Getting Started with Descript - July Webinar recording

Okay.

Good morning, everyone. As more and more people trickle in here, I had an idea for something fun that we're going to start with. And it's just, uh, while I'm waiting for people to join, that is, and it's some music I'm going to play, which was generated by Descript. So this is something we can talk about today and was the topic of a recent video in on my channel here, and it's— let me just show this first and then I'll play the result. So there's a generate audio button here under AI tools, and if you click on it, it allows you through a prompt to generate music. It can be an instrumental only, or you can include lyrics that you've written, or you can give it just a general guidance, like make it funny. And so what I did, this is a little preview of my prompt. I said, create a song for a Descript webinar called Getting Started with Descript that's meant for beginning Descript users, and it'll be played in the 10 minutes leading up to the livestream, et cetera. And so this is the result. It's just nice, soft instrumental background. It does start singing in a moment. Um, But anyways, this is a super cool new feature and I think you'll like it. I think I've certainly enjoyed it, adding bespoke music, if you will, to my videos. So I'm gonna give this a couple minutes here and then we'll get started. So let's see if any more people trickle in. And I'll just fast forward a little bit so you can hear the lyrics.

Glad to see your face, getting ready for the show to start.

And I'll just fast forward a little bit so you can hear the—

we're about to begin. Let the learning in and give your content a brand new heart. Getting started with Descript, a helping hand. We'll walk you through it step by step. From the very first clip across the land, a creative journey you won't forget.

Okay, I'll go ahead and get started. Um, so for this webinar, what we're going to be talking about today, it's going to be casual, first of all. So if you're on the Zoom call, you can, uh, type into the Zoom chat. If you're on YouTube, you can type into the chat there and feel free to just leave comments as we go. I'll address them when it makes sense to do so. Um, and then what we're going to go over is familiarization with Descript itself. So again, I'm assuming that you all have never used it before. If you have, then some of this might be repetition for you. And if you want me to slow down, show anything again, again, feel free to drop your comments in the chat. And then we're going to talk about creating your very first project. So from the homepage, as if you've, you're logging in for the first time, how do you actually create your first video or your first podcast? And then recording into Descript. So. As you may know, you can record directly into Descript. You can record your screen, you can record remote interviews, or you can do audio only, but all of those can go directly into Descript, or you can import stuff that you've recorded elsewhere. So maybe you have a camera, um, it could even be your iPhone, whatever it is. How do you actually take those files and then import that into Descript? We're gonna talk about the AI tools. So that song that I opened with, as I mentioned, that was generated in Descript. That's, that's a brand new feature since the last time I did one of these webinars. Um, you've, for a very long time, you've been able to generate images in Descript. Then they added the ability to generate videos in Descript. So there's, they're always adding more and more ability to do that type of stuff. And we can talk about those. We can go in any direction that you all want. Basic editing techniques, how to actually cut your video, how to remove words that you don't want in there, how to remove bad takes, things like that while making it look nice. And then we'll have time for Q&A. Again, like I said, it's casual, so feel free to stop me as we go. But, um, there will be a dedicated Q&A to fill the remainder of the time. And then at the end, I'll give you some more resources for learning. Okay, so, um, this was inside of an already existing project, which I used to generate that opening music that we all heard. And the view that you get when you first log into Descript though, is this one here. So a brief familiarization, this is called the Drive view and the tabs over on the left are different places that you can navigate to. So the home button, the views, the things that you see here is first of all, your drive name. That's what's up here on the top left. And then this big box right here in the middle is Underlord. So Underlord, as opposed to your, your Overlord, is all of your AI stuff. So that's their name for it is the Underlord. That's their name for the AI editing assistant. And this chat box right here in the middle. Is something that you can talk to Underlord in plain English and tell it what you want it to do. So you could tell it, I want to make a podcast, I want to do X, Y, and Z. You would just tell it here in plain English exactly what you want it to do. This little paperclip is to provide it with images, videos, anything at all, any type of files that you have that you want to use for your videos. You can click here, browse through your computer, find those images or video, uh, whatever they are, video files, images, anything at all, and add them. And then Underlord can work off of that. Next to that, this little thing that says Sonnet 5, this is the default AI engine that is going— that Underlord is going to use. So Underlord is the harness, if you're familiar with that term. Underlord is the, um, the interface that uses an AI engine under it. So there's Claude, there's ChatGPT, which is GPT-5.5, and there's Gemini, which is the Google AI product. And so you can choose any of those to be the brains behind Underlord and The reason for choosing different ones, like, wouldn't you want to just choose the latest and greatest one? Not necessarily, because for example, the latest and greatest as of today, July 22nd, is Fable-5, Claude's product. And if I hover over this little coin stack on the right side, it says high cost. So the newer, the smarter, the better AI model you choose, the higher it's going to cost in AI credits. And with your Descript subscription, you get a certain allocation every month of AI credits. So the better the model that you use, the quicker it's going to burn down those AI credits. So if you go to an older model like Claude Haiku 4.5, if I hover over that, it has a low cost. Now it's not going to be as smart. It's going to make more mistakes. It's not going to, um, be as smart in the inferences that it makes off of what I'm trying to communicate to it. So that is the trade-off is you might do more prompts back and forth. It might not get things as right, but depending on what you're trying to do, it could be a better way to do it. Um, for example, if it's not a complex task, Haiku can probably handle it just fine. And so you can select that. Anyways, that's a, a quick primer on the Underlord. You can also, with every single feature that uses AI, in Descript, you can choose the underlying models for it. So if you're generating video, there's all these different models that go off of the, uh, that, that can, can generate video and you can choose the ones that give you the best result. So if you use it a lot, you'll start developing your favorites and go from there. So anyways, um, that is all the AI stuff in a nutshell. Now, if we go up to these two buttons in the top right corner, there's a record button, which if I click on it, I get this dropdown, and there's a new project button, which my choices there are video project or audio project. So again, we're going to start with showing you how to record. So when I click on record, I can choose camera, screen, audio only, record with others, or schedule for later. Camera means it's going to record your camera, your web camera, that is the camera that's plugged into your computer. Any sort of, uh, webcam that Descript has access to. Screen means you can choose windows on your screen like I have right now. And if you've watched my YouTube channel, this is exactly how almost every single video on my YouTube channel is filmed. Is by recording my screen, my webcam, and my microphone. And you can't see my microphone because I have a fake background, but it's right here floating in the darkness. And so you choose those as inputs in Descript, and then that is what actually gets picked up by the software. And then, um, audio only means no camera and just your microphone. And record with others is sort of like I'm doing on Zoom right now. Where it creates a call so people can be anywhere in the world. They, they call into you, you have a conversation, you click a record button. I should reverse the order there. You click the record button, you have the conversation, and as soon as you hit stop, it puts that recording into Descript with every single participant as separate layers. So you can edit them uniquely. So if you want speaker A to be full screen, while they're talking, you can do that. And then when Speaker B starts speaking, they're full screen and it just alternates as the conversation progresses. And that is a professional level podcasting tool. Um, it's great if you're doing that kind of content. The schedule for later is so that you can send out invites to people's calendars for later usage. So we're gonna have a conversation on July 29th. It goes out in an email and then they can add that to their Google Calendar and they have the link and they know exactly what to do when that date rolls around. Okay. So let's start with the camera recording. So I'm gonna click on that and you're not able to see this over the, uh, livestream sharing that I'm doing right now, but a window just popped up. That says web.descript.com is asking you to give permission to the microphone. So that's a security feature that I'm sure you're all familiar with when you open anything that uses your microphone or your camera. It just wants to know, do I actually have permission to use this? So you want to choose the correct microphone. So I'm choosing the one, mine's called a Shure. That's the brand that makes it. So I'm picking that. And then I'm going to say allow. And it takes out my, my artificial background. You can see my whole thing here, but that's a preview of my camera. And at the bottom there is the camera choices. So I'm gonna actually go ahead and turn this off, 'cause I don't want you looking at my nasty background there behind my sheet. Um, and so even though I chose camera as the starting point, I can choose, I can change that later. What I mean by that is I can, by choosing the camera here, I can choose which camera Descript is looking at. So it might be your built-in laptop web camera. It might be an external one. Like I have one called OBSBOT Tiny 2. That's the name of the camera. And by choosing that, that is the, the input source that Descript has. And then same thing next to that with the microphone. If I click on that. I can choose the microphone that's built into my computer, or I can choose one of the microphones that, that is plugged into it. And you can see I have several, so I could choose my best microphone. And then this, this sound wave that's bouncing on the screen right now, that's a preview of my voice. Every time I speak, you can see it bouncing proportionally, and that's letting me know that it's picking me up loud and clear. So that's good. I want to see that. It shouldn't be too big. I don't want it to be so big that The sound waves are completely filling the space. That means it would be booming and either I need to move further away physically from the microphone or I need to turn the sensitivity down. Um, but this, it should look about like this. And if it's too small, if the sound waves are too small, then the opposite, bring your microphone closer, turn the sensitivity up, et cetera. Next to that, this little button right here. Is to enable screen sharing. So as I mentioned with my Descript tutorials, when I am showing my screen, I am capturing me manipulating Descript, then I click on that option right there. I choose my Descript window, and then that is the feed that goes into Descript for editing purposes. The red button right there, that is what will actually begin the recorder. To the right of that, you have a teleprompter, so you can paste in a script and it'll actually scroll through there as you're recording. And so you just read off of the script as you're recording, and then when you're done, um, let me back up a second. So then you, you can stick on to your talking points rather than just rambling top of mind, and it can, it makes your video a lot better. It makes the editing a lot easier. Because you're not editing out tangents and filler words and things like that. And so the teleprompter is extremely powerful. And the last one there, that little gear icon, is your settings. Okay, I'm just going to start a practice recording and I'm going to go ahead and turn on my video for this. Even with my background, I'm just going to adjust the sheet behind me so you don't have to see my floor. So I'm going to turn on my video again. There it is. And I'm gonna hit record and I'm just gonna go for 15 to 20 seconds. I'm just gonna talk, kill some time here, because everything that I'm saying is gonna get transcribed. And then you're gonna see how we can edit our video like a Word doc. That was something that Descript, uh, used in their marketing was like editing video like a Word doc. So you can see the time is counting up as I'm going. You can see on the right there, that little bar that's bouncing up and turning yellow sometimes. That is representative of my mic feed. I want it to be hitting the yellow. If it hits red, that's not good. That's too loud. It's going to sound boom, booming. It's going to be too, too much audio. Um, and it's going to actually ruin our audio. And I don't want it not, not bouncing up at all. That means it's not, my mic isn't getting picked up. So I don't want that. Okay. I'm going to hit stop. By just clicking that red button again. And now my recording is processing. You can see there in the bottom right, this little notification popup that's letting me know that it is working and it's already 50% done. It's very short, so it's, it's going to be quick. I expect it to be quick. I can minimize that and it's currently transcribing. It's 10% done. Once that is done, we're gonna see the words from this video on our editing page here. So while that's working, I'm just gonna familiarize you, you with a few things. Up here is a preview of the video. This is the title of this video, and I didn't write that. That was generated by AI. So now that the transcript is done, It knows what my video's about, what I'm talking about, and then based on that, AI is deciding on a title for me. Now I can override that. I can delete it and say new title here, but I'm gonna just press undo. Let's leave the AI-generated one there. And so this is an example of how AI is just, it's always helping you out. It's always there to, um, make, make your life easier. If you forgot to label it or you don't want to spend that little tiny bit of cognitive load to think of a title yourself, Descript comes up with it for you. So, and it usually does a pretty good job. Now, I wouldn't use this as my YouTube video title. It sounds very AI with the colon and stuff, but for my own internal purposes of finding this video and knowing quickly what it's about. It did a pretty good job. Okay, so beyond that, below is the transcript, and below that is what's called the timeline. So again, transcript is the words up here. Timeline is this whole thing down here with the squiggly lines. So these all work together. If I click on a word like the word 15, A couple things just happened. There's now a blinking cursor right there. What that means is I am looking at that moment of this video right before I say the word 15. And so when I say looking at, I mean the video up here reflects that, how I look at that moment in time before I say that word 15. And then down here on the timeline, this gray bar is at that moment in time. And you can see the word 15 down there as well. So it's reflected in a bunch of different places. And if I click anywhere, it moves down here, it moves in the video, it moves on the transcript. So all of that is linked together. And then if I highlight some words, you see it turns purple over those words. It's highlighting the exact same part in my video. So from the word from 0:00 in my video, the very start, to about 5 seconds. And you can see the numbers up there, up above the little preview of my video. So I, I highlighted a— if I see this number down here— 5.3-second section of my video. And with it highlighted, let me highlight it again, there's a few things I can do. One is I can delete it. I can press Delete on my keyboard. And now that range that I had selected is gone from my video. But I'm gonna press Undo. And Undo, by the way, there's a button for it up here in the top left corner. So you can click on that. And by clicking it, it brought back my last action. And you can press it multiple times. You can keep pressing it to undo each subsequent action all the way to the very first edit you made from the start of today. So, um, highly, highly useful. And in Descript, nothing you do is permanent. Everything can be undone. If, if not directly undone through the undo button right there, there is also, if you click on this thing in the top left corner and you go to File version history. If you click on that, this is a log of most of the changes you've made throughout the history of this project. So right now, because I just started it today at 11:19 AM, it says my last move was a minute ago. But if this was a project I've been working on for months or years, I would see a complete log that I could scroll through and return it to how this looked on March 25th, 2023, if that existed. And so there would be a view button. You click on that and you can see how this project looked at that moment in time. And when I'm looking at it, I can click restore and it'll revert this entire project back to how it looked at that moment in time. So this is all to say, let me relieve a ton of anxiety for you right now. Nothing you do, no mistake is permanent. And it's the name of the game to just try stuff when you're editing. And if you don't like it, undo it. So that is what I call the editing cycle is make a change, evaluate it. If you like it, keep it. If you don't like it, undo it or keep adjusting it until it looks right. And what I mean by that is to make that concrete. Let's say you want to change the volume. If it's currently too loud, you know you have a problem and you need to bring it down. Even me, after years of doing this, I don't know the exact volume level that will sound perfect. So the name of the game is to just make a change, just lower it, like let's say lower it 50% and back up a couple seconds to play it. At the new volume level. If you like it, keep it. If you don't, keep changing it. But where I'm going with all this is no one knows, even professional editors, they don't— they typically depends on the edit. They typically don't know exactly the edit that it needs just off the top of their head. It's a, it's a process of trying, evaluating, and then adjusting from there. So, um, and to, and to, to back up and check one of your edits is as easy as clicking backwards in your transcript or in your timeline, like I showed you, just clicking backwards, clicking the play button right here. And I'm just going to go for 15 to 20 seconds and listening to it, watching it, seeing if you like it, and then going through that process. Okay, so that is the basics of playing through, deleting, selecting. The other thing that is really important to talk about is adjusting the window here. So right now my video is super small, like that's very hard to see. If I'm— if the visual is important, which it is in video, then I want to make this a lot bigger so I can see the details of my edits. So if you come up to View and you go to Scene Editor, this here, Scene Editor Placement, is how these three elements are featured. So again, the three elements being the video itself, the transcript, and the timeline. The default, because of the window size that I have, was stacked. What that means is those 3 elements are stacked on top of each other. Video on top, followed by transcript, followed by timeline. You can also do side-by-side, and you can see already my video got a lot bigger by doing that. So side-by-side is the video and the transcript are side-by-side with the timeline on the bottom. If I go back to view, scene editor. The other option is full screen video. So click on that. And now my video is full screen. My timeline is collapsed and my transcript is not visible at all. So that is, uh, your 3 basic views there. If I click on this little gray line in the bottom middle, and sometimes things are really hard to see in Descript. Um, they're, they're small, they're.

Not—

they don't have a lot of contrast, like it's a light gray line and it's very small. But if I hover my mouse over it, my cursor turns into the two arrows, one facing up, one facing down. If I click on that and I drag up, it pops open my timeline and it shrinks my video proportionally. So, um, this is the name of the game. Based on what you're trying to do, adjust the windows to what's comfortable. There's probably not, depending on what you're doing, there's probably not a fixed view that is just the perfect view that you're always going to keep, because there's times where you're going to be focused on the transcript. So I want to bring the transcript back. I'm going to go to View, Scene Editor, Side by Side, and you want the transcript to be big so that you can focus on your editorial edits. And you want to spend a lot of time in here marking up the transcript. I didn't show you, you know, for the— we don't, we only have an hour here, so I'm not showing you everything, but you can, for example, highlight stuff. You can take a filler word like this and do a strikeout. That removed it from my video, but it leaves it on the transcript so that I'm aware I deleted something and I can bring it back really easily by clicking that back arrow. So there's all sorts of things that you can do in the transcript. I can even like highlight a word and correct it and change gonna to going to. And I can correct this one instance, or I can say correct all and it highlights all of those mistakes. So I'm going to say correct to, correct all, and it highlighted every single time that I said gonna. So anyways, there's all sorts of things you can do. To the transcript. And while you're focused on that, you can, for example, grab this bar in the middle and slide it to the right to hide my video completely. So I can just focus on the transcript. And then when it's time to focus on the video, I can make the video bigger and focus on that. Um, as well as I haven't even mentioned the view over here on the right side. This is the properties. So if I click on this little X, that gets that out of sight, out of mind. And now I have even more real estate to focus on my transcript and my video. Below the video, there is what's called a layout. That's a little bit beyond the scope of what I have time to get into today, but just know layouts are extremely important. They're a way that allows you to take a certain— they used to be called templates, so let me just start there. They're presets that you've built one time that you can apply across all of your projects forever. So it's a way that I can edit a video faster than it takes me to play through the raw video using layouts and some AI tools. So you can get extremely, extremely fast with Descript. Background color. My background's not even showing, but if I drag this out of the way, you can see I have a black background. So if you're doing things where your video isn't filling the complete image, you can change the color with that. And this has to do with the layers. So in video editing, there's an important concept called layers, which is— right now I just have one layer, which is the one and only video that I have in there. But if I wanted to start adding elements, so for example, there's an elements tab right here. If I wanted to add a text layer, then I can go to this elements, click on one of these text layers, and I can say my video. And now this text layer that I've just added is a layer. So not only is it on my video and I can move it around, I can drag it around, I can change the text like that by just typing into it. If you've ever used PowerPoint, if you've ever used Canva, same principle. Um, so it's there. And then down on my timeline, it is a video or it's a layer, this orange layer down here that says new text. It's taking on the text that I typed in. And this particular one spans my entire video. I could adjust that to be shorter or longer than my video, but right now it spans just my video. And then on this text layer, you can change the properties of it. So how it actually looks. So it defaults to a font called Roboto, but I could use one called Outfit. That's a font that I've added. It's a font that's part of my brand kit. So you can add your own custom fonts. Based on what it, whatever it is that your brand kit follows. And you can make it thinner, you can make it thicker, bolder, and you can change the size of it like so. And I'm just going to drop that into the corner like that. So those are some basics. Now, the other thing I want to expose you to, I, this, this whole thing is very fast. I get it. You know, like Um, there's only so much we can do in one hour, but if I go to Project, Files right here, this is all of the files that make up the video that I'm working on, which right now is the one and only video file that I've recorded. You can have hundreds or thousands of pieces of media that you're working with, and they would all go into here. So for the next part of our discussion today, I want to show you how to bring in something that you've recorded elsewhere. So to do that, I am going to click on this plus button. And you can see here, you can bring in media from Zoom. If you have a Zoom recording, you can bring in media from a Google Drive. You can bring in slides in the form of a PDF. So if you have a PowerPoint that you've made, you can bring that in. But I'm gonna click on computer. And you're not able to see this cuz of the way I'm sharing it with my live streaming software here, but it opened up a window where it's browsing through my entire computer and I can choose a video file. So let me do that. I'm just gonna go through here. Um, I'm just gonna pick something that I made and I'm gonna say open and it brings it in. To my project. So here's a little preview of what that video looks like. It's called night shift final.mp4. That's the name of the video file. And then in the bottom right is how long it is. So this is a minute and 1 second long, and I can click play. And that previews, uh, the video that's actually in there. And then there's a little dot next to the video file, and if I hover over it, that tells me that it's not used in the project. So it's been added, but it's not yet been added to my editing project. So to do that, I can drag it in and I can drag it to the end of my, my layer of my webcam layer. And now I'm going to click right there to look at the end of my video. And when I click play, okay, I'm gonna hit. And so now as it, it goes from that first video that was in there, which was the video I recorded live with you here, to the video that I just brought in, which is my AI-generated, uh, video right there. Let me just delete a scene. Let's see here. I'm gonna refresh my page real quick. Sometimes if Descript is giving you problems, like there was some, there was a glitch happening that I, I won't waste any time explaining, but if you have glitches, you can simply refresh your webpage and that'll clear out the issue, which it did in this case. So there is my AI-generated video that I just brought in, and it's now part of my video. Um, so anyways, that's how you would do it. If you had iPhone video, then you would browse through your computer, find that video, assuming you've already brought it onto your computer, and then you can bring it in using the steps that I just showed you. And then everything automatically transcribe. So if this video had any talking, it would be added to my, um, transcription here. But it's audio only, so there is actually no audio or no voices to be transcribed in this particular case. Now, if I wanted to add music to this video, I could go to Media over on the right side. And here is Descript's stock library. So Descript, assuming you're paying for it, includes a giant library of media. You have videos, you have Giphy GIFs, which are these little short animated memes type of things. You have videos, which are static images, Giphy stickers, which are these type of birthday stickers and things like that. And backgrounds, which are slowly moving shapes and colors and They're nice soft backgrounds. So you can choose any of those. You are paying for them. You have the rights to use them with some exceptions. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs, but generally you can use these videos in your YouTube videos or your content that you're making. And then if you— everything we've shown is here on this, this tab. These are the visuals. If you click on this one, these are your audio options. And so in this tab, you have sound effects like whoosh sounds, and you can preview them by playing it right there. You can see that this one was 5 seconds long and it's called Cinematic Whoosh Impact Reveal. And so if I wanted to add that to my video, I would click on that little plus button and that would drop it in. As a new layer. On top of that, you have music. So these are just stock music songs, which same thing, you can see how long it is, you can see the title of it, you can preview it. And if you hit this plus button, that'll actually add it to my video. If you want, I've, I've had all sorts of people ask me like Should I be paying for another stock media subscription? Of course you're welcome to, but again, you're paying for this with your Descript subscription. So I highly recommend check out what they have available here. Um, when people ask me that, they're usually not aware that there's a search button right here. So you can type in, for example, jazz, and you get, if you go to music, show all. Dozens, at least possibly hundreds or thousands of songs in the jazz genre that are tagged as jazz. I personally like violin. These make for really nice— these make for really nice intro and outro music. So hopefully you're able to hear that over the live stream. I think you can, uh, let me know in the chat if you cannot. But yeah, the important thing is you have access to a giant body of, uh, stuff to start building your projects with and make your projects look nice and professional. Okay, so, um, anyone have any questions? Drop them in the chat. It's been Really quiet so far. So if not, um, I'll go on to some AI tools. So I am unfortunately low on, on AI credits. I have 119 AI credits left, so this is gonna be a very short tutorial. I think what I'm gonna show you today is generating music because we're already there and it's what I opened with. So there is, back to the stock music section, there's a button right here that says Generate with AI, and that is for generating music like I talked about at the beginning. Another way to get there is the AI tools, and from here, Generate Audio. So click on that, and then here, same as we saw with the stock media, there is a music tab and there's a Sound Effects tab. So you can generate both of those right here in Descript, which is awesome. They just added this about 2 weeks ago. So if you click on Sound Effects, I can click on this thing right here and I could say, um, because I have an electric car showing there, I could say electric car motor humming. And then below that, this little thing is to loop the audio. So if I want that, the sound that is generated to play over and over and over, that would be looping. Otherwise, I can leave that toggled off. The ne— the one next to that is how long I want that sound effect to be. The default is 3 seconds, but I can go all the way up to 30 seconds. I'm gonna leave it on 3. And this isn't a great prompt. I would want to give it a lot more detail, like if I could give it a brand, if I could give it a, um, if it's a long generation, I could say for 3 seconds it's quiet, but then it starts spooling up and it peaks at 6 seconds. Anyways, I'd want to be very specific, but for the sake of demonstration, I'm going to say generate. And this is usually pretty quick. Another thing you can do is there's an Inspire Me button. So if you click on that, it drops in a random prompt, which I'm going to go ahead and— this one says heavy wooden door creaking open. I'm going to hit generate, see what it comes up with. And my electric car one is already done, so we can play that. It kind of just sounded like background noise, like an air conditioning hum. So not a great result. Let's see how this one is. That's not bad. So if I wanted to use that, I could hit this little plus button. And this green layer that just got added, that is the sound effect. So I could position it so that it is overlaying the exact part of my video where that opening door is happening. And this is something that Hollywood does, by the way. Like a lot of times, if you haven't seen this before, when a character in a movie is walking, the reality of the shot is there was probably no sound or very little sound of the foot, you know, crunching the gravel as it may be. And so they add that in post, they add in a sound effect that was shot in a studio of feet dropping on gravel. And so it's just a way to add texture to your videos. And so until now, you pretty much had to rely on stock sound effects or sound effects that you bought. But you can actually generate those yourself now, which is really, really fun and really cool. Um, okay. So again, because I'm low on credits— oh, and by the way, those that I just generated, if I click on this little pink box in the top, this shows my AI credit usage and my plan actually resets tomorrow, which is why I'm so close to the end. I've been using it all month, but Um, those generations that I just made, those were, um, it doesn't actually show. I thought it would say media generation, but if it did, it would be on this list here. I don't know why it's not on there, but you can see my Underlord usage. So it says like something I did on July 8th burned 33.2 credits. And using the recorder today used 8 seconds of media time. And so anyways, that's how you can check your usage as you go, because to back up for a second, this is important to talk about. If you haven't started your Descript account yet, you can do a lot. Not that much, but you can get started for free. Like a lot of things, Descript is freemium where you can Create your account, you can start playing around with it, and you can make one short video for free. But pretty quickly, you're gonna need to upgrade. And what you're basically paying for is the, the account that most people end up on is Creator. What you're paying for is media hours. So this is the amount of time of videos and images that you bring into Descript and AI credits. And so every single feature that you use in Descript, has a cost to it in AI credits. And this is the pool that you burn down every month. And that is the one that I have 100 left of, and it resets tomorrow. So it resets on the day that you start your, your bill, um, every single month. Okay. Let me know if any questions about that in the chat and we can talk about it. And if you have any questions about which account to pick,, but yeah, like I said, most people settle on the Creator plan. Um, okay. We already talked about editing basics with the deleting stuff by the timeline and the transcript. Um, so with that, any questions? If you're on Zoom, we only got 2 on Zoom. You're welcome to, to use the chat or you can come off mute and ask your questions directly. And if you're on YouTube, just type your questions into the chat, but I will dedicate the last 15 minutes here to questions and answers if you have them. No, nothing. Well, if not, I'll go into my services. Um, if you're interested in learning Descript more, I have a course called Descript Made Easy, which is a bundle of 3 things. It's first of all, an on-demand library of lessons that I update all the time. So each lesson is very short, like 3 to 10 minutes long. About a particular feature in Descript. So if it is, um, the— what a decision about what plan to pick, I have a lesson on that walking through the considerations of how much you use it, which, uh, which plan is right for you. Or if it's about the video generation or the music generation, there's a lesson about that, how to get the best results, how to actually do it, how to add it to your project. So there's something like 200 lessons and I update them cuz Descript updates all the time. They change how things look, they change what things are called, all that kind of stuff. So I'm constantly updating, adding to it as the tool evolves. So that's the first part of the Descript Made Easy. The second part is live calls Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning. I get on Zoom for an hour just like this and I answer questions. Sometimes we have focused workshops on a particular topic, and then we go into that. The, the Tuesday calls are focused on Descript. Wednesday is more YouTube focused where we talk about YouTube strategy, you know, thumbnails, titles, editing techniques, things like that for YouTube. And then Wednesday has become, or Thursday rather, has become kind of an AI session talking about how Descript integrates with Claude and ChatGPT and The AI tools in Descript and external AI tools that can help you with, um, making your life easier as it comes to creating content. Um, and then the third part of the program is the community. So a large part of that is the group calls where we get, you know, maybe 6 to 10 people on the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday calls, and you get to meet them, talk about what they're making, how you can help each other. But there's also a forum. Where you can leave your questions, you can link up with other people. We have some students in the course who become editors. At a certain point, if your channel is successful, um, hopefully editing is the first thing you need to go. So the, the advantage of this course is you learning the language and learning the basics of how to do editing, but hopefully within a few months your channel takes off and You're not touching Descript anymore, but you might hire somebody who is. And so there's some people in the course who are retired and they're helping other people with their channels, or they have other editors that they can recommend to you. And so anyways, there's a network for that as well, where you can connect with other people editing, or you can ask your questions like, I'm stuck on this. What do you think about this YouTube title and thumbnail? And people are there to help you out. So, um, last call for— I'll hang out a couple more minutes. We went through that way before the hour, but last time we had a lot of back and forth on the Zoom chat here. But if there's nothing, I'll hang out for a couple minutes and we can wrap up here. If not. I do have— while I'm killing a couple of minutes here, I'm going to pull up that QR code. Probably you guys already have your Descript accounts, but if you don't, I have a QR code that will get you, um, 50% off 2 months. So effectively a free month. Um, and I think that that's the Creator Plan. So if you haven't already signed up, that gets you directly to 50% off the Creator Plan. You can scan that with your phone's camera and that'll open that up for you. And yeah, I see. Question in the chat: will this recording be made available? Yes, it will. Um, if you're on my mailing list, which I think you are, considering you found this call, um, I'll send that out within about an hour or so once I get it uploaded and processed and everything. And then, uh, yeah, that'll be on, on YouTube. First of all, this is being live streamed to YouTube, so it's It's there and then it'll also be, um, on my website, DescriptMastery.com. So yeah, my pleasure. And this is what we covered. We went into just a very basic familiarity with the, uh, the homepage and then some of the AI stuff that's there, and then how to create your first project starting from absolute scratch. How to record into Descript, which is my preferred way to do it. But the alternative to that, if you're not recording straight into Descript, is bringing media files from somewhere else, like you've recorded it on your iPhone or something like that. So we went into that. And then AI tools, I just kept that pretty minimal today. I only showed the generating audio, but you can also generate video in Descript. You can generate, uh, photos. And then basic editing techniques like selecting stuff from the transcript, deleting it, using, um, stuff like that. So let's see. Yes, to answer your question. Well, first of all, to answer your question about pricing, I have two options. There's a pay per month, so it's $99 per month for a 6-month program. It's not a recurring thing. It just, well, it's recurring for those 6 months. And then it, at the end of the 6 months, you can choose to continue or not, but it doesn't automatically happen. Or you can pay upfront for the 6 months for $549. So it's like a, what is that? Like a 10 or 15% discount to pay upfront. And then, um, regardless of which package you get, the course itself you get access to for a lifetime, and that includes the updates. So when I release new lessons, if you've started on either of these plans, you get lifetime updates. And then the, the group coaching, the 3 times per week calls, that is what you're paying for with the ongoing, the 6-month thing or the upfront 6 months of access. Um, that you only have access to for the 6 months or at the end of your 6 months, you can choose to continue. At a discounted rate. Um, and then there's a bunch of resources. I have all sorts of checklists for like when you're recording. I have all sorts of different guides and cheat sheets and hot, hot key cheat sheets, things like that that are included in the course. And of course, the community that I mentioned, you have access to that. Um, and then you asked about tutoring as well. So I do offer that and there's a discount for that, by the way. If you're a member of the course, then the tutoring is 50% off. So if you're not a member of the course, then it is right here. So these are my packages. You can book 1 hour, you can book a 3-hour package at a discounted rate or 5 hours. Um, and again, if you're a member of the course, this, this amount is $150 for the hour. So different options for you there. Um, all right. Well, we can wrap up here. Thank you everyone for joining and really appreciate you being here. And, uh, hope to see you all in the course or in, at, at minimum on the YouTube channels. Feel free to follow along there, leave questions in the comments, and I'll see y'all around.