How to Create Animations in Descript (Tutorial)

To animate any type of element in descript, what you need to do is select that element and this could be a title, could be an image, could be another video. Any type of layer, you can just select it. In this box that pops up over it, there's the word animation. Click on that and you can choose. There's a couple of preset ones. Personally, I don't use these, but you might find these useful. You're welcome to try those out. I always do custom for the most amount of control. And the way this works, and the principle is the same in any video editing software that I've ever used, what happens is on the timeline on that layer, two keyframes appear. So there's a starting keyframe, this one here on the left, and an ending keyframe, this one here on the right. And I could reposition where these are. I can move it left and right by clicking and dragging it. By default, they're five seconds apart. So that's how long this animation will take. The way that the video looks at the starting keyframe is how this animation will begin. And the way that you have your element look at the second keyframe is where this animation will end. And then what happens in between is the animation, the image, the layer, whatever it is, is going to morph into between those two points. That is your animation. So for this title text, what I'm going to do at the starting point is I'm going to move this outside of the canvas by simply clicking and dragging it out. And again, I have the first keyframe selected, and then I dragged it out. And then if I come to this second keyframe, I'm going to move it back into the center of my image. And I did that by clicking on the second keyframe so that whatever I'm doing to the the image is going to happen in that second keyframe. And then I moved it back into the middle of my canvas. So now it's going to look like this. Anything before that first keyframe, my layer is going to be outside of the keyframe, since that's where I moved it. And you can see it's very slow because it's a five second animation. So if I click on it again, click on the layer that is, and then I go to animation, I'll have to. Actually, I don't even need to do that. I can scroll down and then right here where it says Custom Animation 1, I can click on these, this little icon here, and that'll bring my keyframes back up and then I can to make this animation quicker, I can bring them closer together on the timeline, or I can make them farther apart to make the animation slower. But I'm going to make this like a one second animation, like so. And now let's see how it looks when I hit play. There we go. That looks pretty nice. Falls smoothly into the middle of my image. Now, the last thing you can do with animations is this thing right here that says easing. And with easing, you have 10 different settings. And these all have little lines next to them, little squiggly lines. And what those represent is the speed with which this animation happens, or rather the pattern, I should say. So none. This bottom one is the same speed from beginning to end. So it's just a straight line. Overshoot is where it's going to start fast and then it's going to actually go out of the frame, out of the second keyframe that you set, and then bounce back in. And I'm not going to explain all these, but these little squiggly lines represent the behavior of the animation. And if you want to see each of those in depth, I created another video that I'll link up in the top right of this video that you're watching right now, where I display a little preview, a little preview of all 10 animations. So you can see how it affects, in this case, this white dot. So if you like this video, watch that one next and you can see how the easing works on animations.