Guide to Creating Your First Video (Descript Tutorial)

Today, I'm going to guide you through creating your very first video in descript. Grab your coffee and let's get started. I'm going to assume in this tutorial that you've already set up your descript account and you've logged in. Once you do that and you come to the homepage of web. Descript.com or the descript app on your computer, this is the view you see, this is the home view. And there's a lot of different ways you can get started. You can, as you see, with all these different buttons here, you can edit a video create with an avatar. So there's a lot of different AI ways to make videos and ways to record directly into descript. I cover all of those different things on this channel in different videos. In this one, I'm going to show you how to create a video that you've already shot and edit it in descript. And also one other note, I am on a paid plan. A lot of what I show you today you can do on the free plan. However, there are some things, mostly AI tools, that you will not have access to if you're on the free plan. And I do recommend if you decide that descript is the tool for you, you're probably going to want to upgrade to one of the paid plans. With that out of the way to create our video, we're going to come up to the new project button in the top right corner and click on the one that says video project. Click on that and this is what a blank new project looks like. Right at the top there's a little part that says name your creation. This is gonna be the name of our project. So I'll call this tutorial demo. And then right below that there's this big button. When you highlight over it, it turns gray. And you can click on this to browse through your computer and find an image, or you can drag and drop files onto this square. I'm gonna go ahead and browse by clicking on it and you can see I can bring in images like JPEGs and PNGs, or I can bring in videos like dot MP4 files. I'm going to click on it and I'm going to hit open. And immediately it brings that video into my project. And this transcribing dialog box opens up. If you don't know, descript is a transcript based editor, so it's always going to want to transcribe your video into text. And depending on how many speakers you have, you can let it know there's one speaker or there's more than one and you can assign who the speaker name is. This isn't critical. It comes into play later if you're using AI text to speech capability. But I'm not going to be, so I'm actually not going to label that. I'm not going to worry about that. You can set the language that you want it to translate into, or you can just leave it on auto and hit done. And you can see it's working on it. It's working on transcribing. And note, my video is upside down. Yours will not be unless it was shot upside down. That's just the way I have my webcam mounted. And so I'm going to fix that first. And what I do is I just click on the video and you see this menu that pops up over it. You have different things here, like the position of the video on the screen. You could put it into a shape. The one that I'm going to do right now is this. I'm going to rotate it so that it's right side up. And notice too, I can start editing even while it's uploading, even while it's still transcribing. That's no problem. That can run in the back. It won't interfere with my editing. I can grab the frame. So if you see there's a purple frame around my video and I can grab it, I get this big double arrow and I can drag it up, for example, to zoom in a bit, to crop in a bit on my video. And if you double click on the video, notice it puts these grid lines on it. This is crop mode, so I can reposition and actually cut out parts of my video if I wanted, as well as I can reposition when it's in this mode where I can just slide myself left or right or up or down if I had any space to go up or down, which I do not in this particular instance. So I'll hit done. But that's the first step is to go and make this video of your subject look how you want. So crop or zoom in as needed. Adjust the angle, which you can do with the corners here. You can grab the corners and twist it left or right like that. This one's already level, so I'm going to leave it as it is. Or with this video layer selected again, I know it's selected because of the purple border around it. If you come to layer on the right side here, this layer button, this is going to be the menu. The properties for the currently selected layer. And I'll go through these in order. So the first one is, how fast is that layer going to play? Right now it's at 1x speed. It's gonna play a normal speed. I could drop it down with a number below 1 to put it in slow motion, like 0.5. Or I could put in a bigger number like 2x to play fast but not relevant. For this particular video, I'm gonna leave it at one. Below that is the audio level. Currently it's at 100%. That means it's just. It's full volume. If I wanted to make it louder, I raise that number over 120%, I hit enter and now it's a little bit louder. Or if I go less than 100%, it's a little bit lower. And you can also use this dial right here to slide through and quickly change the audio level. And if you click this little speaker icon, that's going to mute the layer altogether. Below that is opacity. There's a little eyeball where you can hide the layer or bring it back. Or you could dial the opacity to something between 0 and 100. Size and position. I'm going to skip over that for now, but I'm going to show you this visual effects section. So if you hit the plus button here and come up to towards the top where it says color adjustments, it just added a color adjustments property. And if I click on these little dials right here, this is how you would change the effect settings for any particular adjustment. So you click on that and you can see here I have things like exposure. So if I. This is a little bit dark. So if I just touch it up a little bit, make it a little bit brighter, it looks like that I'm going to add a little bit of saturation just to make a little more colorful like that. And you can play with these to dial in your color. And now if you notice on the left side, there's all this text over here, that is my transcript. And what I can do with that is I can edit it like a Word document. So if I want to get rid of this sentence that says, what's the difference between a video that takes you 30 minutes to edit? I can highlight it just like I am right now, and I can press delete on my keyboard. And now that part of the video is gone. So this is what's so incredibly powerful about descript is it's like editing a transcript, like editing a print document. So that's the transcript. This is a preview of my video. And on the bottom we have what's called the timeline. And if you're not seeing might be collapsed like this and you gotta grab this little arrow right on the bottom that says resize timeline. You click on that and you drag it up and now you can see the timeline. So even though descript has the transcript and you can do a lot of the editing from the transcript, you are going to need to learn the timeline. It is intimidating. I get it. But we're going to break it down here. So let me point out a couple things. You see these, these waves here? Those are called sound waves. And those represent my voice in this case on the video. And then above that you have the words that are transcribed. So if I highlight the words, let's see here, three hours or more on my transcript, it also highlights it down here on the timeline. So they work in conjunction. And if I delete it, deletes it in both places and it's gone from my video. I'm going to hit Undo command Z on a Mac keyboard or Control Z on Windows. And that brings back my immediate last action. I'm going to scroll back to the very beginning of my project by clicking on this left arrow right there. And you see how for the first seven seconds of this video, there's no sound waves. The sound waves don't start until right there. That is all just empty silence. I hit record and I didn't start speaking yet. So that's going to be my first cut is I'm going to grab the start of the video on the timeline. And you see my mouse turns into a bracket open to the right. That is letting me know that I'm going to trim this video clip and it's going to be affecting the clip to the right side of this bracket to the open side of that bracket. So I click and I slide to the right and it's trimming that silence all the way until I touch the first word and it snaps in a little bit. It wants to lock into where that first word is. And there we go. There's my first edit. Now it's going to start right as soon as I start speaking, which is what you want. What's the difference between a video that takes you 30 minutes? So there we go. Now another way you can edit from the timeline is using these words. So if I hover my mouse over a word right here where like this word layouts. First, let me point out right before it, there's this 0.4s indicates there's 0.4 seconds of silence between the previous word and the next word. So if I click on that word and I slide it to the left, it's closing up that gap. It's getting closer to the previous word. So that's another way you can edit is by just simply clicking on words and sliding to the left. Now, for example, right here, there's a really big gap. And by the way, I'm zooming in and out on the timeline, I'm making it bigger and smaller using this right here. So right now it's at 121% zoom. If I click on the plus button, it's zooming in. So it's showing me more detail on the timeline. And let me scroll over to some sound waves. You can see, as I zoom in, the sound waves become more detailed, and as I hit the minus button, they become less detailed. And if I keep going, I can zoom out to the point where I see my entire video all in one view. So these are going to be. These plus and minus buttons are going to be your friend. You're going to be wanting to go in and out a lot as you make adjustments to your video. And then there's this thing right here, this. This scroll bar on the bottom that allows you to scroll forwards and backwards in your video. So scrolling to the left takes me closer to the beginning. And scrolling to the right, it's kind of hard to grab, takes you closer to the end of my video, which is out at 13 minutes and 10 seconds. And you saw me trim the very beginning of the video. You can also trim the very end of the video. So if I put my mouse on the very end of this clip, now my bracket is open to the left, which means that I'm affecting the clip to the left side of my mouse. So if I click and I slide to the left, that is trimming the video there. And if I click this left arrow once again, that'll return me to the previous scene, which in this case is the very start of my video. It's really important to start with the fundamentals that I just showed you. Getting familiar with that bracket, zooming in on the timeline, knowing how to scroll left and right, all of that is foundational as we move into the automated tools that I'm about to show you next. So to use these automated tools, we're going to click on this thing that says AI Tools. And you see here, there's a section that says sound good. You have Edit for clarity, Studio sound. Remove filler words, remove retakes, shorten word gaps and add chapters. That's what most of the rest of this tutorial is going to focus on are these different tools. So let's get into them. The first one is I'm going to skip edit for clarity. Edit for clarity is kind of a catch all of the rest of these. And personally I don't like using it because it doesn't give me as much control. But play around with it, see if you like it for yourself. But what I definitely am going to apply is studio sound. So click on this and you see it immediately starts applying it. So what is studio sound? Studio sound will take background noise, like could be dogs barking. Right now as I'm recording this, my neighbor is running a vacuum cleaner. You probably can't hear it because I have studio sound. Playing studio sound will just like the name implies, make it sound like you're recording in a professional studio even when you're in a poorly treated room. And it will take a minute to apply. So I'll let that run in the background while I move on to the next thing. So next click on AI Tools again and we're going to do the one below it that says remove filler words. Click on that. And this box popped up over my transcript. So amazingly this only found three filler words in this 13 minute video. Sometimes I've had hour long videos where there's 600 filler words, so this is amazingly few. But if I click on the word that says all filler words it tells me what it found. So it found times where I repeated words, it found times where I said the word like the word well. And amazingly I never said umm or uh but if I had it would. There would be a number next to it letting me know that I used that filler word. Now you can leave it on all and it's gonna just blanket find all of those instances of filler words and remove them. Or what I like to do is I unselect all and I'll only remove ums and us because those, those typically need to go whereas things like so or right not always. And I like to remove those manually. But for the sake of demonstration I'm just going to select the word well so you can see how this works. And you see it just found the one instance. And if I click over here on the right side again this is the list of where all the filler words it found are going to be. I click on it, it scrolls first of all it make my. It scrolls me to that point in the video So I can see if this is a cut that I do want to make, and if it is, I just simply click remove and it removes that instance of the filler word. Alternatively, you can hit remove all and it'll just blanket remove every single filler word in your entire video. Oh, and I just realized the reason that it only found so few filler words is because of this right here. Avoid harsh cuts. What that is doing is it's. It's not going to show you filler words that are too close to other words, such that if you remove them, it would cause the clip to be to sound bad, to be clipped and jolty. So if I toggle that off, it still only found four. But anyways, avoid harsh cuts is a good idea to use. It just ensures that it's not cutting everything, no matter what. It's just cutting ones that it can cleanly remove without destroying your video. That's the gist of it. With the filler words. I'm going to close that for now. Moving on back to AI Tools, the next one we're going to do is remove retakes. And so as you can see here, it says cut all but your best takes. And what this is typically for is if you're reading off of a teleprompter or maybe even not reading off a teleprompter. But most commonly it's like if you say a line wrong and then you say it a second time to correct yourself, it'll identify the bad takes and just help you remove those with the click of a button. So if I click submit, it found three retakes. And as with the filler word, the filler word identifications, it lists them over here on the right side. And if I click on it, it takes me to that moment in the video. So this one's at 15 seconds and I can hit this little button to play it and see if that's a bad take that I want to remove fast and efficiently. And if you look on my transcript, you can see it's lined out where it says, here's a raw video that I haven't edited at all yet. It lined that out because that was my bad take. And then here was my better take right after it. Here's a raw video. I haven't started editing this at all yet. And keep in mind, descript is going only off of the transcript. So if one of your takes you like how you set it in a certain way, or your intonation, whatever, then use your human judgment on what take is better but typically Descript's gonna pick the later take. Cause presumably you did multiple takes until you nailed it, until you set it the way you wanted to. So if I want to remove that, I can hover over this green check mark and I can say, accept, edit, and now it's been deleted from my project and then it takes me on to the next one. So once again, it lined out the part that I. I messed up. And you can see I say and oops. So I messed something up while I was showing something in Descript and I hit the green check mark to accept that change. Just for the sake of demonstration, if I don't want to accept that change, then I can click this red X right here that says discard edit. And it'll keep that line, you see, it's selected in blue on my time, on my transcript. It'll keep that in my project. And that's it. It was just those three retakes. So I'm going to hit done and we'll move on to the next one. Again, we're in the AI Tools tab and we just did remove retakes. Now I'm going to do shorten word gaps. Click on that. And here, this looks very similar to the filler word removal functionality. It says, but this time it says gaps more than 3s. So that's looking for times where there's three seconds or more of silence. And it found 15 instances where that's the case. And then it lets me choose how long I want to shorten those gaps to. So right now I have it at.05 seconds. I can click in here and I can change that number. I could type in 2.5 or just 2. Let me, let me try that. And now it found 26 instances. And I can change how long or short. It's going to shorten that gap too. So I'm going to shorten them to one second. And as with the filler word over here on the right side, I can see every single instance of those gaps and I click on one, it takes me to that part of the video and it starts playing it. So I can determine if that is a gap I indeed want to remove. If it is, I can click shorten to shorten just that one instance and it takes me into here like that. Or I can click shorten all and it's gonna remove all 25 of those removes. So what I could do. So look at that. My video just went from 13 minutes down to 8 and a half minutes by removing all of those silent places where I was thinking or catching my breath or whatever it was behind the scenes. So pretty amazing. I have yet to even play through this whole video. I'm just using the AI tools so far. Okay, so let's go back to AI tools. And the next one I'm going to show you is add chapters. When you click on that, it asks how many chapters you want. So chapters are ways to add navigation points to your video. So if you're changing topics, there are ways that you can click on certain things and quickly navigate to that part of the video. And when you export this video to YouTube, those chapters become YouTube chapters that your viewer can click on and navigate to that part of your video. So it asks how many you want. It defaults to auto. Oops, it defaults to auto, which I'm going to leave it on. And I'll hit submit. You can also type in a number in there if you only wanted five chapters or three chapters or whatever. And so here's the names it came up with introduction, the key to faster video editing, etc. Etc. And it made about 8 to 10, it looks like. And as soon as you click add to script, those chapters are now in my video. And you can see here, they're in this in bold, like making initial cuts and selecting layouts. And I can select it. And for example, instead of the word selecting, I could change that to choosing like that. It's just editable by clicking. And now that I have these chapters made, I can click on this button that says jump to marker. Click on that. And you can see here I can go all the way to the beginning of my composition with that first one. Or I could go somewhere in the middle to applying different layout categories. For example, at 2 minutes and 27 seconds into my video, I click on that and it scrolls me right there. So let's go ahead and click done. And by the way, these chapters do not affect the video. They don't go into the video. It's purely navigational here in the editor. And again, if you export it to YouTube, they become chapters that your viewer can click around quickly. So now that we've done all of our AI stuff, and again, I do recommend doing that all at the beginning because a lot of those features apply to the whole video and it just saves you a lot of time when you go through manually making the fine tuning to make sure that it didn't get too aggressive on the cuts or cut out something you didn't want. So then what I would recommend is you go onto the look good Category, you could apply the eye contact feature, which will use AI to make it look like your eyes are looking right at the camera. You can center yourself. You can apply green screen to remove your background. And by the way, I'm not going to go into all those right now for the sake of time, but I do want to let you know if you're interested in going deeper in descript. I do have an event called the youe First Video Challenge, where we meet live every single day for several days in a row. And I guide you through never having used descript before to publishing your first video by the end of the week. So if that sounds interesting and you're ready to publish your first video, click the link in the description below. But once you've gotten all your AI stuff applied, then what I would recommend is you just play through the whole video and you make the changes. You make any edits as you need using the techniques that I showed you at the beginning of trimming clips, removing text, et cetera. So just going to play through this, and I'll stop the video to point things out as I go. What's the difference between a video that takes you weekly layouts? So, okay, right there. So this was the cut I made as an example, and that created a really bad, jumpy cut. So notice, you can scroll through, by the way, if you click up in these numbers and you slide through. So pay attention to my hands here. All of a sudden, when that cut happens, my finger pops up and it looks really bad and jumpy. So what you can actually do in descript is restore something you've deleted. So the same way I got that bracket and I was trimming my clips, I can do the same thing in reverse to restore a clip. So watch this. If I click and I slide to the right, that's restoring that cut I made. And I'm gonna restore until I start seeing that sound wave again. Cause that was where my next word starts. So now I've restored that 0.4 seconds that I got rid of earlier. I'm gonna back up a second by. By clicking backwards. And I always recommend you do this with any change you make in video editing. You never know how something's gonna look. You just kind of. You make a change, you back up, you play it, see if it was a good change. If it wasn't, then you repeat until it looks how you expected. So I'm backing up a second by clicking back here on the timeline again up in the white space in these numbers, and I hit play. Probably not using correctly layouts. So there we go. Now it's not jumping anymore. I've restored it back to how it originally looked and it looks smooth. So in this video, I'm going to show you how I use layouts to edit fast and efficiently. Here's a rock. So right here where it says 1 second, that was actually a 45 second thing that the remove word gaps feature cut down to one second for me. But I actually want to still make it shorter. So what I'm going to do is get my bracket and I'm going to trim it even more so that silence is gone and I'm going to back up and hit play efficiently. Here's a RAW video. I haven't started editing this at all yet, so let's pretend you've just finished going through your whole video. You've gotten it all cleaned up. I'm going to show you one last really powerful tool, which is called layouts. And that's actually what this video is about. This video that we're editing right now. And you can check that out on the channel here. If you want to go deeper into layouts to make a layout, to apply a layout, you need to move your playhead, this blue line right here to where you want your layout to begin. In this case, I'm going to apply a layout that is an outro to this video. So what I'm going to do, I place my playhead right there. So right there I'm going to press a forward slash on my keyboard. And that creates what's called a scene. So scenes are how you divide up your video anytime that the visuals are changing. So like if you have a video where it's just your face and then the next scene you want to show your screen or some text, you would create a scene to break up the action and go into that next visual view. Let me show you what I mean. So over here on the left side of where I made that scene, this is my camera view. Over here on the right side, this is now my scene number two. And you can see down here on the timeline, there's a little number two that tells me that there's a scene as well as on the transcript, there's a little thumbnail of what that the first frame of that scene looks like. And right now they're the same. But I'm about to make a change with my playhead. Anywhere inside of scene number two, I can come to this button that says scene. Click on that. And there's this thing that there's this section called Layouts. So layouts are pre made templates, for lack of a better word. They're different ways you can make your video look at a moment in time. So I'm gonna click on this thing that says choose Layout and it defaults to a bunch of different layout packs. So as I said, I want to do an outro. So I'm gonna find the category called outro. I'm gonna click on six more just to see all of my options. And I think I like this one right here. This that says thanks for watching. And these are all little previews of how this layout is going to make the scene look. So with this one you can see there's some text that says thanks for watching, white text on a black background. And then there's this like this square right here. That square is called a placeholder element. So it's going to replace that square with my video. I'll show you what I mean. Go ahead and click on it and it drops it in. And so you can see we have the thanks for watching text we have. And all of these are editable by the way. You can, you can double click on these and change that to anything you want. I could change watching to viewing, for example. You could on these ones, change it to your website, change it to your email. And then with this one, as I mentioned, it's a placeholder layer. So when you click on it, there's a button that pops up over it that says add media. And this is where you could replace it with something else. It could be your logo, it could be another video. You could even record a brand new video. So it could be an outro with a call to action like don't forget to subscribe or go to my website or whatever it may be. But I'm just going to go into my project files and add a video that I already have. And you click on a video and you say replace. And now it's in there and I'm going to flip it. So that's how you use layouts. Layouts are a bit more advanced, but if you want to go much deeper into them, check out the video linked in the top right corner of your screen here on YouTube. Now that you have your video edited, you have the basic foundational skills of cleaning up your video. Let's export this bad boy. So you come up to the export button in the top right corner. And because it's a video, it's on the video tab. You could also export this as audio only as a gif. Timeline, it will put it into another video software. You could export the transcript only to a Word document, or you could export subtitles, which are time synced. But again, let's go back to the video tab. You can change the name if you want, and then you can choose where this is going to go. This, this first one, the default one that says descript Web Link. This is the fastest way to do something with your video. When you click Export, it's going to generate a unique URL for your video that will allow you to download it super quick or share it, or do whatever you need to do with it. So highly recommend that in every case, you just go ahead and export to the web link as a starting point. And as soon as you do that, it says published and you can still make changes to your video. So look at this. I could go back, I could make some cuts and then I'll go back to export. And now that button says update. So if I click on that, that's going to update the video at the URL at the descript web link. And if I want to see what that web link is, I can click on this right here and it opens up a page like this. So this is something you could send to somebody else that wants to view it. And it's going to render this video, it's going to make it all finalized so that I can download it right here. Going back to descript, back to the export button. Once that's done, once it's rendered on descript Server, there's a download button right here and it'll download almost instantly. So again, descript Web Link, highly recommend you use it. It's super fast. Also, once you've done that, you could do a export to YouTube. So if you do this, you can Click Sign into YouTube, it'll prompt you to sign in with your Google account and then you'll come back to descript, hit export one more time and it'll publish this video directly to the YouTube channel that you've specified. If you click on that dropdown again, you can see there's also different, like podcast platforms here that you can export to Wistia if you're making a course. There is even Google Drive if you just want to put this video on a Google Drive. And lastly, there's local export, which as soon as you hit that export button, it's just going to download this video to your local computer's hard drive. So again, these were just the foundational skills and it was very fast, I realized that. But if you want to go deeper and you want to spend a whole week with me going into everything you need to know to create your first video. Check out the link in the description below and I hope to see you in the your first video challenge.