of this becoming a TikTok or YouTube short, you want that very fast paced, high retention editing. Depending on your audience, depending on your branding. But you know you can. Something that's really popular is to add gifs and got some like sound waves. Since the topic of our imaginary podcast here is podcasting, I can pull in like a little microphone. Podcasting has become a popular medium for Sherry. I can resize that layer so you could add little funny humorous elements or things that complement what's being said. Oh, I should add captions. Captions are the. The obvious one. Let me get rid of some stuff here. I'm going to get rid of that. I'll keep the waveforms. Let's keep the waveforms for now. And then I'm going to come to text at the top this big T. Come to captions and there we go. There's some little captions. Let me just do this. Make it a little bigger. And then if I hit play stories, discussing topics and connecting with audiences. So it just literally captions read your transcript as Opposed to titles, titles are static. You set it and then it doesn't move. Captions read your transcript in time with the audio and obviously the words. So when we have that layer selected and it's a layer just like anything else, so I can make it. I can click on the ends of it, I can make it shorter, I can add. I can have it fade in. I can do all sorts of things on my properties. Bar on the right. With the. The captions layer selected, I can change the color of it. I can change the style. A very popular one is karaoke, where it does that. The active word has a background behind it. So in their example there Lorem Ipsum. Ipsum is the active word. So it has a background and then the next word would have it and then keeps moving in time with the video. And I can change those colors. That's a preview. So it's a blue background. This blue particularly. I can make it purple like that. I could change the border color, actually, I'm going to get rid of that border because it's a lot. So the word that has already been spoken is going to be purple. You could add a border, which is what we just had, that nasty orange. The background. Let's make it like a blue. And this is going to be a background around the whole caption area based on how we size that particular element. The active word has a white fill. So the text is white inside of a blue background. And let's make that like. Let's make it green. Now you can see how that looks. And then the future words are like a gray there. This. It's. Let's see what it is. It's a white, actually, with 50% opacity. So it's partially transparent, partially opaque. And if I dial it up, I can make it appear even more white, like so. And now let's see how it looks. Podcasting has become a popular medium for sharing stories. It doesn't look nice, but you get the idea. You can customize that as much as you want. And I applied shadow, but you could turn that off. You can see how that kind of makes it pop when I toggle it on or off. So that's captions. And so we've covered 80% of the elements that you might do on a short, like between adding GIFs, adding captions, adding some sort of moving element, like a waveform. And it depends on your style, depends on your branding. That's a topic for, you know, we could talk for about that at length. Like, are you trying to entertain people are you Mr. Beast? Then you're going to want to change scenes every second. But if you're a long form podcast talking about a serious topic, you're not interested in that kind of audience, you're not interested in that kind of viewer. And so I would recommend that you don't try to overdo it on the, the retention tactics. That's a topic I think a lot about. I do YouTube consulting as well. So let me turn that off and just make that a little bigger. And so for a boring, just getting a short out without anything fancy, it's just literally a cut from your long video. This is what we're back to. Got rid of all the elements we added. Okay, what else? So waveform and progress bar are the only dynamic features. I just saw a question come through. Two speaker podcast with video recorded vertically. How do I make the video horizontal with both videos stacked on top of each other rather than set next to each other left to right? Yeah. So let me see if there's a good way I could demonstrate this. Okay, so are you, are your videos your two speakers, they're separate videos. Are they inside of a sequence? And so let me, let me just create a sequence. So let me add media. Okay. One video, one video file from Zoom. Okay, I'm gonna skip the sequence thing here. So you're for sure you're gonna lose some screen real estate by changing it. Because like, let's say this is your video. They're both. It's hard for me to imagine how they're stacked. Are they like. Are they like this? Are there. You want them like that? If. Okay, this, this might help just to demonstrate. Yeah. Okay, so if you have two. But it's one video file. So the first thing is, I don't know if you saw this earlier, if you just joined the call, but the aspect ratio is right here. So if you go to landscape, that changes it to landscape, which is the first step. And then you'll need to move it. So here, let me make this smaller because it's really big. I can hit position and just fill canvas. That'll. These are separate layers. And so I could just make it smaller, reposition it like so. And then let me make this other one smaller. And then you could have them click on the bottom layer. So like that. So that was a copy. I. Sorry, I wasn't explaining everything as I went through. The very first thing I did was I copied the file that I had. So let's say if you got both speakers in the view like this and you Want the guy on the right to be on the bottom. What I did was I copied this entire layer. So if you see here on my timeline, this blue one, I just hit command C and then command V to duplicate it. And then I resized them so that one was on top, one's on bottom. But what I could do further, if I only want Speaker B to be in the bottom frame, is I could just click on the edge and again, sorry, this is. This is the problem is you might not be able to fit them both in because of the limited real estate and because you have to spread it out. But. So Speaker B's, the back of his head is now filling up the entirety of that. That layer. And then if I click on the top one and I click on the right side here, and I make it bigger. Now Speaker A, and I can readjust her by just sliding her down. So now I got Speaker A and Speaker B on the bottom like so. And that would be it in a very quick way. Does that help? Do you have A. Is there something missing or something that different that. That you have? That'd be useful. Let's see. Let me see if I can get different videos here. Let me see if there's like a zoom B roll. One interesting thing you could do is to do it, apply something like this and let me make it bigger. Yeah, there are templates. You could make templates for it if you had. You could have a template where it takes the two duplicate video layers and you've had. You have presets on how you want them positioned. But the more elegant way to do it is to have two separate video files which you can download from Zoom. You have to set it in your settings ahead of time in order to get that. But the feature you're looking for to really do it nicely is called active Speaker. So I would look into that versus having it in one file because descript does it. It helps a lot for a lot of different reasons, to have separate audio tracks and separate video tracks for each person in an interview. Having everything in one file gets more. It's simpler, but it's harder to manually control the individual speakers, like, you know, volume and things like that. Active speaker. The term I use was active speaker. So let me. I don't want to show, like, client work, but I think I have a video I can pull from squadcast. Hang on, let me pull up squadcast. And if you have. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So for interviews, the best way to do it, separate files and then adding them into a sequence and A sequence is like a container with all those separate files so that you can individually control each speaker's whether or not they have Studio sound, their volume. You can, if, if they're talking over each other, you can cut out just certain parts of that speaker with the, the one who's talking over someone without affecting the, the speaker that you want to be audible. I'm going to pull up SquadCast real quick. Okay, so here's my Squad cast and this brings up another. Since I'm just trying to share valuable information as I go. The reason you would want to use squadcast, which if you have Creator or Pro descript, you have access to this. The reason you would want to use squadcast over Zoom is Zoom is optimized for work calls. It lowers the quality of your audio and video to make it faster so there's not lag. Squadcast optimizes for quality of maintaining, you know, if you have a 1080p webcam to maintain that resolution so that you can edit it in the highest quality file possible. And it doesn't put that little, you know, the name tag in the bottom that Zoom does and things like that. So it's just better for a professional product, a professional interview. And it has a second advantage of. I got a question. Do you prefer squadcast or Riverside? I have only used squadcast, but I won't. Let's see, Riverside has a better reputation. Let me say that SquadCast is known to be finicky. I've had it fail a lot and I know a lot of people who just. Because when you have like a high profile guest on the line and then it doesn't work, you're screwed. You have a bad, you leave a bad impression and stuff. So, so yeah, it's hard to recommend squadcast, but if you have like a, a podcast where you and a host, you know, you're, you're comfortable with each other and you don't mind if sometimes you might have to reset your browser or something like that, then Squad Cast is good. But it does. And I do have, by the way, let me drop this in the chat. I have a SquadCast best practices checklist, which is things like be on a Chrome based browser here, I'm pulling it up, I'm gonna drop it in the chat. If you're on like Firefox or Safari or something like that, it's just not going to work as well. And it's just finicky. It's just finicky. Squadcast is, I feel like I've said that A lot today with descript, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of nuances and that's why my, my little business exists because. Because it's hard to use. Okay. I just dropped in the chat my squadcast best practices and you should be able to access that link and then download it to your computer. And the idea with that is you could share it with your guests. Like people can go through it and then you can just have the highest chance of a successful error free session. Okay, that was a long tangent. Squadcast, this is the dashboard. You can connect to it. You have access to it included with your descript creator and pro plans. And the beauty of it is, is it just syncs straight to descript. So I have two speakers here and I needed to. How do you work around. Needed to remove studio sound in just one segment of audio. Studio sound at 100. Yeah. So you still can't apply Studio. There's a question in the chat about how do you remove studio sound from just one particular segment of audio? And the answer is you can't. Studio sound is file wide, so it's either applied to the whole thing or not at all to the whole thing. And so unfortunately you can't. And yes, it does distort the laughs. There is some workarounds. Like you could duplicate the audio file and then play over. It's tedious, but you could play over that part where the laugh is happening and then on the duplicate one have studio sound turned off so that you can hear it as it originally was. It's a lot of extra work and hopefully that'll get fixed. Hopefully they'll dial in how to detect laughing And I think it has gotten better. It seems like lately there's. It has gotten better, but that is a problem. So in SquadCast you can select your tracks and then it just says this button edit and descript. And you can have up to 10 different files. So 10 different people in your interview with SquadCast. So you'd select the ones you want. Maybe you have like a producer who you don't want. You could unselect them here. And then when you hit edit and description you can say MP4 or you could do audio only with WAV or MP3. I'm going to do video and it's starting the export process and it should open up in my browser here. There it is. Successfully created new descript project. And then you can just hit open descript and try that again. It should have. Did it open in a background window there we Go. This is what I'm used to seeing. So this dialog comes up that says import from squadcast. It's got your different video files. So one video file per speaker. And then you can choose. If you had multiple drives, you could select them there. You can select your workspace transcription language and then hit Create project and import files. And oh, you know what? This was a sample session, so it was only. Oh no, it's two minutes long. Okay, I think that's fine. Yeah. So if I look over here on my layers, you can see I have my two. It's. The first one is labeled the exact way it was inside a squad cast. It just says squadcaster7BCH. Just a randomly generated. If your guest doesn't label themselves, that's what it shows up as. And then the next one is track one, which is me like that. And I just rearranged the order. I put myself on top, so now I'm visible. But now what I want to show you here is. And this is the last thing because we're almost at an hour and. Thank you, Terry. Thank you for joining. Thank you for the questions. I'm glad it was helpful. So when you click on one of your layers right here where it says multicam, you click on that and now watch what happens. There's this button that says active speaker. I simply click on that and it created six scenes. And every time that there is a speaker, in this case, it's me, track. I'm called track one. That's what my file is labeled as. Then I am the one. My video file is the one showing in the video. And then when my guest is speaking, she's showing and it automatically switches and all I had to do was click that button that says active speaker. So that is why, the big reason why, especially with like an hour long podcast, rather than manually doing that all yourself, just click active speaker and it'll do it all for you. And now if I go inside, actually there's a better way to do it. If I right click on the timeline and I click Edit sequence. This is my sequence view. And so right here, for example, I can see that my sound. I'm track one. Let me just label myself for clarity here, Ross, and I'll just call her guest. So I can see that there's my sound waves and there's her sound waves. But if I wanted to. Oh, there's a question in the chat. Is active speaker super sensitive such that this. If the secondary speaker is an active listener and says yes, it can like let Me see. Let's see what it does right here. So you notice how the guest has. She's saying a couple words that are overlapping with my words. I don't think it'll switch right there. Let's, let's take a look. Yeah, so her words are overlapping with mine. I don't know if you can hear it through this stream, but it does happen. I'm not going to say that it doesn't, but it's generally pretty good and it saves a lot of time. But in those cases you could manually, manually adjust which video is showing. Or here's what I'm going to show you. Inside of the sequence is there's where she's talking over me. And so I can use my range tool, this one right here or letter R on your keyboard and select the crosstalk just like that. And let's see if this works. This doesn't usually work how it should. So okay, it doesn't work. It deleted. It muted the whole scene. So I'm going to bring that back. So what I would do in this case where she's talking over me is just hit delete on that part that I have selected. And notice it didn't slide her. It keeps everything in sync. It didn't slide the other video over or anything like that. And so now, now it should have fixed the crosstalk. And actually there's probably going to be a black. Yeah, it's black right there where I cut it. So let me just get rid of that. Let's see how that looks. So yeah, that part right there where she was talking in the background is now gone, but it's showing me. So the viewer isn't aware of that, if that makes sense. Now, if active speaker doesn't work correctly or it, as you asked, if it's too sensitive and it switches for a second. What I could do is here in scene four, for example, if I actually wanted this to be showing my guest, let me just bring it right here and I go to the layers. You can see what ActiveSpeaker did is it made her scene hidden and put it in the back. So to make it visible I can just unhide it and then just click it and drag it above mine. And now it's visible again and I can click on it, say fill canvas. And so that's a super fast and easy way to just overcome any perfections from the automatic active speaker portion. So another question, it's a one hour podcast. 100 different cuts to different speakers would get annoying. Is there a way to Apply active speaker. Get the 100 cuts, but then reduce them to, like, 20 cuts only. Yeah. So you could also, for example, extend these scenes. So right now the guest is the active scene. She's visible, I'm not. And so what I could do is just put my mouse right here where I get those double arrows between scene four and scene five. And I could just click and extend it. And now her scene's longer, and I could just extend it all the way until it deletes that scene. Or. Yeah, now it's just her that whole time. So that's one way is to just tweak with the. Tweak with the settings like that. This is really cool. Let me show you something else that would be really handy for what you're asking. So let me. I'll make her smaller. I'm gonna make myself visible. And now we're side by side. And this is only in scene one. If you see my scene thumbnails, there's scene one. Scene two is just me. Scene three is just her. But what I could do is I could make this sort of like a template for the rest of my scenes. So I could right click on it, hit copy layout. And then let's say right there, we're laughing, and I want us to show both speakers. I can right click again and I can say, paste layout. Oh, and it wants me to give permission. Yeah, that's fine. Look at that. It just pastes the layout. So it keeps the content of, you know, whatever we were talking about in that moment. But now it's side by side. It pasted that layout from scene one. So that's what you could do, too, is just have a template of a different layout. And this would work with, like, titles too. For example, I could, like, have Ross, and then I could copy that. And then in the next one, where I'm talking paste layout, and it pastes there and it fills the whole scene. And there's a really cool thing you can do. I keep getting more and more down the rabbit hole. But if you have a caption applied, this is really handy. I'm gonna need to bring that to the front because I can't see it right now. Oh, because there's no words there. Hang on. Okay. There's no words, so we're not gonna be able to see the caption. But what you could do is go to these three dots and. Hang on. This one's kinda. Okay. So for this caption that I have set right now, you can set. You could have, like, for your guest you could have, say, pink captions, and then for yourself, you could have blue captions. And then that's where you could set this. So what this is saying is every time Guest is on the screen, every time Guest is the active speaker, it's going to play her color of captions. And then every time I'm on camera, let me just play, make some captions for myself. Let's see here. Why am I not seeing them one second here. Well, without wasting too much time, for some reason, I'm not seeing my captions. But what I could do is apply, like, let's say I make a certain caption, color, font color that applies just to me different than the one that I want for my guest. I click on these three dots and I apply it to myself. Oh, there it is. Okay, that was the problem is it was only showing for the other guest. Now I can drag this throughout the rest of my video and you'll see it'll disappear when it cuts to my guest. No captions, captions. A lot of cool stuff. Descript is meant for podcasting, obviously. Podcast, podcasting and spoken word stuff. So that's it. I've gone over the hour. I hope you found this useful. I'll give one last plug to my services if you go to my website, descriptmastery.com I do tutoring. I have a course and this is what I do. I teach people descript. So thanks for being here. I think this was a success. I'll probably do this again next week, same time. So hope to see you here. Thanks for watching.
