Huge Changes in Descript + Q&A | Livestream

Okay, and we're live. So this is— welcome to another Descript livestream. I haven't done this in a very long time on the YouTube channel here, but excited to have you here. And feel free to drop questions in the chat, questions or comments in the chat as we go. But the idea with this is I'm gonna show you some of what's new in Descript over the last month. So this will become a regular thing where I'll just show you the changes and how it can help you edit better. So first of all, if you don't know, Descript maintains a changelog. It's called feed— it's at feedback.descript.com. That's their website. And this is where they post all of their new stuff. So, um, I'm just gonna go through this in order and again, feel free to drop questions in the chat and we can go any direction you want to take this. But the big one, a big one is that Descript has new colors. It's no longer the blue logo. Even on their website, they have the red logo and then in the app, same thing. They've switched to that sort of red look. And what they say about it is it's inspired by the record button. So the red record button is the direction they're going for their brand look. And it's also more compliant from an accessibility perspective. So they have— it's supposed to be easier to see buttons and things like that. So you'll probably notice some subtle changes, with that type of thing. Um, okay, this is perhaps the biggest change of this entire, um, meeting is the media library. So if you go to your Descript Drive, and let me just pull that up here. Um, right here on the left side is what's called the media library. This is, this is the brand new tab as of a few days ago. And real quick, I'm just going to check my sound. Is the media— OK, looks good. Let me know if there's any issues, if there's any sync or anything else happening with the stream here. But so the media library is a place where you can put up to 50 media items. So that could be sound, sound effects, music, video, images. Et cetera, that you want to just effectively store on Descript's cloud. So, um, if there's anything that you find yourself often going onto your computer to grab, for example, a logo is the example I always give. You go to your computer, you have to browse through all your files, find your logo, and then drag it into your video. No more. You can just save it here. In the media library and you can access it from any project forever. So this is a really, really handy thing. Um, and of course it's on the cloud. So if you're editing at a different computer, you, you can log in with your Descript login and you'll have access to your media library there. Additionally, it's shared between editors. So if you have a team of editors, that you share your Drive with, then they will also have access to this. So yeah, it's a really handy thing. And let me show you in a project. By the way, I was running an Underlord thing here just to demo something, which so far doesn't look like it's doing a very good job with the colors or the font sizes there. Uh, the way that this works inside of a project is you go to your project files and you click on the plus button right here, and there is the new media library tab. So you click on that and then you can browse through your media library. So as you saw, I only had one image in there, which was— I did it as a demo the other day. Um, it was just an image off of a stock— DScript stock photo. But that's what it looks like. So you'd have a list of every single thing in your media library, and then you could pull it in, click import, and in a second, there it is inside of my project. So I could now use this. So you could have, if there's music that you always use, if there's, again, logo is the, the obvious example, um, anything at all, you can save that in the media library and then really quickly and easily access it. From there. Okay, again, uh, saw we got a couple new people join the call, so feel free to interrupt me at any time, type your questions in, and we can go any direction you want. Or if you want to go deeper on anything, feel free. Um, okay, then there's some updates to the layouts. So if we go to the properties, this is where you go to apply layouts. Then you click on a layout and we already have one applied. Um, one thing that's— well, okay, I'm trying to decide which, which direction to take this. If you click to save a new layout, like you've created a scene and you want to save it for future use as a layout, you do that, you make your changes in the scene and then when you click the Save as New Layout button, then this is the view you get. And so a little bit of simplification here compared to what we had a few weeks ago. So you can give it a name, like, uh, I'll call this Intro Title, whatever. And then as before, you can give it a type. So this does not affect the behavior of the layout, it's just a categorization Um, that's completely up to you, however you want to categorize it. So this could be a text, for example, or it could be an intro. Um, I'm going to call this an intro, and then you choose where you want to save it. So the packs are, um, you can think of it as folders full of the layouts. So you can have multiple different, uh, layouts inside of a single layout pack. So for example, I have a Descript Mastery one. I click on that. And then this is what's— this is where the majority of the changes happened, is with this layers section. So every single layer that is inside of your, uh, scene in this case is, is going to be labeled here. So I have a title and I have a script, which I don't actually have. Oh, there is a script that was generated by AI. Um, but you can choose whether that is actually a part of the layout or not. So What I mean by that is over here on the right side, you click on this dropdown that, that title layer could just be a placeholder, meaning it's going to just be— it's going to still be a title layer, a text type of layer that you can change yourself. Or if you do keep content, it's going to be exactly what's in there. So it's going to say Descript: Latest Key Changes, etc. And then that exact layer is what would be part of this. Layout. Or if I don't want it at all, I just say leave out, and that's not gonna get captured in the save. And then script, same thing there. So you'll have the same options for every single layer, with the exception that you can see I don't have the use placeholder option on the script layer. The reason for that is because the script layer is actual audio, it can't be changed based on where I'm applying it. Um, or there's a lot of nuance to layers, so I'm trying to choose my words carefully here, but it's gonna— this would be either like keep the exact words that are in the script as is, or just leave it out and let it take whatever script you apply this to, let that replace how this looks when it's applied. Um, so those are your options there. And then you click Save, adding layout to layout pack, and it's saving. So, um, just to back up a second, what this is, this, this project that's on the screen right now, right before the call, a couple minutes before, I went into Underlord, which if I go to the Drive view and we go to Home Uh, this right here where you can, it's on the front page when you first log into Descript, web.descript.com. This is where I typed in a prompt and I said, based on what I'm about to give you, which what I gave it was the changelog. I copied this whole thing off of Descript's website and then I pasted it in and I said, make a presentation based off of this video. And so that's what it came back with. Um, and as you can see, it still has problems with the sizing of text. Um, but it did come up with this script, which I haven't reviewed, but it's, uh, it's— I— the AI— whether to use AI generation or not is a big topic of discussion right now for obvious reasons. And I would never use something like this in production for a client or for myself. Um, but I think it's good to keep your finger on the pulse and see what you can do. Um, I made a, a, a post yesterday on this channel about how much better Underlord has gotten, and that's true about certain things. It's gotten very good about stuff related to the script. So for example, if you want to find a certain part, like you know that your guest on a podcast made a certain quote and you don't know the exact words they used, so you don't know how to find it. And it's an hour-long podcast, so you're not gonna listen to the whole thing and search through it that way. Underlord is great for semantically just telling it in plain English. Like, there was a part where the guest talked about X, Y, and Z. Can you find that? And it does a really good job about that kind of thing. It's also really good about bulk stuff. So for example, I have this giant project I'm working on for a client that has 20 videos inside of it. And they have a, there's a spreadsheet with all the names of the compositions that need to be put in there. So what I could do is take all those 20 video names and then paste it into Underlord and say, make a composition for every single one of these video titles. And it does that. And it'll just, I could even tell it to be a little creative. I could say change the titles to something more interesting or put them in order. So it goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and it'll just go through and add in front of each title name that the number that I specified it to. Okay. So the other thing about Underlord and all of Descript's AI tools as of the last few months is you can change the models in them, which is really cool. You didn't used to be able to do that. And so if you click right here, and actually these little icons are new, I think I'm seeing that today for the first time. So there's Claude models, there's ChatGPT, and there's Gemini, which I think most people would say are the top 3. Models right now, or the top 3, uh, AI providers. And so within those AI providers, like within Claude, you have 5 of their top models. And so Claude Opus just came out like February 15th or something like that. It's about a month old. And so the cool thing is Descript adds it the same day or the next day, and you have access to the latest model. And you're paying for it. Uh, you have, you have your AI credits within Descript. So depending, you know, if you're a heavy user of these tools, like you still might need a subscription to them, but if not, if you're just doing a couple prompts here and there, then you can use the, the AI credits that you're already getting from Descript and then just keep everything inside of here. Um, but yeah, it's really I've been using it more and more lately. Um, for a long time I was not recommending it and not using it cuz it was just so, it, it was more trouble than it was worth. But I think we're finally getting to the place where things are getting interesting and it's, it's pretty good now. Um, and then same thing with image generation. So if we go back to Descript and you go to AI tools down here, you have generate an image. And generate a video. And so if you click on one of these, like a generate an image, and those are the ones that it already did for me. I didn't tell it to do that. That was part of the initial prompt. Um, but up here, that there's that little icon, same little icon we had with Underlord. It's a little cube. And anywhere you see that across Descript, that is to switch models. So the other places where you can switch models besides generating an image, generating a video, and Underlord is you can choose models for the text-to-speech, for avatars. You can choose models a little bit for transcriptions, whether it's Scholar or Daredevil is the two terms they use. I can talk about that if anyone's interested. But anyways, so everything that relies on AI across the platform, you can use, or you can switch models to the one that you prefer. Um, so for example, if I go back again, generate a video, you have totally different options here and way more options than with Underlord. And so as anyone who follows this space no doubt knows, this stuff changes very, very fast. And what's the top model today? Will be obsolete within a couple weeks. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's really nice that we have these options. And then be aware, this is the credit limits of what it costs to run one of these options. So some of them are— the trade-off is lower quality, fewer credits, or if you want the top-of-the-line models like v0.3.1, it's going to be very expensive credit-wise. Um, okay. And I see in the chat someone asked if it's recorded and yeah, it will be. It will show up on my channel after, uh, we finish today. Okay. So some changes to rooms. I don't know if anyone wants me to go into that. Um, it's very minor. It's just an alert when your CPU is overloaded during a call. Background noise reduction improvements, and then they got a big list of bug fixes and things like that. And then moving on into the, the earlier ones from February, as I mentioned at the top of this live stream, they changed their colors from blue to red. So if everything looks different, then, uh, it's not a bug. I saw some people asking about that. Is it like is, is Descript broken? Is there a glitch? Uh, they just updated their entire branding, so that's what that's about. And resizing the sidebar. So this is, uh, a welcome change. If you see here in Descript that I can put my mouse right here and I get those, those arrows facing left and right, you can drag the sidebar to make it wider or narrower like this. Um, until now it's, it, and still is very limited compared to some other editing tools I've used. Um, there's other editing tools where windows can pop out and things like that. And if, if Descript is watching this, I hope you're, you're working on more, uh, stuff for the interface. But yeah, it's, it's been super limited, but at least we can do this now. You can, uh, make it wider. And more narrow, um, to give yourself a little more real estate here. So that is a nice little change. Um, we talked about layouts already, I showed that. So that's the ability to make a certain layer either a placeholder where it's going to take on the context of the video you're applying it to, or you can keep the content exactly as it is, exactly as you saved it in that layout, or you can choose to leave it out where when it's saved, that particular layer isn't in there at all. Okay, I'll pause real quick 'cause I see a question in the chat. Is AI supporting text editing as well? Yeah, so that is the best use of AI right now. Um, so for those just joining, this entire video on the screen right now, I had Underlord create from a prompt, and it kind of works, but you can see like this, this title is like really huge and it's overlapping. And in general, you're probably going to spend more time undoing what it did than just being able to— it's not at the point where you can just give it the prompt and say, this is an out-of-the-box video that I'm gonna use. So where Underlord really does shine is exactly that, is text edits only, not editing the visuals. And so if I gave the example earlier of like, you know that your guest in a podcast said something, you don't know the exact words they used, so you can't do just a search, like a normal search by keywords. And so you could ask Underlord, find the part where my guest talked about, and then you could tell it whatever you remember. So it's a way to, in plain English, um, interact with it and just be able to tell it through, again, plain English, what you want it to do. And so in the case of like analyzing your transcript, assuming it's something that you recorded yourself, it's not, um, you didn't just paste it in from text. So if it's something you recorded, it's been transcribed, you could have Underlord do things like the filler word removal. So, um, if you go to AI Tools, anyone who's been using this tool for a while is probably familiar with remove filler words. That is something that will go through and find ums and uhs and likes and so's and things like that. If you wanted to, you can narrow it down or broaden it up if you want. But anyways, that Underlord can do that through text rather than clicking on that button. You could have Underlord do it and you could say only cut it if there's a second of silence before and after the, uh, otherwise I don't want to cut. You could be very like specific like that. And just tell it through plain English if you prefer. Now, other ways, I guess you could tell me if there's something in particular you're looking for, hoping to accomplish with that. But yes, I would say that is really where Underlord shines right now, is script-based stuff, context around the script, and being able to give you feedback on the script, like things like that. And again, um, Opus, you have the latest models right here. So if I'm not mistaken, Opus from Claude is a $200 a month subscription. That's their top of the line model. Um, so it's pretty cool that you get this stuff. And then Gemini is also really good. Um, and my favorite Just to tangent on this a little bit in case anyone's interested, my favorite image generation is this one right here, Nanobanana 2, which also, by the way, is, um, is brand new. So Nanobanana 2 just came out like a week ago. There's, there's also Nanobanana Pro, which is really good. Um, But yeah, all this stuff is just, you know, it's changing really, really fast. Okay, so you said fixing the transcript and removing sections. Yeah, so you could, again, through the Underlord, just tell it what you want it to do. So remove the part where I talked about X, Y, and Z, and it can go up and do that. So let's try it actually. There's the media. I'm talking something about the media library there. So remove the paragraph about the media library. Let's see what it does. And did a pretty good job. The thing that I just had selected, it just didn't ignore on it, basically. Um, and you see how fast that was. So let's see if it did anything else. Nope, just that. Yeah, so that's a great— ah, sorry, coughing a lot. That's a great way to interact with your video. And like, let's see here, you could say something like, narrow this down to 90 seconds. Let's see what it does. So it'll make a couple editorial decisions. And where I started to say is the quality of the output is largely dependent on the prompt. So I'm giving— that's a very, very vague prompt. Just narrow this down to 90 seconds. But if I said narrow it down to the 90 seconds about AI updates, like, that's a, that's a very different request. Or narrow it down to the 90 seconds that you think would do best with people who love AI and love the latest stuff. You know, like the more you can give it, the more it's gonna refine the response. And you can see it working in real time if you, if you're paying attention to the transcript over here, stuff is getting cut, the time of the video is changing and Well, I saw it doing more a second. There was, there was more sentences cut, and now there's only one paragraph cut, so I don't know what happened there. But yeah, so that is, uh, my recommendation now is like Underlord is best used with transcript stuff, stuff related to your transcript, and not so much, uh, the visuals. Um, okay, so there's update about Claude 4.6. I mentioned that, and, uh, they're saying it's better visual arranging. Cling models for higher resolution avatars. So this is, um, I don't know if anyone on this call is making avatars, but if you are that they've just recently added the ability to switch models on those. That was something you couldn't do until that particular update. So, um, the one that they mentioned, Cling, is way better than it used to be, uh, than whatever the, the one and only model they were using before. And then Cling is just one of several options you have, so you can choose whichever one you get the best results with. That's if you're making avatars. Happy to go down that road if anyone is interested. They added waveforms, waveform elements to specific speakers. So this is if you're doing things with multiple speakers in the same project, then they can each have their own waveforms visible on the timeline. Better lip sync and timing for translations. So if you're doing translating material using Descript, then, and you're also doing the lip sync feature, rather than just being the lips as they were in the original language, in the original video, you can actually lip sync it to match that target language, the language that's being translated into. Um, let's see here. Okay, and then this next one is about the, the, uh, history in Underlord here. So with every single prompt, if this should relieve some anxiety if you're testing it out or you're unsure how it's going to work or the results you're going to get, if it gives you a result and you want to revert back to an earlier version before that particular prompt, there's a revert button right, right there. And that'll, as it says there, restore project to before this step. So if I click on that, it undid the latest changes, um, and you can do that for every single prompt that you made. And then if you want to start a new chat, you click on this bubble right here, and it's warning me that it'll stop any work in progress and it's gonna erase this chat history. So the chat history doesn't get saved from project to project or even within the same project if you start a new chat. So if I click new chat, that entire conversation history is gone and I just have, uh, a new Underlord. Now why that matters is, I mean, besides being able to keep track of the prompts you have and the revert feature I just showed you, is I'm realizing more and more how important it is. I mentioned the context of giving the AI context. Like, it's super important to spend a few prompts just sort of warming up the AI. So you tell it like, here's what I'm working on, here's your role, here's what I expect you to contribute, here's the, um, expertise I'm looking for on this particular project. And so just warming up, spending a few prompts, like priming it, I think is, is really important for getting good results. Um, okay. Oh, okay. This one's kind of interesting. If you use the Descript web links, so if you publish, you go to export, and then you publish it to a web link, this creates a URL for this project. So right here, this share.descript.com link, and what that is, well, I can just go to it right now and show you. It's a page that the— a dedicated page with this video that I'm working on, and it's currently— it's still rendering. It'll take a couple minutes, but you could send this to clients, to Employees, it's really useful for like if you have a new employee, you show them something in the software, like a screen recording, and then you send this to them and they can watch it. Um, it's also got the transcript over there and the viewer can download it using the button in the top right corner there. Um, but what has changed with this is this used to be the same page that showed up on a mobile phone. So that was a problem because this is optimized for a desktop. It's a big view. But they've— what that, that change is about is that on the mobile view, there is a mobile optimized look for this page now. So that's nice, like bigger buttons, bigger play button, etc. So it's just a little easier to use. They've added UK English. So for my friends in the UK, you'll be happy to hear about that. Um, the extra U that you add to the word color and armor and things like that, uh, you'll have access to that now, or it'll transcribe into that, into UK English if you want it to. That would be something you set in your, in either the prompt that pops up when it says, do you wanna transcribe this video? Or in the settings for your account, you can change it to UK English as the default. You can verify your skills on LinkedIn now. So maybe you've seen this on your side where you're editing. And then when you go back to the Descript Drive, the homepage, there will be a little popup there that says you've earned the, you're proficient in Descript or you're advanced or you're expert. And so based on like the type of, the type and number of features you're using, I don't know behind the scenes what they're tracking, but it's tracking something that, that can determine. How advanced you are with the tool. And then if you so desire, there's a link to connect it with your LinkedIn and you can post that on your LinkedIn profile. Um, and that's it for— we're caught up through the previous one, which is in January. I won't go that far back, but anyways, anyone have any questions? Open floor. I'll give it a couple minutes here if anyone has anything at all about Descript content decisions, um, what's new, anything at all, happy to talk about that for a few minutes. Otherwise, we can sign off here. Um, I will say that you can also add documents here. Um, like if you hover over it, it says add context. So that could be a PDF. Like I know some people, and sorry, I know my, my video's in the way there on this, uh, stream, but some people have PDF documents or Word documents that have like a detailed, detailed instructions about what role the AI is supposed to play. and you can upload that kind of content here. You can also upload images and generate images inline inside of Underlord, um, if you so desire. You'd say, take this image and change the background and put it in my video as B-roll, whatever. Um, it can do stuff like that. And yeah, that— I think that's, uh, a wrap for this one. Thanks everyone for joining, and, uh, we'll do this again next month. Appreciate y'all. Bye-bye.