Getting Started With Descript Webinar

Okay, having a little bit of technical difficulties with the Streaming software. It's always a process getting that set up, but I think we're good to go and people are trickling in. But thanks for being here, and I got some slides prepared, so I will go into that. And let me just share my screen here. Um, for those of you on Let's see. Okay. Recording's going. For those of you on the Zoom call, I got 2 things going here. I got a Zoom call and I have the YouTube livestream going. So for those on Zoom here, uh, feel free to jump on. Let's see. I'm gonna admit some people in and let's just get the screen shared. Feel free to come off of mute and you can ask questions. This is interactive. Um, only got one on Zoom right now, so we probably won't do any icebreakers. But, uh, and typically when you have a larger group, we'll do breakout rooms and stuff like that. And if you're on YouTube, then feel free to, uh, leave your questions in the chat and I'll get to them when there's time, when there's good stopping points and things like that. Um, but it's interactive, it's casual, we can go in any direction. You want. I do have like a bit of an agenda, but, uh, which I'll run through and then you can interrupt me as we go. Okay. So first of all, uh, my name is Ross. We haven't met before. And I run Descript Mastery, which I've sort of rebranded as Descript Made Easy. Uh, but it's the same thing that I've been doing for 3 years. And I've taught, uh, I forget my numbers. I think I've done like close to 500 one-on-one tutoring sessions. So people book a Zoom call with me and I help them with their projects. Typically people do like a package of like 3 to 5 calls and then I help them, you know, go from knowing nothing to launching their first YouTube channel or a podcast, things like that, make a course. And then I also have a group coaching call, a group coaching community. It's got a standalone course where you can go through it at your own pace. There's about 200 lessons as of now. And then there is group coaching 3 times a week. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I'm on Zoom for an hour. We usually get between like 6 people up to, I think the most we ever had was like 13. And so it's, it's intimate and it's just kind of a question and answer, and people share their wins from the week. They say, hey, I posted this video, it's got 50,000 views in 24 hours. Like, and we just help each other learn from what's working, what's not working, and it's really fun. And then, um, let's see, I also do editing for people, uh, less and less so, but I, in some cases, I can do client editing work. And so that's me. I, I've been— this has been my world for 3 years. Now again, we'll skip icebreakers unless more people join on the Zoom call. I do see some people trickling in on YouTube. Hi Mindy, thanks for joining. Glad to have you here. And, uh, let's see. So I just wanted to give a couple words on why making videos matters. And my perfect case study is myself. I try to lead by example here. And this channel You can go back to the very first video I posted, which was June of 2023, and it didn't get any views, not a single one. It's gotten some since because it's my oldest video and people go back and look at that. But it took me like daily posting for like 20 days or something before I even got a subscriber. And then it took like, I think by around year 1, I had 1,000 subscribers and got monetized shortly thereafter. And and all that. So it's a flywheel. It starts very slow, but the more videos you put out and the better you get at this, the faster the flywheel spins. And you can drive people to your— if you're doing this for a business, to your website, to buy your book, to whatever it is that you want to do. Maybe you're just doing it as a hobby and you want people— you want to share your passion with the internet and fund it on the side by YouTube ad revenue, or maybe you sell a product. And so that's why video matters, because you can fund any passion you want and share what matters to you with the world, get your ideas out there to a global audience. I've worked with people all over the world in every continent on the planet, and it's all made possible thanks to YouTube. And the videos live there forever for free. So Even my 3-year-old video, it's out there helping people that are looking for that specific thing. And, uh, it cost me nothing to have it out there, just getting, getting eyeballs on it. Um, and it still works in 2026. Anyone who says that YouTube is dead or dying or that humans aren't going to be needed anymore because AI is— there's going to be a huge amount of AI content, which there will be. And I have thoughts on that. We can talk about it. But, um, YouTube is still incredibly, incredibly valuable at the time I record this. Um, and in the, in the chat, Mindy's asking how to find my tutoring. So I have descriptmadeeasy.com. And let's see here. Okay. And I see your chat. DRMMS about layouts. We can definitely talk about that. Um, okay. So yeah, Descript, just to talk about this real quick, descriptmastery.com. This will take you mostly to the course. This is the course landing page, but at the very bottom, there's a link to one-on-one tutoring, or you can type in descriptmastery.com/tutoring. Oops. Is that gonna— there we go. And this has the information on the tutoring packages. Okay, so let's go now to the agenda. So we're gonna start off, I'm assuming no familiarity with Descript at all. Like I've assumed that you've set up your account. And that's it. Um, if you haven't set up your account, you can go to descript.com and do that. And one thing I will point out that's always good for transparency's sake is the costs of Descript. So if you haven't committed to this tool yet, or you haven't budgeted for it, you can get started on the free plan. And that's a great way to do it, to kind of just get familiarized yourself. However, you're gonna be very limited on the core functionality of Descript, which is the AI tools and the quality that you can publish at, the quality you can make your projects in. And so most people land right here on the Creator plan, and that gets you 30 media hours, 800 AI credits, and I'll talk about those when they come up, but those are the main 2 things. That you're paying for with any of these plans. So the way I always look at it is like, start small and then upgrade as you go. As you, like, you can start on the Hobbyist after you've maxed out your free plan. And if you max out the Hobbyist plan, then bump up to the Creator plan. And you can start on monthly. And then once you decide that Descript's a tool you wanna learn, then you can bump up to annual. And I think that's just generally good practice for Any software that you're not sure how it's going to fit into your life, if you're going to commit to it, that kind of thing. Um, just like I always say, you wouldn't marry somebody on the first date. Like, you want to, you want to get comfortable, see how does this person fit in with my life before you decide to commit for the long term. Um, okay, so now there's 2 ways to use Descript, and the way I'm going to show you today is in the web. So I'm in my browser. And I use a browser called Brave, but it works best on Chrome. Um, so, and Brave is a Chrome-based browser, so it has the same benefits, the same compatibility as Chrome. Um, but yeah, so, so whatever you use— Chrome, Edge is also Chrome-based, Brave, uh, there's a few others— let me know if you have any questions about that. Now alternatively, you can also download an app to your computer, whether it's on Windows or Mac. And I'm on Mac, by the way, so some things will be slightly different, but it's 99% the same. And I'll call out the differences if they come up. Um, but so you can also download it and the, the performance should be identical because however you use Descript, it's using the internet to do it. So the performance that you get out of Descript is largely dependent on the speed and stability of your internet connection. So if you have any issues with your internet or you want methods for checking it or anything, like feel free to drop that in the chat and I can talk about that a little bit more. But just know that like if your, your connection's weak or it's cutting in and out, like you're going to probably have issues with Descript. Okay, so this, this first page, which is on web.descript.com, this is called the Drive view. So in Descript, everything goes into what's called your Drive. That's where all your projects are stored, and that's kind of the container that has all of the work that you have done and will do. And on this, on this page, you have like some ways to quick start a video. So this Box right here is an AI agentic assistant. So you can talk to it in plain English and describe what you want to do. And you can use this little paperclip to upload a video. Like if you've already shot a video, you can upload it and just start working with it immediately. And then you can choose this little dropdown right here is to choose which AI agent you want to use. So if you're in this space, if you've been using AI, You're probably familiar with these. They have Claude, they have Gemini. If you click more models, they have ChatGPT. And these are all the latest models. And when new ones are dropped, Descript gets rid of old ones and puts in the new ones. So you're always on the cutting edge with Descript. Um, and then below that, these are buttons and you can do quick things like rough cut of a podcast. Rough cut means Like take out all the filler words or like tangents, things like that. It's just gonna cut out a lot of content without like finessing it. So that would be your, your later cuts where you're like making sure that it's smooth and making sure that it sounds right and all that. But the rough cut is just like the down and dirty, get rid of what you definitely don't want in there. And so what this would do is AI would do that for you. You drop in your, your video, hit rough cut, and boom, it would take care of that for you. I'll make this a little more concrete in a second when I actually show you this in the project. Um, but for now, just know that these are shortcuts to different types of projects. And below that, there's an AI video maker where you can have AI actually help you make the video from start to finish. Um, AI speaker— this is when you can train the AI on your voice. You read a little short script and that gives AI all the different sounds in your accent and things like that, your pronunciation. And you can then type or paste in a script and it'll convert that into your voice. Now it's not perfect, it's a little bit robotic still, and your results may vary. Like I have a client with a South African accent and It doesn't do that very well, but it could pretty much nail American and Canadian accents because it's a Silicon Valley company that it's trained on majority American corpus of data and stuff like that. But there's a transcribe button down here. So if you just want to take a video or podcast and then just get the transcription out of it and maybe like post that on a blog or something, That's what that would be for. And, um, up here in the top right, these are where we're gonna go for today. So new project would be a blank new project, and you would use that if you are going to use content that you already have. Um, so for example, like you shot a video on your iPhone or another camera, it doesn't matter. And you have that file somewhere on your computer, then you can use that and bring that into this blank video project. And same thing with audio. And you can do that at any time, by the way, no matter how— no matter what type of project it is, you can always bring in more content and stuff like that. But in general, that's the starting point, as opposed to this record button, which is actually— no, I'm not going to show you the record. I'm just going to show you the this one for today. But Record is how you could record directly into Descript. So like the way that my video camera is recording me right now doing this live stream, I could click Camera and it would pick up the same camera feed and put it straight into an editable Descript project. And Screen would be the same thing. It would put your camera into the bottom corner. And you can adjust it, you know, you can put it in the left corner, right corner, whatever you want. But it would, it would put your camera somewhere on the screen and then it would grab your screen of your computer. So if you've watched my YouTube channel, which presumably you all have since you're on here right now, um, this is how 90% of my channel is shot is with this right here where I'm showing my Descript screen. And then my face is in one of the corners and it's following my mouse movements. It's following everything that I'm showing. So that's really good for tutorials and walkthroughs and things like that. Audio only is going to be only capturing your voice. So you'd use this for a podcast. That's, that's kind of the only thing that people do audio for anymore, like just audio. Um, when people say podcast nowadays, they often mean including, uh, video. So because it goes out on YouTube and it goes out on X and it goes out on LinkedIn, and so, um, those terms are used interchangeably now. Podcasts can include video, but if you wanted audio only, that's how you do it. This last section below that horizontal line right there, Record with Others, is sort of like a Zoom call like I'm on right now. Um, however, it's better than Zoom from a quality perspective, not necessarily from a reliability perspective. So you can record using this option in 4K. So if you have a really good camera, it can pick that up at the highest quality your camera is capable of. It's also going to be a little bit higher quality audio, and, uh, it gives you some more flexibility than Zoom does when it comes to editing. So if you're gonna do a professional quality podcast, this is what you want, is the record with others. And below that is the ability to schedule a call for later. So you can create a calendar event that'll get emailed out and you can send that to all the participants. Okay. And I don't see any questions in the chat, but again, feel free to stop me as we go. So I'm gonna go to new project. And video project. And let me see if I have anything that I could show you right now. Let's see here. I don't. So what I'm gonna do is go to project and— Well, first of all, Let me familiarize you here. This is the, this is the blank project that we're in right now. So you can name it. Right now it's just an untitled project is the default, but you can click in there, give this a name. So I'll say, um, Getting Started with Descript. So now we have a name in there, and if I click into the white space, it puts the name there and it puts the name here. So this is the project name, and there's, there's a couple important terms here: the project and composition. So right now there's one composition inside of this project. If I come over here, there is my one composition, and again, it's inside of this project. The composition and the project currently have the same name. Getting Started with Descript. If I click this little plus button, say Composition, now I have 2 compositions. I have my Getting Started with Descript and I have a new untitled one. So you can have multiple compositions inside of a single project. So for example, the project could be a module in a course, and then the compositions could be individual lessons inside of that module. So it's, it's an organizational thing. And the other advantage of that is down here, this files section. This is where all of the files that make up your videos live, that, that make up this project, only this project live. And so they're shared between compositions. So if you add an image here, if you had a video, if you had an audio, all of the compositions in this project will have access to it. And sorry, I know that's a little bit, um, theoretical, so let me start showing you this. If I go to Files, there's a plus button here, and these are all the different places you can add media from. So you can bring something straight off your computer, you can have a media library, which is like content that you've saved before. So A good example of this is a logo. If you have a logo that you always put in your videos, you can save that into the media library and then you can access it across all of your projects in Descript. So really good to do with things that you are going to always use over and over. Other projects is going to let me browse through previous projects in other places on my drive and pull in videos that I've used there. In order to edit them inside of this project. You can also import stuff from Zoom, from Google Drives. You can bring in, uh, PowerPoints. And sequences and folders are a little bit beyond the scope of this, so I'll skip over that for now. Okay, so I'm going to click on Other Projects, and you can see this little box pops up and I can move it around. You can do this with pretty much anything in Descript. You can Move things around, resize them, and make it comfortable for you. We'll talk a little bit more about like the setup in a bit. So now I'm— what I'm seeing here is other projects inside of my Drive. And so I can go through here and I'm gonna bring in this video right here. So I'm gonna click on it. And now what I'm seeing are the project— are the files that make up this project. So some of these are images. You can see they say .png, that's an image file. Some of these are .mp4, that's a video file. And so these are files that make up this particular video, which is called GrokBot: My Experience After 10 Days. And so I can pull one in. So I'm going to go over this one and I'm going to click Add. And I can see down here it says importing. Whenever you do anything in Descript that requires some sort of loading, it's going to show you down here the progress of it. So if I expand that a little bit, some things show a percentage. It'll say like 5% done, 10% done, done, etc. Um, so that's just letting you know that it's working on something, and you can minimize it, you can close it if you want, and just get out of sight, out of mind. And there's a little check mark, so that tells me it's done. Let me close out. And there it is. And so now I have one video file inside of my project files. And if I click on it, it opens up this floating window. And I can play this. And that's a preview of the video. So it's not— I'm not editing it yet. I'm just looking at it just to like see if this— because you might have a lot of videos that look similar, and so you could start playing through them and see which video is which. Um, and I can see here it's 7 minutes and 8 seconds. Again, this is the preview of it. This is the title of the video in the top left, and this little button right here shows you information about this file. Um, it's, it's a little bit technical, so I won't spend too much time on that, but If you know anything about video, like the resolution, the file size, like there's some stats for nerds there, let's call it that. And when you're ready to add this to your video, you can click Insert into Script. And now it's actually in my editor and it's taking a second to load. Like I've got a black screen right here and in just a second, there we go, there's the actual preview. So what you see in this box is the video. Like, if I go to save this or I go to publish it to YouTube, what's in this box is what's actually in my video. So if I click on my video and I expand it so that I'm no longer in the frame, because I'm no longer visible here, I won't be in the finished video if I were to publish this to YouTube. So hopefully that's intuitive enough. And just to back up on what I just did, if I click on my image, you can see there's like a purple border around it and there's some white dots in the corner. So if you've used PowerPoint or Canva or anything like that, it, it works the same way where you can grab an edge and drag down or even drag up, and that starts cutting off. Some of my video. And if you grab the corners, it increases height and width together. And so that's the easiest way to resize what is inside of your viewer. You can also drag it around. So like, let's say I, I zoom in a little bit and I can click on the video and move the entire thing. And you can see those little red lines that just formed in the vertical and horizontal centers. Those show me that this image is centered, perfectly centered. And so if I drag left and right, you can see that my— the bar through the middle stays there, but the horizontal middle is now gone. But if I drag right until there, Now it's back and it kind of snaps into place. So, so yeah, it helps you out as you go. Um, okay, any questions so far? I do see I've downloaded you. Okay, I've been using Filmora for a while. Yeah, I haven't— I've very lightly used Filmora. I know that's a popular and fairly simple editing tool, um, but I haven't used that one extensively. But Descript, by the way, to go into like what makes this unique, Descript's been around almost a decade. I believe that they came out in 2017. I've been using it since about 2022, and I've been teaching it since 2023. But the thing that put Descript on the map is this right here. The transcript. So it took my video, it transcribed it, and you can see when I highlight the transcription, it turns purple. It also turns purple down below. This is the timeline down below, and this is how video editing has worked for the entire history of digital video editing, is timeline-based. So the transcript was the innovative piece where I can highlight the words And it syncs to when I actually said those words in the video. And for example, I can press delete and now that part of my video is gone and it's gone from my transcript. And so that is like amazing for talking head videos because before you used to have to go off those squiggly lines. If I click over here, these squiggly lines, imagine that but not seeing the words above it. That was what video editors had to go off of until Descript. Um, and I don't know for sure that Descript was like the very first ones to do that, but like they were early, let's say that. Because now since, since then, more and more video editors have been adding that as a capability, but that is like the core of Descript. It's built around this. Okay, so these little dots. On the transcript represent silence when I'm not speaking. It's not detecting a human voice. And so I can highlight the, the dots here, and it's highlighting this, this silence area down below. I press delete, and now it's gone. And the reason I'm doing that is because I want the video to start right when I start speaking. I don't want there to be 15 seconds of silence, or nobody's going to watch that. Okay, now I still have about 4 seconds of silence at the beginning because I deleted— I didn't start from the very beginning. I kind of had a little piece later. So there's this little 4-second chunk later, and I could highlight the dots up here once again, or I could click on it down here, and you can see there's a little 4.0s. That tells me there's 4 seconds of silence because you can see when I am speaking, there's words. And then like right here, there's a 0.5s that indicates there's silence. So another way to do this is to click on that section up above and press delete. And now it just deleted that entire piece. Okay, now another way to edit— I'm kind of just showing you like the basics of different cutting techniques. And with a lot of things I show you There's multiple ways to do it, and there's no objectively correct way. So I just want to say that up front. Like, I don't show you all these to overwhelm you, and I, I am intentionally not showing you all of them. I'm just showing you like a couple of the easiest ones. But the reason for that is there might be ways that are intuitive to you or easy to you, and in some ways that are just like, that doesn't make any sense. So Pick the ones that make sense to you and then do those methods. Um, but experiment with all of them, you know, and see, see how it fits your flow. But the other thing is these words that are down here on the timeline, I can click on a word. So like the word my right there, if I click on it and I slide it to the left, that's also eliminating the silence that was before that word. Or let's say I don't want this word but in there. I can click on the word after it, over, click it, and I slide it to the left and it slides over it. I'm actually effectively deleting that word but. And so you can go through here and edit your video from down here as well. And let's see. Yeah, I think that's, that's good on that point. Um, that's basic editing. So I guess that was that one there. Um, and that, that's what editing is, by the way, is just cutting. Like it, it, the majority of it is cutting, getting rid of what definitely doesn't need to be in there. It's like taking a big block of marble and eliminating everything that doesn't need to be there to be left with the Statue of David, right? So you might have this big ugly video with a bunch of unnecessary stuff in it. But you trim it down and you could actually be surprised with how, how good your video is underneath that, underneath all the fluff and unnecessary parts. So that's the basics, is using those techniques I just showed you and get rid of everything that you definitely don't want. Okay, so now let's talk about the AI tools because this is another core functionality. And so There's broadly 2 types of tools in Descript. There's over here on the right side, the button that says AI tools, and these are what I call narrow purpose. So the things in this list, and there's a lot of them, I can scroll through here, there's probably 40 of them, they have one functionality. So for example, Studio Sound, which I'm going to show you— actually, I'll go ahead and click on it right now. And it's applying it. This makes it so that— and let me share my sound so I can give you the, the results here in a second— this will take out background noise. So if you have like an air conditioner hum, there's traffic, your dog is walking around, it'll get rid of that kind of stuff. And it does AI to do it. It doesn't require any knowledge of sound engineering or any advanced stuff. It's just, it does it for you. And so that's a narrow-purpose AI tool. It does just one thing, as opposed to in the bottom right corner here is Underlord. And Underlord is general purpose, meaning you can talk to it in plain English and it can do a wide variety of things. It can do— it has access to all these tools, like it can do all the same stuff as the AI tools. Plus a bit more because it's, it's smart. It can act on its own. And Underlord is getting increasingly powerful, just like all of AI. If you tried it 3 months ago and it didn't do well, try it again today. It's probably going to be a much better experience. Um, so you can also make templates, they're called, where you can have a prompt, an AI prompt. that will tell Underlord the steps that you want to be done to your video, and it'll, it'll do that. It'll go through them step by step, or however you describe what you want done to your video, and it can help you do the actual editing. So where I'm going with all this is I've gotten to a point for myself and for some client videos I edit where I have these really robust prompts That will do most of the work for me. So I bring in a raw video, I give it an Underlord prompt, and it just takes it away. Um, I guess I should say too, what I often do is the rough cut. Remember I talked about rough cut earlier, is taking out the stuff that's definitely not going to be in the video. Um, so I'll often do the rough cut myself just because I, I don't 100% trust Underlord yet to make the right decisions on What to keep in, what to take out, like stuff like that. Um, so I'll do the rough cut and then I'll give it the template, and that's when Underlord will do its magic. And there's some types of projects where Underlord saves me 6+ hours per video. It's incredible. So, and it might, it might take you 12 hours to get Underlord tested and get the right flow of like to make it work properly and everything. It might take a long time and, and be a bit frustrating, but it's an investment in your, your systems to be faster going forward. So I highly recommend it. Um, okay, let's go back to AI tools. I showed you Studio Sound, and let me, let me play it for you so you can hear a little before and after. And what I'm gonna do is is play this and I'm going to toggle studio sound on and off. So if you see right here, audio effects, this is where I can— the toggle is on right now, meaning studio sound is on. And what you're going to see me do as the video plays is turn it off and turn it on, and you can see if you hear any difference. It might be subtle because I have a pretty good microphone. I was in a decent room. But generally the worse the audio is, the better this does because it'll take out all that horrible noise in the background. But okay, so again, we're starting with Studio Sound on. I'm gonna hit play and I'm just gonna play 10 seconds and, and toggle it on and off as we go. It's barely bigger than a smartphone. It's a beast and it's affordable. My whole life I've been a MacBook user, a couple MacBook Pros. And before getting this, a base MacBook Air M2. And those were great for most things that I needed them for. Over the years, I've become more and more of a power user, and I wanted to start— So actually, that was a pretty good example. I don't know if you could hear the echo in my room. There's quite a bit of reverberation, and Studio Sound really did help clean it up. Now, it was a little bit powerful. It made my voice sound a little bit robotic. Um, but that, that's me. I'm listening for that really carefully. But for most people who don't— they're not sound engineers, they don't have any— they don't need this to be like the most polished thing in the world. This is your 80% solution. You toggle that on and it's gonna sound great. Okay. Um, so there's a question in the chat about mainly using images and diagrams and related to healthcare, provide some tips. Yeah, so this gets into a really good— another fundamental sort of skill in Descript. So up until now, my whole video is just in one layer. And if you see on the bottom here, that is my video layer, my one and only video layer where I'm speaking. And it's got my video, it's got my voice. And this is called the script layer. There's only one script layer in Descript, and it's the bottom one here. It's called the script layer because it gets transcribed like this. And that's as opposed to if I right-click on the script layer and I say remove from script, notice it pops it up, up above. And now it's a, a normal layer. It doesn't have a name, it's just a layer. A non-script layer. And the difference is my text disappeared. So it's no longer up here in the transcript and it's no longer down here, down below. The rest of the video, the part that I didn't select, still is. It's still in the script layer, but this one is not. So I do that to show you what scripts are. I can, I can return this to the script by saying include in script, and now it's back down. Below. So in Descript, if we want to add anything else to our video on top of my script layer in this case, then those will be added as new layers. So for example, if I go to media on the right side, this is, uh, stock media that's included with your Descript subscription. So you have things like videos Giphy GIFs, images which are just still, Giphy stickers, and backgrounds which are like soft, subtle background movement. And let's say I want to add— let me go to here, whatever, I'll just add this Will Ferrell here. I'm gonna click on it, and in a second it added it. So you see that it added right where my— this blue line right here is called my playhead. So right where that playhead was, it inserted the video at that moment in time, which was about 2 seconds into my video. This, this 2 up here tells me where in my video time-wise my playhead is. So now I've got this image added, and I— if I click over, if I move the playhead, which you can click into this white space, the numbers up here and drag it, and you can see my, my video is moving to display it. So now that's what it looks like. This, this layer is overlaying— it's on top of my video of myself, my, my face. And what I can do is click on the layer and move it. So I can click it and drag it to the very beginning, and that's clicking on this top solid bar, not the, not the striped one below, and then you can drag it around like that. And notice it's repeating, so that those diagonal lines tell me that this is looped, meaning it continues to play over and over and over. So if I want to play just once, I can click on the video anywhere, it doesn't matter, And then I come over to properties, and with every single layer in Descript, they have associated properties with it. So like being able to control the size, the speed, the volume, things like that. In this case, there's an option for looping. So if I wanted to play just once, I click on this dropdown and I say once. And now if I look at my timeline again, rather than that playing over and over and over throughout my entire video it's gonna play just this one time. Now the other thing I can do is highlight my video on the actual editor here, the editor preview, and like I showed you at the beginning, I can grab the dots and I can make it smaller and change where it's positioned. You can just slide it around like this, and again, there's my little red bars to, to tell me I'm— I've got it centered. And, um, yeah, so that's it. That's how you add a layer. And how that relates to you is you can take your diagrams and you would add them like I just showed you. Now let me zoom in on the beginning of my video again. And by the way, when I say zoom in, there's this number right here that says Zoom Options. If you click the plus button, zooming in gives you more detail on your timeline. So if we look at these numbers here, there's 37 over here on the right side, and over on the left side, 17. So I'm looking at about a 20-second chunk of my video. If I zoom in, I'm looking at a— what is this— 22 to about 32. I'm looking at a 10-second chunk. And I can keep doing that all the way until you're seeing like a micro fraction of a second, or I can zoom all the way out to the point where I see my entire video, which is 6 minutes and 41 seconds in one view. So that's super, super fundamental is like knowing how to zoom in and out, because there's times where you need to do really nitty-gritty detailed stuff, and then there's times where you need to see the, the big picture. So, um, that's really critical to practice, and there's a whole— there's a bunch of drills in my course about just that. Okay, um, I'm gonna zoom into like 150%, and then I'm gonna press the Home button on my keyboard, and that returns me to the very beginning of my video. And I'm gonna add a still image, so I'm gonna go to Media again. I'm gonna click the back button and let's say I'm gonna type in medical. You can search, by the way, like you're not limited to just what is given to you in the stock media. You can do a search and it can pull up pretty much anything you, you could possibly need. Um, so like I typed in medical and now it's starting to give me like doctors and offices. I'll say medical diagram. And I'll say show all. You don't want that. Let's see here. Well, let's do like a still one. I'm gonna do images. Not quite what I'm— let's say medical. This will be fine. I won't waste too much time on this. So I'm gonna click on that. And once again, I can see my layer in the timeline. It's called Stethoscope Lying Over Medical Head X-ray. And I can click on it, go to Properties, and I can see things like the opacity. Opacity is how bright or dark it is, or how transparent I should say. So you can see if I'm at like 50%, I can start to see my, my video of my face behind it. Um, 100%, it's completely visible. There's no transparency to it. And if I click this little eyeball, it hides it completely. So the layer is there, it's just not visible. And I can click that eyeball again and it, it brings it back. Um, so Yeah, this is it. Like, this is how you could add your diagrams, and then you can resize it so that it fills the whole thing. I'm grabbing the edge and I'm dragging it until it snaps to the very outer side so I don't see the, the background of me at all. And, um, then if I want to control where this image starts and stops, then I can scroll through here and let's say right here after this word pros is where I stopped talking about this diagram. I can click right where my playhead is and I can press split, and that just split this layer. It doesn't change how it's, um, displayed. It just turned this into 2 pieces. So if I click on the left side, I'm now controlling just this without affecting the stuff to the right of that split. So if I click on the right of that split, now I have that selected and I can press Delete and it deletes just that half without affecting the other side. Um, okay, and now the question is, could you also demonstrate how to highlight and zoom in and out for a particular word Or a part of an image? Yeah, there's a lot to say about that. So the highlighting, I'll show you a method for that, um, and I'm going to create a scene which I, I don't have time to probably talk about today, but just know that I just did something that'll make what I'm about to show you a little easier. So if I put my playhead again, I click into the white space and I, I focus my video at this moment in time, and which is over our stethoscope diagram here. If I go to elements, and these are some shapes here under basic. So you have like hollow shapes where it's got like triangle, star, square, et cetera. You have filled in shapes, you have arrows, so you could like point at something, and you have lines. I'm gonna do a square. So I clicked on it and it dropped it in, and we don't see it yet 'cause my playhead is before that square actually starts. But if I hit play— iPhone, it's a beast. There it is. It's that white shape, and it's white by default, but we can change the colors, we can change the thickness, we can control it completely. So let's say that in my video I'm talking about this particular scan right here, and that's what I want to highlight with this square. I can resize the white, the white square like that so that it's covering just the one I want to draw the viewer's attention to. And if I click away, it looks like that. I'm going to click on it again, and this 10px, there's this menu up above it. So if I click on it I get this menu and I can double how thick it is. So now I just made it 20 pixels. And if I click on this white dot, I can change the color. So now it's red. Click on it again and you can do all sorts of stuff like round the corners. You can change the fill. If right now it's— there's no fill at all, but you could have like a little bit of a A fill color in there to add, uh, some texture, things like that. And so that, that's, that's technique number 1 for highlighting something. And that's exactly what I do in most of my course is I add these red squares and here on this YouTube channel as well. Um, hold on. Had to sneeze. Sorry. And so yeah, that, that's a really effective way. That's, that's exactly what I like to do. Um, for some clients, if their colors are blue, I'll do blue, for example. Um, white is really safe. And so that's a good way to do it. Okay. I'm gonna click on that square. I'm gonna press delete. And it's a 4. Whoops. And now, now that's gone. Now, if I want to zoom in on it, then what I can do is there's a few ways to do this. Let me think about the easiest way. I'm going to show you how to do this through scenes because scenes are really important to understand. So scenes are how you compartmentalize your video. So for example, right now I have 2 scenes. I have this, the little number, that black number 1. It's really small, but if you see my air— my mouse down here in the left side, that number 1 That tells me this is scene number 1. And if you follow my mouse over here, this is scene number 2. And right where that scene is, there's like a gray boundary line right there. That's where my stethoscope, uh, image ended. So scenes can compartmentalize your video. Like, you add an image or a rectangle or any sort of thing into a scene, it'll go from the beginning of that scene to the end of that scene by default. You can also make adjustments after that, but it's a good way to, to do things like that. Now another, another way to use scenes is I'm going to click right here, I'm going to type a forward slash. That is a scene, that creates a scene. So now I have a scene number 3, and I'm going to click back into scene number 2 I'm going to click my video inside of scene number 2, and notice on my timeline it only highlighted, only made purple my scene number 2. It didn't, it didn't highlight scene number 1 or scene number 3, just scene number 2. And if I zoom in on it, like let's say I zoom in on this thing in my background so it looks like that, What I just did only happened in scene number 2. If I go to scene number 3, it's back zoomed out. Now, the reason I show you all that, it might seem like it's not related to zooming in on your image, but it is. Let's say that I want to zoom in on your image again, the same one that I did the white highlight around. And let's say that I want it to start right here, right after the word beast. So I'm going to click right there. I'm going to type a forward slash again. Forward slash creates a scene. And then inside of my newly created scene number 2, I'm going to select my image layer, in this case the diagram. I'm going to change this to current scene so that it only— my zoom in only happens in this scene. And sorry, I know I'm going fast. There's a lot of like, uh, It's a lot. It's a lot to take in. I get it. But it— I promise this, those all become intuitive when you get in there and try it yourself. But right now I'm selecting just scene number 2, and if I zoom in on this, it's gonna make that the one that I wanna focus our attention on. I'm gonna center it up a little bit. Like that. And so, and look at that, it's got, it, it already does the animation. So I'm gonna play this. You can see, and it's affordable. So it goes from the full zoomed out version of the diagram, the, the x-ray scans in this case, and it automatically zooms in to how it needs to look in scene number 2. Why does it do that? Well, between scenes there's a thing called transitions. So if I go to Properties and I look at the transitions, because of the way my settings are set right now, it automatically creates what's called smart transitions. And in this case, that smart transition does that zoom in. So it goes from the fully zoomed out to zoomed in on that one skull. In by the time it reaches scene number 2. Beast, and it's affordable. Like that. Um, now you can also change like how— like that was very fast. So what I would probably do is find that smart transition, and it said there's a smart transition in and out. So every single scene can— it goes in a certain way and it goes out a certain way. And you have other options here like fade, or none. You could have no transition at all where it just abruptly goes from small to big. Um, but crossfade, blur, etc., you got different ways that you can make it look. But, uh, in addition to changing the type of transition, you can click on these little dials right here and you can change the duration of the transition in milliseconds. So I could say 800, and that'll be twice as slow, twice the time as the default, which was 400 milliseconds. Easing— if you, if you hover over these, these are like how that animation happens. So none means it's the same speed from start to finish. Natural is the default, and that's where it starts slow, it gets faster, and then it goes out slow. So again, I'm covering a lot of ground, um, and there's a lot of like nuance and it would take like actually seeing all these to understand them. So, um, it's overwhelming, but when you get in there and you try all this, it makes sense. It becomes intuitive. So let me play this. And it's affordable. My whole— there's a slower one where it did a slower zoom in on the image. Um, Okay, so we are down to the last 5 seconds or 5 minutes here. So I'm gonna do some wrap-up, but if you have any last-minute questions, feel free to drop them in the chat. The replay to this will go out to those who signed up, um, through my website, and then it'll also be on the YouTube channel, Descript, uh, Descript Made Easy with Ross, which by the way, let me start with that. Um, if you aren't following me on YouTube, which I think 90% of people find me through YouTube. But this is the YouTube channel, and I would love it if you subscribed. I do this webinar once a month. It's geared towards very beginners. So now that you've seen it, you probably won't need to go through this again, but it's here if you'd like to join another one. And you can sign up for other live streams. I do different workshops and things from time to time. And then if you click on videos, I have different tutorials. And this one, by the way, is a great one to go further. It's an hour long and it goes into some more, um, just very basics that you need to know as a beginner. Um, and then if you want to join my course or book tutoring or anything like that, descriptmastery.com. And I have dscriptmastery.com will take you to my course landing page. There is, let me pull it up here. It's being slow. That's not good. I'm gonna have to look into that. I hope my website's not down since I just showed it earlier. It was working fine. There we go. Um, so there is a 3-month option. And by the way, with both of the, the prices on the screen, those are— you get lifetime access to the course. So that's the on-demand lessons where you can go through them at your own time. This one is course only. And the one on the left here, $100 more gets you 3 months of the live calls. So. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. That's the group calls where it's open Q&A on a Zoom call. You can join and ask a question and leave, or you can stay the whole time and meet the other people. It's up to you. But anyways, that's what the extra $100 gets you— 3 months access to that in addition to lifetime access to the course. So yeah. Thank you so much for joining. It's been a pleasure, and I wish you the best of luck on your Descript journey. Feel free to reach out to me at any time if you have questions. Have a good one, everybody.