Getting Started with Descript webinar | August 2026

All right, let's see here. Got one on the Zoom, a couple on YouTube. We're gonna kick off this livestream in just a moment once I verify. Okay, that is going. Last time, last month, I forgot to hit the go live on the YouTube side, so we only had the— Recording, unfortunately. Um, let me mute myself there. So this is what we're going to cover today. This is the same thing I do every month. Um, if anyone is a regular, I don't think— I think most people come to these just when they're getting started, which is what it's intended for. So this is as if you've Maybe set up your account. I'm not going to go to that level of like how to set up your account, but I am going to go to how to create your very first project. So this is assuming no knowledge, like you've never even opened up Descript before. And if you're on joining us on the YouTube chat, you can feel free to leave questions there as I go. This is supposed to be interactive. So, um, you know, if you want to go in a certain direction or tailor things to your projects, then just chime in with those. And if you're on Zoom, one of you is here, uh, feel free to come off mute and ask your questions or drop it in the Zoom chat as well. But otherwise, this is what we're going to cover, uh, the familiarization with Descript, the, the 2 ways that you can use it, and then creating your very first project, how to record into Descript How to import into Descript if you're not, uh, oh, hang on. Let me check one thing. Okay. Yeah, we're good on this stream. Um, how do you import into Descript if you're not recording directly into it? My preferred way is to record into Descript. My entire channel pretty much is me just pressing record into Descript and having either the webcam that I'm using right now talking into currently, or an external camera. Um, like my Sony, or you could use your phone, whatever. It doesn't matter. Lots of ways to do it. Uh, AI tools. So briefly touch on Underlord, which is the AI assistant that can edit for you. Basic editing techniques, and then the rest of the time will be question and answer as allows. But again, feel free. This is interactive. Feel free to chime in at any time. Okay, so. First of all, the 2 ways to use Descript. One is in your web browser. So right now I am on a Chrome-based browser. Chrome, of course, is a popular web browser, the most popular browser. And inside of Chrome, if you type in web.descript.com, then this is my preferred way to use it. The second way to use it is on the desktop app. So if you go to descript.com, /download, this will automatically start to download an application to your computer. And so if you're on Windows, you'll have a Windows version. If you're on Mac, you'll have a Mac version. Um, it'll automatically detect that and it'll automatically start. If it doesn't, then you'll have to click the download button. But anyways, uh, let me know if you get stuck with that. But otherwise, I recommend you use web.descript.com, and that brings you here. And just to go— just to familiarize you with what we're looking at here, first of all, from top to bottom, you have a search bar. So if you use Descript for a long time, you'll inevitably have dozens or hundreds, or in my case, thousands of projects, and this search bar will find all of them by keywords. So Descript, as you may know, is a transcript-based editor. So every single piece of media that you bring into Descript, it transcribes it into text. And if you type in keywords— so for example, let me type in YouTube. So it found projects where YouTube is in the title of it, like this first one there. But then if I go down further to like this one, January 10th, it's not in the title, but somewhere in that video the keyword YouTube is in there. So it's a super powerful search function and it can search across thousands and thousands of videos. Um, okay, so then next we have up here in the top right is my AI credit and media minute usage. So when you're paying for Descript, those are the 2 main things that you get is an allocation, a monthly allocation of credits in the form of AI credits or media minutes. I'll talk more about those in a moment. The next, these buttons are how you actually start. So that's what we're gonna— that'll be the next phase of what we go into. This is the Underlord, the AI agentic assistant that you have built into Descript. And you also have this within a video that you're editing, but this one here is kind of like a quick start. So you can tell it, I wanna make a video about XYZ. You just tell it in plain English and it'll do that. And if you're already using a particular AI tool, for example, Claude, uh, Claude Haiku, Claude Sonic, Claude Opus, Claude Fable, or ChatGPT 5.5. Those models, those frontier models are available to you in Descript. And they all have these little coins there indicate how much those cost in AI credits. So again, the number that we see up in the top right is your AI credit allocation. And some of these cost a lot more. So 5, Fable-5 is a very powerful model and it has a high cost, as it's telling me there. But Haiku is an older model and it has a lower cost. Then on the left, you can create folders. You can see I have different folders for different types of projects that I work on, and you can favorite them so they're there for quick access. I won't go into everything over here, but again, if you have questions in the chat, definitely let me know. And we can go in that direction. Down below there's recent projects, so these are like the, the last 4 things that I've worked on just for quick access. You can open them down there. Okay, so to actually create your very first project, if you click on this new project button in the top right, and then you can either choose to have a video project or an audio project. So I'm going to do video. And this is what it looks like when you're inside of a blank new project. So right here at the top, there's no name yet for this project. It's just called Untitled. If you look up here as well, it says Untitled Project. There's currently nothing in there, but I can call this My First Project, something like that. And now it updates up there and up here at the top. And you can start a project by uploading media into here. So you can drag files off of your computer onto this square, and that'll be your first piece of media that you can work with. Or what I'm going to show you, my preferred way to create videos in Descript, is to click this record button. And you can choose to record your camera. You can choose to record your screen and your camera. You can do audio only, or record with others is sort of like Zoom functionality or Riverside if you've used Riverside. So this will allow you to generate a link that you could send to somebody. You could email it to them, you could text it to them, doesn't matter. And you can, and they, they can click on that and join it, and then you can have a conversation. And when you're done recording it, it automatically becomes an editable project. In Descript. Um, okay. So with that, I'm going to just go ahead and do a— I'll do a camera recording. It's going to mess up my background here. You can see my, my screen. I had an artificial background. Um, but that's okay. So you get a preview. I'm not recording yet. This is just a preview of what will be recorded. And down at the bottom. You can choose different microphones or different cameras. So this is the camera I'm currently recording with. I can choose my laptop camera or other virtual cameras. I won't explain, I don't have time to explain those, but, um, or you can do no camera and now it's an audio-only recording. So those are your, your options there. Um, and then over next to that is your Audio input. So this is my good microphone that I'm talking into, and that is the name of it, Shure MV7 Plus. I could choose my laptop's microphone, or I could choose one of these other options. Um, whatever your best microphone is, obviously choose that one. If you have an external microphone, make sure it's plugged in, make sure it's turned on, all that kind of stuff for it to be visible on this list. Additionally, The first time you open this, you'll probably get a pop-down that says, do you want to grant Chrome or whatever your browser is permission to access your microphone and camera? Make sure to click approve on that. And then that'll make sure that Descript can actually see your camera. Okay. So, and if anyone wants to, has any questions about gear or anything, that's, that seems to always come up on these calls is like, what microphone should I get? What camera should I get? Happy to provide my thoughts on that if you have questions. Next to that is screen recording. So it's currently off, but if I wanted to show a window on my computer, like, uh, this is what I do for my Descript tutorials. I show another Descript window recorded from Descript, and then I show what I'm doing as I explain and walk through some steps. Like, for example, Yesterday I made a tutorial showing how to link up ChatGPT with Descript, um, and for that I was recording my entire screen. Okay, next is the actual record button. We're not going to hit that just yet because I want to show you the teleprompter. So if you click on this, it opens up this window which you cannot see. Okay, um, there's a floating window I'll have to explain it because it's not showing on the live stream. There's a floating window where you can paste in text, so a script that you're going to read, or you can type it in, or you can import a .txt file, like a text file. Oh, actually you can see it. My— I just had a little bit of a delay on, uh, the live stream. So yeah, this is where you can type your script here. Or like I said, you could paste it or import a text file. And then once you have that, you can set things like— actually, let me bring that back— the size. So if you're pretty far away from it, you can make it bigger. If you're pretty close, you can make it smaller. You can set the scroll speed. So what this is going to do— this is a teleprompter like the President of the United States reads off of when they're making speeches. It scrolls through and you read the lines as it goes. So if it's too fast for you, if you move this dot to the left, that's going to slow the scroll down. If you move it to the right, that's going to speed it up. And if you— I got a question in the chat, I'll get to that in a second. Thanks for being here, Kirk. Um, if you have a physical teleprompter, you can mirror this. So if you're— if you have a real teleprompter where it Do you have a screen and it's, it's got a reflective thing that's mirroring it back to you? That's what this is for, for an actual physical teleprompter, which I recommend you have, by the way, eventually when, when it fits the budget, um, because that's going to look the best. But you can also do light mode, dark mode, and there's settings. I don't want to waste too much time on the teleprompter, but, uh, as soon as you click play, it's going to start recording and then scrolling through That teleprompter. Okay, I'm going to pause here and check out the question. Regarding recording, how far should you have your mic from your mouth, and is there a better angle to put it at? Okay, yeah, it's a good thing to talk about because mic technique is important. So I'm going to turn on my camera again so you can see my mic. So, um, you want to have your mic as close as possible. If you have a mic like this, Which I recommend you get, and you get an arm that you can adjust. You want to bring it as close to your mouth as possible. And I'll do an experiment right now, or I'll do a demo. I can't hear myself. So I'm kind of talking into the, into the void here, but this mic is about— my pinky is touching the tip of the mic right now. So I'm like a fist length away. What is that? Maybe 8 inches, something like that. And it sounds like this. Hopefully it sounds pretty good. If I move it away like that, it probably sounds a lot worse and you're probably getting a lot more background noise, not to mention I'm quieter. So these mics, these digital mics, they automatically adjust the sensitivity. And the further away it is, the harder it's working to pick up your voice. And so then it's also going to pick up some ambient reverberation and Air conditioner hum and things like that. So the closer it is— I shouldn't say the closer, but about a fist length away, 1 or 2 fist lengths away is ideal. Um, a mistake a lot of beginners make is they place it on their desk and it's, you know, a foot or 2 or 3 away from them and it doesn't sound good. So there's Elvis, my dog. Um, so yeah, you want to keep it close. And then the other thing with mic technique is you want it to be offset. So you notice my camera's straight ahead of me and the mic is off to the side here. If I had it straight ahead of me, not only would that cover my face in terms of the camera, but the— there's a thing called plosives that you make with harsh sounds. So like P, B, K, T, those sounds. where there's a lot of wind coming out of your mouth for those, those harsh sounds. And those can sound bad when it's going directly into the microphone. When it's offset, it sounds better. Um, now this windscreen, which a lot of mics come with, they offset some of that as well. So that helps to mitigate some of those harsh noises, but that's it. Offset and— A fist or 2 away is ideal. And this mic arm, you can get these really cheap. This was, I bought it for less than $20 and I've had it for more than 5 years and I use it all day, every day. So these mic arms, they don't have to be expensive. Um, the more expensive ones, they do have more like shock absorption and, you know, technology that'll make it a little bit better, but this cheap one is. Totally fine. With the mic, you don't want to cheap out on the mic. This, this MV7+ is, is great and it's like $250, something like that. Um, so this is really, really good for creating with Descript. Okay. So let me know if any other questions about gear setup or gear choices, anything like that. Um, okay. So now I'm going to go ahead and hit record, and it is now recording. You can see once I press that red button, it's starting to count up. That's letting me know that it is going. And over here on the right side, you can see that this white thing is bouncing up and down when I speak. I want it to occasionally get into the yellow, but I don't want it to ever get red. If it gets red, it's not going to sound good. It's going to be booming. It's going to— and I won't be able to fix that if it if it's booming when I'm in the recording process. So you want to see that, that lets you know that your audio is coming in loud and clear. Now another thing I always recommend is just start the recorder, talk for like 10 seconds, and then stop it and see how you look and listen to how you sound, and then make any adjustments if you need to. Um, and that can save you a lot of problems, like if you've realized your mic wasn't plugged in or you forgot to select the right mic or there's some, you know, background noise that you didn't— you weren't aware of. Like, that kind of stuff you can catch when you do a test recording. So that's a key, key tip for you, is do like 10 seconds, listen to it back, and then, um, adjust from there for your real recording. But I'm gonna go ahead and stop. I'm gonna click on that red button again, and as soon as I do that, it drops it into the editor. And you can see over here it says initializing. So what's going to happen is This is going to become my transcript. So the words I was saying while I was recording are going to get dropped into there in just a moment. It shouldn't take too long. It says processing 80%, transcribing. This thing in the bottom right, by the way, this is how you can tell what Descript is currently working on. If it's uploading something, if it's processing something, or if there's an error, it'll show you that as well. So this is a good thing to keep your eye on. And you can also stop stuff. So like this is currently processing. I can click the 3 dots. Actually, that one I can't stop, but some of them will say, uh, cancel or something like that. Um, okay. So now the transcription is done and you can see the words over there. And again, this is the key feature of Descript. This is the thing that that set Descript apart when it first came out in 2017 is the fact that you edit from the transcript. So if I want to get rid of, let's just say this first line here, it says, and it is now recording. I can highlight that just like you would highlight it in a PDF or a Word document or whatever you're used to doing on a computer. You can highlight that and it highlights the corresponding part of my video. So if I look down at the bottom, this is called the timeline, and this is a visual representation of the video. So if I look down there, that little number in black, this purple section here corresponds to what I highlighted up above, the words, and it is now recording. So you can see those words down here as well, and it is now recording. So all those things work together. The transcript is just the most visually friendly. Like, again, it's like a Word document, whereas down here it gets a little bit more intimidating if you're seeing this for the first time. But these work together and you need to learn both. So that, that selection that I made, it corresponds to the first 2.42 seconds of my video. And so with it highlighted, I can do all sorts of things. I can press delete, and that just deleted that first roughly 2.5 seconds from my video. Um, so you can do that for throughout your whole thing. If I want to take a sentence in the middle, I can press delete, and now it's gone. And the other thing with Descript— the— or this is true of all software, but it's always worth mentioning because People get super worried about this. It's like, what if I make a mistake? First of all, you will make a mistake. I make mistakes. It's, it's part of the process. The important thing is to learn how to undo your mistakes. So Descript, at the very top left corner here, there's an undo button, this little back curved arrow thing. If you press that, that undoes your immediate last move. And if you press it again, it undoes the next previous move and you can keep going. All the way to your first move of this session. So if you, if you leave this project and come back, it starts over. But every move that you've made in this session, you can undo. So right off the bat, hopefully that relieves a lot of anxiety because the whole name of the game with editing is you make a change like I just did, like you delete something and then you back up a couple seconds in the video. Mm-hmm. Play it, see if you like it. If you do like it, then you keep it. If you don't like it, then you undo it and make a different change until you do like it. So that's the name of the game. And the more you do it, the, the fewer undos you'll have to do, the fewer mistakes you'll make. But, um, that is the basic editing process is just, um, make a change. If you like it, keep it. If you don't, keep changing it. Now, um, down on the timeline, if I click on this whole layer, you can see that the whole thing turns purple and it highlights the whole thing in my transcript. If I go to Properties— Properties is a super important thing to learn. This is going to show me the settings, or the properties, aka the properties, for the thing that I currently have selected. So Again, I have this entire layer selected and this is called my script layer. It's the, the layer that got transcribed into the transcript up here. And so with that selected, with properties open, I can see all sorts of things about the script layer, the visual role. So this is like, because it's me on the camera, this is a talking head. I could also have it be a screen recording. Graphics, others. I won't spend too much time on that right now, but just know that there's— you can set a visual role. Duration. So right now it's playing at the normal speed I recorded it at, 1x, and that comes out to 1 minute and 12 seconds 0.8. I could change the speed there, so I could say 2x, and now it's a 36.4-second recording, and it'll It plays like that, super, super fast. Let me see if my sound is going. It's not. Recorder, talk for like 10 seconds and then stop it. And so it plays super fast, or you can do partial amounts. So you can do like 1.1, and that shaved about 6 seconds off of my original recording. Or you can go slower, so you can type in 0.9, and now it added about 6 seconds. But I'm just going to put that back to 1x. And then you have your audio level. So Descript auto-levels your audio for you where 100% is going to sound about right. It's going to be about what you want, um, in most cases, but if you want to raise it or lower it, this is how you would do it. And with everything, whenever you see this kind of box in Descript, you can click in there and you can type a number. So I could type in 150, for example. Or you can click on this dot, this slider, and slide it left and right, and you can see the corresponding number is changing with it. And if you want to mute it, if you don't want your audio at all, you can click on this speaker, and that completely mutes out this particular track that I currently have selected. I'm going to unmute it again. And then opacity, same thing. You can, you can type in or you can slide this. Opacity is how transparent the video is. So 0% means it's completely transparent, you can't see it at all, and 100% means it's completely opaque, it's not transparent at all. And just like with the speaker, you can click on this little eyeball and that completely hides it, makes it 100% opaque— transparent, or you can click on the eyeball and it becomes 100% opaque. Below that is size and position. So this is— these numbers relate to the position of the video. So for example, if I click on this, the video itself, and I drag it to the left, notice that X number is shrinking. So if you think back to junior high algebra, when you learned the X and Y coordinates of a graph, then that's what this is. So the X is the left and right position where 1920 is going to be how it, how it should look here where it's centered up and I can drag it right. I can drag it left, et cetera. And then Y is your vertical positioning up and down. So if I go up, you can see that Y number. Is shrinking. If I go down, that Y number is growing. And once again, in addition to clicking and dragging, you can type a number in there if you want. W and H is your height and width. So if I grab one of these corners— notice when I hover over any of these corners, my cursor turns into a double black arrow. That's letting me know that I can click and drag in that position, and this is making my video bigger. So you can see my— the height number is increasing down there. I'm going to press undo, and it returns it back. It undid that last action and returned it back to the original size. You can also grab the corners, the little white dots on the corners, and do the same thing and drag it back. And you can double-click on this image. And this, notice those little, those light white lines that just got added to my image. I am now in crop mode. So what that means is I can grab the edges and now instead of resizing my image, it's cropping out the frame of my image while keeping the video or the dimensions of myself in the middle. the same size. So I can crop it like that to get rid of my background there, and I hit done. And now that's locked into position, and I can grab these corners once again and resize it like that. And it kind of snaps into place. If you notice, when I get close to the edge, my— the video kind of snaps into place. And locks in to fill the whole space. And now that that is sized, I can drag it around and you see that little red line, it's really faint, it might be hard to see on the livestream, but there's a vertical intersection, a purplish-reddish line, and that's telling me that my video is centered inside of my view here. So this black box is what it will be into in the video. So a common mistake I see beginners make is their image won't fill the whole space. You see this little black border around the top? That's a common mistake. You wanna make sure that you fill that whenever you can. And a way to do that, a quick tip for doing that, is if you click on Transform, Position, Fill Scene, Actually, hang on, that filled the whole scene. Let me undo that. Transform, Position, Fit Scene. Oops, nope, hang on. Because of my crop, this is throwing me off. Well, if I didn't have the crop, you can see what this does. It fills the whole scene and gets rid of any of those black margins that you don't want. Okay. So I see a question in the chat. Can you show how to use the current activity feature again early in the session? Yeah, on, on, um, the YouTube livestream, it's, it's text only. I'll send the link to the Zoom. We had a couple people on Zoom and they dropped off already, so there's the Zoom chat if anyone wants to come live and ask questions verbally. Um, the current activity feature, I'm not sure what, which, what do you mean by that? The current activity feature. Did you mean the, the bar that was monitoring my audio? Um, let me know what you meant by that. Um, okay. So Let's see, we've gone into the basic editing techniques, skipped ahead a little bit. I'll go into the AI tools next now that we've gone over familiarization with the transcript and how the timeline and the transcript tie together. So if you go to AI tools, and let me point a couple things out here. So this button on the right side that says AI tools is what I call narrow-purpose AI. So it has one function. For example, remove filler words. All that this does is it removes ums and uhs, likes, you knows, like those types of filler words. Um, generate audio can generate music and soundtracks, or music and sound effects using AI. And shorten word gaps will find pauses where there's no speaking and remove those. So these have one Strict function, as opposed to in the bottom right corner is Underlord. And this is what I opened the call with when I showed you that, that box on the homepage. This is the same tool, but here inside of the video editor. And Underlord has access to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, the latest and greatest AI models. And these update as the models update. So, um, a lot of people who aren't using those tools a lot, they cancel their subscriptions over on those other tools because you're paying for it here in Descript as well. Um, so you can choose those, those models, your favorite one, and then you can ask it questions about your project, or you can ask it to do things to your project. So I could tell it Let me just go to a cheap one here. Haiku-5. Again, for those that weren't here at the beginning, each of these models, they have a little coin next to the name, and when I hover over it, it says low cost. That's telling me that it has less AI credit draw than a high-cost one. So these are going to use a lot more AI credits than older models. And there's certain things like if it's, if it's a simple thing like what I'm about to ask it, then you can go with the lower models, the cheaper models, and save some of your credits. So what I'm gonna tell it just for the sake of demonstration is remove all ums and uhs, leave all other filler words. And before I send that, I'm just gonna scan through my transcript. Okay, right there. That is an um, and Descript will automatically put the blue dotted line under the filler word. So you can see right there, it's gonna find that one. And there's a, there's a second one. So I'm expecting it to remove 2 ums because that's, that's all I see. Uh, okay, so let's see how it does. I'm gonna hit send. And it tells you what it's working on. It says, I'll remove all ums and uh filler words from your transcript. Found 2 matches. Yep, that's what I expected. And it says, done. I found and removed 2 instances of um and uh. And if I look back at my transcript, there is that first um, and you can see it's now grayed out and it's got a strikethrough on it. That is now gone from my video, but it's still in my transcript in case I decide I want to bring it back. So if I had to remove like entire parts of my video, it would be there so that I could see something was removed and I could hover over it. Hang on, let me click, hover over it, and then this menu pops up over it. And if I click this button, that brings the um back into my video. But I'm gonna hit undo just because I do in fact want that gone. And if I hover over it again, for some reason it put the menu up here. It's a little glitch. Okay, there. So now there's this button next to the undo button will delete it. So when it's grayed out and got the strikethrough on it, it's ignored, meaning it's gone from my video, but it's still showing in my transcript. So I'm aware I got rid of it. But if I click this button, now it's completely gone. Now it's, it's gone from my transcript, so it's out of sight, out of mind. Now we have something else though. If you notice in its place, there's that vertical dotted line that's letting me know that a cut was made. So whenever you make a cut anywhere in the transcript, it drops that in to let you know a cut was made there. Um, and this regenerate thing that's above it, there's actually a really cool new AI feature that will smooth out jump cuts. So if, if that cut doesn't look or sound good, I can use AI to actually fix it up. Um, but I, I won't go into that unless you want me to for the sake of time on this livestream here. Um, and if— continue to let me know if any questions as we go. But anyways, so AI tools, that is your narrow purpose. It has one function. Underlord is your general purpose. You can talk to it in plain English and it can do increasing amounts of things. There's still things that it cannot do editing-wise, but every day it's got more and more features. And, um, I, I say this all the time across the channel and anyone who talks to me, like, a year from now there might not be any interface. It might just be you having a conversation with your computer. To edit your videos. So that's where this is headed. Um, definitely use Underlord, get familiar with it, see what it's good at, see what it's not good at. And, um, if you don't like where it's at, try it again in 2 months because it's probably going to be a lot better. That's, that's been the case. It just gets better and better and better as it goes. Okay, so let me know if you want demos on any specific AI features. But what I will say is before I start doing the editing, I'll often, I'll often do the AI tools first, the ones that I'm gonna use. For example, Filler Words is a really good one where the removing the ums and uhs like I showed, or another really useful one is Studio Sound. So this one, let me see if it's already applied. It's not. Okay. So problems, like if you've— let me— a lot of problems. Like if you've realized your mic— I was trying to hear if I could, if my— I could hear my dog in the background there. Problem a little bit. I don't know if you can hear that over the livestream, but I'm going to use this as my demo. So my dog's paws are clicking in the background there over my shoulder. And so what I can do is click on the video, and then I click on audio effects, the plus button there. And then at the top right corner is Studio Sound. And you can see that little coin in the top right that's letting me know that this is an AI feature. It's going to use my AI credits. The rest of these do not in the case of audio effects. So I'm going to click on Studio Sound. And now, so actually this, this is perfect segue. Um, Kirk was saying, I think showing what the system was currently doing. So this thing in the bottom right that is currently spinning, it's a little rectangle down there. If I hover over it, it pops out and it says processing. That's letting me know that it's working. It's actively working on something. And if I want to see exactly what it's working on, I can click this little expand button, and now I can see that the— on this video file, which is called Descript Mastery, that's the name of the video file that's having stuff done to it, the— it's already uploaded, so it's got that green check mark. If it wasn't, it would have a percentage letting me know that it's working on it, or it might have an error message saying failed, couldn't upload it for some reason. And then Studio Sound applied. So because I just applied Studio Sound, it's letting me know that that's already done. Boom, it's got the green check mark. And transcribing— I think this is actually a glitch because it is done transcribing even though it says 0%. So that's a little bit of a glitch there. But that's how you read this, is like, that is the video file, and then this is the log of things that require processing and their current status, either done, in progress, or has an error. And so with some things too, there's these little things over here will have 3 dots and you can click it and you can say cancel or retry if it failed, things like that. To minimize it, you can click on that little down arrow and that pops it back into The little square, out of sight, out of mind. Um, okay, so now that Studio Sound is done, I hope you were able to hear the before with my dog's paws clicking on the ground. Here's what it sounds like now. You— a lot of problems, like if you realize nothing, can't hear anything. And it's especially good with things like ambulances. If you have an ambulance go by It'll mute that out in the background. Now, other problems might emerge, like it can sometimes make your voice sound robotic or flat. And sometimes, like laughter, for example, it'll make it sound weird because it's listening for human voice. So if laughter or unusual sounds, it'll mute those out and it can sound weird. Um, in which case, if you go to the Studio Sound setting over here, this is where it is. If you wanted to completely get rid of it, you could click on that toggle again, and now it's off. And I can just toggle it on again, and now it's applied again. And with it applied, if I come over to the right side, there's these little effect setting dials. If I click on that, it pops up another menu. And so with studio sound, there's only one thing you can do, I guess 2. The first one is adjust the intensity. So from 0 to 100%, 0% would be off, 50% would be half studio sound, half not, and 100% would be all studio sound. So in the case of what I was describing, like your laugh sounding a little bit muted, or it sounds like you're lisping or you sound robotic, those are all like common symptoms of Studio Sound being too strong, you can turn this down to like 70%, for example. And then that's probably— 70% for most people is like pretty good. That's a pretty good setting for a lot of setups. Um, now the second setting that I mentioned is to just remove it. You just click on that little trash can and now Studio Sound is gone again. So that's it. Studio Sound is Pretty simple. Um, okay, so we— let me just check on our basic editing techniques. I went over that already a little bit with the cutting and options. Um, in lieu of questions, normally I have a lot more questions by now, but again, continue to drop them in the chat if you have them. I'm going to show timeline tools because this is super important. So everything I've shown you up until now, I've been on the select tool. That's the default, and it's the most useful tool. You can do all sorts of things with it. You can select clips down here, you can grab words. So for example, this little 0.3s right there, that tells me there's 0.3 seconds without speaking between words. So this of is a word that I said, and then there's 0.3-second gap, and then there's the word problems. So if I click on the 0.3s, that is now highlighted, that 0.3 seconds of silence, and I can press Delete and get rid of it. That's pretty simple. Let me undo that though. And so that's, that's Select tool behavior. Now alternatively, I can click on this thing right here. This is going to change my tools. So if I click on that dropdown, there is my select tool. I can also have a hand tool. The hand tool is purely navigational, so I can click and you can see my— the little hand icon, it clenches into a fist like I'm holding the timeline right there. And if I move my mouse to the right, It's like I'm holding the timeline and sliding it to the left. Or if I do the opposite, I slide to the left, my timeline moves to the right, like so. So the hand tool is purely navigational. You can't edit with it. Below that, if I come back to my timeline tools, is the blade tool. And now you can see my cursor turn into a little red razor blade. So this is going to cut my timeline, my video, wherever I click. So if I click right before the word problems, that just made a little cut right there. And then if I click after the word of, it made another cut. And now when I hover over, you can see it turns gray around that little piece that I isolated. So now I could switch back to the select tool click on that little piece that I highlighted and press Delete. But you might be asking, why would you do that? That's a lot more clicks than what I showed you from the start. And that's exactly right. I don't use that often. Like the Blade tool, personally, I just, I don't find myself using it much. It's just easier to stay in the Select tool. Now the next one I do use a lot, which is the Range tool. The range tool, just like the name implies, allows you to select a range of your video, like a start point and an end point. And so that same 3 seconds, I can click and drag like that, and it highlights. And this one gives you a little more precision. If you remember with the select tool, it was 0.300. This one's 0.305, or I could highlight a little bit more and do 0.316. So you can be a little bit more precise. And additionally, I could highlight an entire sentence. So I could say from the word and all the way to the word you, and that's 3.484 seconds, that little number in black right there. So you get a little more precision and a little more flexibility. And then I could, with that selected, I can press delete and now it's gone. I'm gonna undo that. So the range tool is awesome. It's really good for going through your video and then just cutting out as you're playing through it. Next is the slip tool. I'm not gonna cover that because that's, that's more advanced and you won't use it much. Okay, let me know if any questions about those. If not, I'm gonna Go into this number next, which is the zoom level. So right now, if you look at the numbers up here, if I hover my mouse over on the left side, it says 0:46.7. That indicates the moment in time of my video. So this— where that gray line is, it's called the playhead. Is 46 seconds 0.7 after the beginning of my video. And if I come over to the right side, it's 57 point— or 50.7. So I'm looking at a 3-second segment out of my entire video. And if I click on this minus sign, it zooms out. So now I'm looking at a section from 44 seconds On the left side to 52 seconds on the right side. So I'm looking at an 8-second chunk now, and I can keep zooming out by continuing to press the minus sign until I see my entire video in one view. So I go from 0:00 all the way to 1:10. And I've been asked, like, what is the, what is the right level of zoom? And there is no right level of zoom. It depends on what you're currently doing. So if I want to be able to see my entire video at a glance, then this would be the right view. But if I need to zoom in and get more granular to make a really fine edit, then I'd need to zoom in. So I can click the plus button, and now I'm at 200% zoom, and I'm looking at a 34.78 to 36.48. I'm looking at a less than 2-second view of my video. But you can see when I'm zoomed in, I can see a lot more detail. So if there's like a little weird blip of a sound right here with the word is, now that I'm so zoomed in, I can see that level of detail and I can make a really fine cut, really precision cut that if I was more zoomed out, I wouldn't be able to see. Okay. Um, Somebody in the chat said this video editing tool is totally useless. The audio output is super bad and there are weird hums and O's in the gaps. Don't waste your money like I did. Okay, well, if that's you, then don't use this tool. But for everyone else, it's a great tool. Um, let's see here. What else can we show in the last 10 minutes here? Back to the AI tools. If I go to the Look Good category, so there's, there's different things that you can do here. The top has Sound Good, and these are things like the studio sound I showed you, the filler word I showed you, things related to the audio. Below that is things related to the visual component of it. So like in the Look Good section, if I click on green screen, that's going to remove my background using AI. There we go. So now I can put a different background behind myself like I have on the Zoom recording here, um, a similar principle where it's creating transparency around the human subject. So the human subject stays intact And then everything around it disappears. So now, and this leads into another key thing that you can do in Descript, there's a media button here. So I click on that, and then these are stock media that you're paying for with your Descript subscription. So you have videos, you have GIFs, you have images, et cetera, and you can drop one of these in by clicking on them. Let's see here. There we go. And now it's in my video. So by clicking on it, it added it as a layer, which I'll explain in a second here. Let me just resize my timeline. I know I'm moving fast, a lot of clicks and stuff. It's all, it's all overwhelming when you're getting started, but like I promise if you go in there, play around with it, it all starts to make sense pretty quickly. Um, but now down on the timeline, up until now we've had the one layer of me speaking, the video and audio of myself, and now above it there's this thing that says Breathtaking Norway Aerial View, etc. So that is a new layer that's been added and it's on top of the video of me speaking. So this is a really important concept in video editing, which is the concept of layers and layer order. So because this is on top of everything, it's covering up my video, and I don't want that. I need to reposition these. So what I can do is take this, this layer that's currently on top, I can right-click on it, go to Layer Order, and you can see there's options here like Bring to Front, which this is already in the front, so there won't be anything to— it won't change anything if I did that. But there's also Send Backwards, which sends it backward one layer at a time. And you can have as many layers as you want. So this is simple right now, there's just 2 layers, but you could potentially have 10 layers or 15 layers, or there's no limit to it. Um, but you could see how it would get really complicated and you need to have your layers positioned very precisely. So I'm going to hit send to back, and now my video layer, which again has the green screen applied to it, it's got the background removed, is on top, and then my video or my image of the lake is behind me. So this is how you would do that using the green screen effect. Um, okay, what else? Um, the other thing with the stock media tab here is this tab right here is visuals. So we have our video that I just showed you, we have our images. Those are all visual elements. If you click on this tab, that gives you audio elements. So we have things like music. And you can play it, you can preview it with that little play button. And if I want to add it to my video, I can hit this little plus button and that'll add it to the project in just a second. There it is. So now we have a 3rd layer. You can see there's my Norway layer, and then below that in green, it's a green layer, is my music layer. So let's play it. And it is now recording. You can see once I press that red button, it starts. Oops. And like that. And by the way, to play and pause is the spacebar on your computer, or you can click the triangle right there. You can also add sound effects. Whoosh sounds, things like that. And then there's a search bar at the top where you could find anything you want. So like footsteps, for example. Like that. And there's all sorts of, you know, airplane taking off, golf ball hitting, getting hit, whatever you can think of, whatever's appropriate to your video, there's probably AI sound effect or sorry, sound effects for it. AI sound effects is the next thing I'm going to go into, which is below that search bar. There's this thing that says generate with AI, and if you click on that, it takes you to this prompt box. And once again, we have tabs at the top. So there's a music tab, and then to the right of that is sound effects. And so here I could say lake bubbling, something like that, since there's a lake behind me. And then you can choose how long you want it to be, so all the— from 3 seconds all the way up to 30 seconds. I'm just gonna do 3 seconds so it's fast. Hit generate, and usually the audio generation is really quick. Give that a second to finish. Oh, and once again, the processing here— so you can see while it was working on importing those different tracks. It can— it showed you if it was imported yet, if it was auto-leveled, so the, the audio volume being brought down or raised up depending on, um, the AI making a decision on the volume level for you. That's what that is. I'm going to close that. So here is the lake bubbling, and if I press play So that was generated by AI. And I could give it more instructions. I could say, make it louder, add a fish jumping out and splashing, add people laughing in the background, like whatever you want. You can make your own sound effects, which is incredible. And they just added that like a month ago, that feature. And then same thing with the music. You can say add classical music, add techno music, whatever you want. You can do that through a prompt. And then you can, it can be anywhere from 3 seconds all the way up to 10 minutes long for the AI-generated audio. Okay. Um, what else? I don't see any other questions in the chat. Um, oh, I guess with the last 3 minutes here. The pitch for if you want to learn more. So of course, you know, there's all the free videos on this channel, which let me— Right. Let me pull that up. So you're already on this channel, so I, I don't think I need to explain how to find stuff here, but this is my channel homepage. Um, subscribe if you haven't. Joining, by the way, I, I made a post about this, but if you're not aware of this feature on, on YouTube, you can join channels where it's a monthly subscription and— oh, it's not. I can't see it because I'm on a different channel. I'm logged in as a different channel, but you can pay. And I recently changed this on my channel where there's a $10 a month tier, $25 a month tier, and $99 tier. And If you're on the $10 a month tier, you get recordings of my 3-time-per-week group coaching sessions. If you're on the $25 a month tier, you can join them live on YouTube and leave text questions. And if you're on the $99 tier, you can come to these Zoom calls where you can ask questions live and it's, it's more interactive in real time. And then, um, you also get access to the course. And the course is at descriptmadeeasy.com, which is here. And you can join the monthly subscription here as well. It's the same $99 a month if you join this way. And additionally, I do one-on-one tutoring. So if you want to just— you don't want the group setting, you don't want the course, then The fastest way to learn is to book a one-on-one tutoring call with me where we get on a Zoom call, you share your screen on a real project that you're working on, and whatever you're stuck on, I can help you in real time. I can leave little arrows to point things out, like click here, you know, do this. Here's, here's my feedback on how I would make this flow better. Here's the music I might consider adding. Here's— Um, you know, just things like that that I can help you in real time. Um, so yeah, those are my services in, in the order of how fast they are and how, how much they cost as well, from the free YouTube channel to the course with the group calls to one-on-one tutoring. So yeah, thank you everyone for joining, and if you have any questions, feel free to email me. ross@descriptmastery.com. And thank you very much. Have a good rest of your day.