I Roasted My Students' Videos

Are you ruining your videos without even realizing it? There's a decent chance you are, but the good news is it's probably something tiny that can be fixed with just a few clicks. Dozens of Descript creators recently submitted their videos to me to critique, and after reviewing these, I kept seeing the same problems over and over. For example, turning on studio sound too high and destroying the audio quality. So today I'm going to roast seven of these submissions. I'm going to break down what they're doing that could be improved and how to actually make these fixes with just a few simple changes in descript. Let's get to our first submission. The first video I'm going to look at is this one called 3 AI Skills Everyone Needs in 2025 from Aaron McKelke. And Aaron's got a great channel. He talks about AI topics and using AI in education. So let's see what he's got. Are you overwhelmed by shiny AI app syndrome? Seems like there's a new AI app every day or a new model that's getting better before we even worry about what app. So right there I saw a little jump cut we're using. We need to know what skills should I be mastering so that I can teach and help my students learn with AI. I'll help you make it. So not bad. There's another one right there. But one thing that you could incorporate is after that cut, make a scene in descript, right where that cut is, and then zoom in a little bit. Zoom in like 10% on the image and that helps to cover up that jump cut a little bit. You can also, I think you do this a little bit, but you could add crossfades as well. That's another tactic for covering up those jump cuts. Next is a submission from Woman in Midlife from Lena. And she makes videos for women over 50 different wellness topics. And her most recent video is actually doing really well. Congrats on the success. Over three and a half thousand views. And let's check it out.

I did leave the gloss on a little too long. It is a little purple like the old ladies. I never.

So one thing I noticed right there, I don't know how your camera is mounted, maybe it's a laptop webcam, but the camera's shaking a bit, so just be, be careful of that. Possibly get a tripod, set your camera on it if you're able to. But I do see the camera shaking a bit.

Understood. When I was young and I would see in the salon old ladies and their hair looked purple, I Kind of know why now.

Oh, well, I like the hook. Solid hook to get people interested. And one thing I noticed right here on this intro, I like that it's. It's short, but it's a little bit misaligned. You see how there's a little bit of white space right there. And that could be intentional, but I think you were probably trying to line it up in the box. But I like it. I like that it's dynamic. I like that you added the whoosh noise to it.

One year into my ditch. The dye three gourmet blendings. Trying all sorts of products. These are the ones that I love. Today was hair wash. And the last.

Thing I'll say is I don't know if you applied studio sound to it, but it sounds a tiny bit echoey. So I'd recommend apply studio sound. The best option is to deaden the sound in your room if you're able. And. And this is something Lena and I have talked about before in the descript mastery school. But if you apply studio sound, it'll help make it sound a lot better. And I just hear a little bit of reverb in. In the room that you're recording in. Next, I'll be looking at this video from Garden. Yay. From Alice. And let's take a look at what you got.

Hi, Alice here and I'm R. My name's Bonnie Rolf. And Bonnie has graciously agreed to share with us how she's.

So this one has the opposite issue as the last one, which is that you have studio sound on, but it's on too intense. Your. Your voice sounds very muted. It sounds a little bit flat because studio sound does that. It just, it takes a little bit of the range out of the voice. And so I'd recommend just dial it back a little bit. If studio sounds on 100%, go into the studio sound effects settings. Click on this dial and just dial it down. You can type in a number. A lot of people find that 70 works pretty well. But just play it back and see if that helps make the voice sound just a little bit less flat. Next up, we have Bonnie with Bonnie Lee Travels. She's got a great channel about different travel and travel agency related topics. So let's see what you have.

Bonnie, what's up next? The owner suite on.

So right away, these captions, that's fine that you're using them, but they're hard to see. You see how it's just kind of blending in with the skin color of your hands in the background. So I'd recommend add some borders to that caption or add a shadow to it or change the color so that it stands out a little bit more.

The silver wind. Hi everybody. Bonnie Lee here.

And also with these captions, same thing, you could add some borders, add some some texture to em with his shadow. Also, I noticed that they're formatted a little bit oddly. Like there's a big space between this comma and the next word. So a couple quick things you can do to fix that up. If you go into your transcript, there's three things I love to teach people and it's the Z, X and C key. So if you hold Z on your keyboard and click on a word, it toggles uppercase and lowercase like this. If you hold X on your keyboard, it toggles punctuation. So notice when I click, it adds a period. I click again, it becomes a comma. I click again, it becomes a space. And it also, if it becomes a period, it capitalizes the next word. So let me just undo that. And if you hold C and click on a word, it opens up the correct box. And then from here you could change great to good, for example, and then hit correct and it changes it in the transcript. You can also select an entire line and this is what would help with the spacing you have. So if you're going to correct there was a bunch of spaces, you could just simply delete those, hit correct and it'll be fixed on your transcript. Next we have Andre. Andre does Google Ads. He makes videos about Google Ads, so let's see what he has.

Want better return on your performance max or shopping campaign spend? Start with your product feed is the foundation that powers your shopping ads and determines how they appear. In this video, I'll walk you through four different methods of customizing your product data.

Honestly, I don't have much comments on the editing. I really like how you played with the zooms. I like that you had those numbers pop up. Captions are great. All that kind of stuff at the beginning is really helpful in increasing engagement. I always recommend front load, all of your B roll, all of your effects, because that's where you're going to lose people. If you've ever seen engagement graphs, they usually fall steeply off a cliff right at the beginning. So really good job on the editing. The only thing that you could have added also is some music. But what I do want to tell you about is your presentation style because this is something I struggle with as something I've been working on, which is voice Modulation, your voice is just kind of flat, kind of monotone. One thing that really helped, that helped me get better at this is someone gave me the advice to record a video of me saying the same line three ways. So the first time you read it at 80% of your energy level. So read it being very boring, very flat, as boring as you can be, read it a second time at a hundred percent energy. So this is how you would just normally read it, like what feels comfortable and then read it a third time with 120% energy. So go above and beyond what feels comfortable, exaggerate your words, add lots of voice modulation and then play them all back and see what sounds better, what is more interesting. And it's probably not going to be the eighty or a hundred percent. It's probably going to be somewhere between a hundred percent and 120%. And that will be where your speaking voice should be. So that's my advice to anyone who struggles with voice modulation as I do. Just try to bring awareness to how you can add more energy to your videos. This next video is also submitted by a member of the Descript Mastery School and it's an interview with slides. It's about a historical topic. And let's see what she's got. She's just looking for ideas on how to make this a bit more interesting.

Gaza is one of the old.

So right there at the beginning there's five seconds of silence. You saw, I had to, to look to see if it was even playing. There was no speaking, there was no movement at all. So I wouldn't recommend that. I would recommend have her speaking while that, that first slide is showing or have some, some music or something. Something. Because I didn't even realize the video has started. And I realize this is a historical video. This isn't entertainment. People are probably gonna have a little bit longer attention spans than they otherwise might in the rest of YouTube. But you still wanna, as I mentioned in the last one, you wanna front load interesting stuff so that you get people hooked. And what I would recommend with this is take the most interesting 10 to 30 seconds of this interview. Maybe she told a particularly interesting story and put that at the beginning as a hook. So it gets people interested to watch to that point. That's a really powerful tactic that a lot of people use. Okay, let's continue on.

Oldest towns in the world. There's uncertainty about when it was founded, but by the end of the second millennium B.C. it was well established and was dominated in turn by the Babylonian.

And as soon okay, so it would be ideal if you had a video of her of the person you're interviewing. And if you have that, it would be nice to add it maybe to the side. You could have her in a little bubble or switch between the slide and her being interviewed. I think that would help to just mix it up. And then secondly, I hear the studio sound is on and it's a bit too intense. So the same advice I gave to Alice about just turning it down, that would be really helpful in this situation. And our seventh and last one that I'm gonna look at tonight is from Baby Boomers Fit. Another student in the Descript Mastery School named Rick. And he makes health related Fitness related content.

68 years old.

Those health hacks that I've seen several of Rick's videos, and a lot of them start with that same opener, which is him winning a CrossFit competition. Which is awesome. I love that. However, I would not recommend that because the topic of this video, the title of this video is Unlock the Magic of Antioxidants for Health and Aging. So, yes, it establishes your credibility seeing you win a fitness competition, but it's not directly relevant to the topic. People aren't interested in that. So I would recommend skip those intros. Just get right into the meat of the subject. And that's what a lot of my advice boils down to, is just cut the intros, cut the fluff, and just get straight into what you're there to talk about. If you like this format and you want me to do it again and you want me to review one of your videos, comment it down below. And if you want to go deeper on learning Descript and video creation in general, check out the Descript Mastery School linked in the description below.