Introduction to Descript - Full Course for Beginners

This is a drop of three and a half hours of content from the old version of my Descript course. Why am I doing this, you ask? Because today I released a new version that's completely updated for the latest version of descript that came out a week ago. This old version that you're about to watch was at one point a $325 product. And this isn't even everything. This is probably 60% of the full course. Also, it's sort of a Frankenstein in this form. I haven't reviewed it to make sure that everything is in the proper order, and it was recorded over the course of more than a year as things updated in descript. Also, again, it's the old ui, so everything is going to look completely different than what you're seeing in your descript app after June 2024. The new version of the course is completely project based, so students have to pick a project to complete as you go through the lessons and by the end of the course you you'll have learned all the features in descript and completed your first few projects. If you're already a student of the course, a previous version of the course that is you get lifetime access. So please reach out to me and I will give you access to the latest version. With that said, please enjoy this old version of the Descript Mastery course. The first thing we need to do to start using descript is to get Descript. There are two ways to use description. The first is on the web through your browser. The second is the desktop app. You get both options with all descript plans, including the free one. So it's not like you have to pick one and stick to it. You can try both options and see which one you prefer. But let's talk about the browser first. To access the browser version, go to web. Descript.com and I should start by saying I don't recommend the browser version. For most people, you will get better and more stable performance from the desktop app, as well as the fact that the desktop app has more features than the browser. The desktop app is just where descript as a company has focused most of their development efforts. And the desktop app also has the benefit of using your computer's processing to do some of the heavy lifting. Now, the exception to this, the time where I do recommend people use the web version is if you have an old or underpowered computer. In that case, you will likely benefit from using the web version. And if you aren't sure if you don't know how your computer is going to Handle it. Try both. It doesn't hurt. And see which one you get better results with. To download the desktop app, if you haven't already done it, go to descript.com and this is their homepage. You'll have to create an account because descript is very dependent on the Internet to be used. So yes, you will have to create an account and if you haven't already made one, you can start with the free plan for now and upgrade later if you need it. In a later lesson, I will be talking about choosing the right plan for your needs, so don't worry about that just yet. But that is your very first action step of this course is to set up your descript account and download the app to your computer. And so it's handy. I will leave a link to descript's website below and you can get started with setting up your account. One thing you're going to hear me say a lot throughout the course is that descript is non destructive. So what that means is everything is saved. If you delete something, it's still there. If you delete a entire file off of your timeline, it's still in your media bin. So you can always recover things. And we're going to talk more about changing things from the timeline. But for example, you can shorten something on your timeline by putting your mouse on the boundary of a scene and shrinking it. Or if you put it on the other side, shrinking it the other way. And that's getting rid of words. But look how when I pull it back, it restores those words. But that's not what this lesson is about. This lesson is about version history. So version history, if you've ever used something like Google Docs or even Microsoft Word, where it's constantly backing up your project as you're working on it, it's constantly making a copy to the cloud, descript does the same thing. So here's a project that I was working on a few days ago and let's say I found something like this area right here that I accidentally deleted and I want to restore it. What I can do is, is come to the D logo, come to file, and then here on version history and I click on that. And then over here on the right side, you can see these dates and there's one for today. It's March 20th as I record this and I can view it. But actually I'm going to go back a little bit further. I'm going to go to March 18th. So that was two days ago. And I can, when I Clicked on it. I am now inside of that version and. And let me keep going back. I want to see. So it looks like here, if I go all the way back to March 7th, I don't even have video in some parts. And let's say this is what I want to restore to. I made a bunch of mistakes. I want to go back to this version. I can hit this restore button right here. And actually before I do that, I want to point out one more thing. There's this return to latest version. When I click on that, I'm now in my latest version from March 20th again. Okay? But to go to my March 7th version, I simply click restore and it prompts me. This may cause conflicts if other people are currently working, currently editing this project. So if you have other editors, be aware of that. And all other versions can still be accessed through the version history. So you can cancel or you can hit yes, I want these changes restore version. And now I am in the way the exact state of my project from March 7th almost two weeks ago. And it goes all the way back to when this project was made, which was also March 7th. So nothing is ever lost. If you make a catastrophic mistake while you're going through this course, don't panic. Find the version history and restore to a backed up version. Once you've gotten your project all set up how you want it. And of course you can always adjust things in terms of like the sizing of the canvas, the sizing of the thumbnails, whether your properties bar is showing that type of thing, you can always adjust it as you go. And I recommend you do based on the particular project that you're doing. But the very first thing you gotta do is add the RAW files that your project is gonna be made of. And there's three ways you can do it, or at least three ways. There's. There's even more, but the main three would be hitting this plus button, going to files. And I'm talking about adding your own files versus descript's built in stock ones. That'll be next lesson. Or you can hit this button or you can hit this media bin up here. It's a little play button with the box around it. And from there you can browse through your computer. But I'm going to show you the easiest way of all, which is the drag and drop method. So if you find a area on your computer where you have the video that you want to use, and you select that video and drag it and release into your project, then it is now in There and again I dragged it into the transcription section of my project and the first thing that happens is it asked me to transcribe it. By default, Descript will automatically transcribe your project. You can change that. And the reason you might want to change it is because Descript limits you. Especially if you're on the free plan, you can only transcribe one hour per month. If you're on the Creator plan, it's 10 hours, pro plan, 30 hours. So you might want to save your transcription time. But here is where you would select the speakers. It's just me, so it's just one and then the name of that person. So if it's someone who is you've trained the AI speaker for, it'll be down here. You can select their name. If it's someone completely new, you can type their name in there. But this one is me. I'm going to select Ross and it's now labeled. And then the next thing you do is set the language so it defaulted to English, which is what I am speaking. So I'm going to keep that. But you could change the default to your native language or the language that you use most often. And then I'll hit done. And it's a super short file. It's only three seconds long, so it already transcribed it in the back. But depending on the length of the file, it may take longer or shorter. But now that that's done, my video's in there. And you can do that with all of your raw files. If you have multiple videos, if you have images, if you have music, you can all add it using the drag and drop method. But the other way is once again the media bin at the top. And you can see here inside of my media bin, this is the, the video file that I just added. And if I click on it, I can see a preview and I can play day. Version 85 of tells me how long it is. 3 seconds. I can insert it into my script. But what I'm going to show you is the way to add more files. And the other, this other method is through the browse method. So if you go to the add files button here, you click on it. You can find other types of files on your computer and you can add anything here it doesn't have to be video. If it's audio only, you can add audio. If it's, well, you can only add audio on an audio only project. In video projects, you can add pictures, you can add audio. This one's an audio M4A. This one's a PNG image and you just hit open and that puts it into your media Bin. And all this stuff gets backed up to descripts cloud as well. So it's all being saved there. And until I say add to script or add new layer, this is only inside of the Media Bin. It's not in my project yet. So if I want to add this to my project, I'll now click on that file and once again, this one is an image. So there's no play button, there's nothing to listen to, it's just a static image. But I get a chance to preview it and then I can click add new layer to add it into my project. If I show timeline, make this a little bigger, that blue layer right there is my picture. So I could, I could resize it, move it out of the way, that type of thing. But let me add some music. So I'll go to media, I'll go to this meet this music file, click on it and I can preview it. And there's no video component, so it just shows the sound waves and yeah, I can click on it to play it. Lots of incredible things happening in the world. And now notice I have a different option here. I have insert into script and this black arrow with the their white arrow rather. And there's insert into script or add new layer. Script layer, if you remember, is our primary layer, our base layer, the one that gets transcribed. But let's say it, this isn't. But let's say for the sake of example that this is a music file that I want to have as background music. So I don't want it to get transcribed and I don't want it to interrupt my script layer. So what I would do is go to add new layer and there it is. So it's audio is a green layer on the. It shows up as green. Images and videos show up as this bluish color. So that's adding audio. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to add descript's built in stock media. One really cool thing about descript is it includes a lot of stock media with it on all plans. Even on the free plan, you have a limited variety of stock media that you can use. And to get there we go to this, the Media Bin, which is this top button here with the play button on it. You click it and then you go to. There's the files which we just talked about, where you can add files from your computer. These are your own files that you've created or received Somehow. But the ones that are built in are stock media. Are these tabs right here we have videos, gifs, images and audio. So let's talk about each of these in order. So first of all, we got videos and there's two tabs within videos. There's video and backgrounds. You'll have the exact same ones on your view. So you can scroll through these, you can find ones that you like, or you can type something in here. So let's say you're making something about business. You could type office in there. And you have people sitting around a table, people working at desks, different office scenes. So all of the videos in the video stock library are tagged and labeled with things. So you can even type in man, woman, you could type in ethnicities, you can type in types of food, sports, anything you want. And there's probably videos for it. And then same thing with the backgrounds. The difference with the backgrounds are they're more like this, like nature type of scenes. Sometimes they're illustrations like this. And then when you hover your mouse over it, it plays. It does a little demo and then it plays the how long it is in the bottom corner. So this one is a 8 second or so video clip. And then to apply it, all you do is click on it and it adds it. And then if we open up our timeline with this show timeline button, we can see that it's been added as a layer. So the bottom layer is our script layer. And then anything above it is a is a supporting layer. We'll talk more about layers as we go through the course. Okay, back to the media bin. Moving on to gifs. So same thing here. You can search for keywords. They're all tagged with different keywords, so you can find anything you want here. The GIFs of course, are kind of your memes. They're little clips from movies or cartoons or just like funny little things. Usually. You also have giphy stickers, which are more like animations with transparent backgrounds. So you could add this as a layer. So let me add this one. And you can see it's transparent. You can see around him as if he has a green screen. Okay, moving on. And those just play constantly. You don't have to hover your mouse over it to get the demo and you just click on it to add it. Moving on to images. All these images come from unsplash, which is a stock image library. And these are pictures. Pictures. So they're not moving, they're just static as before. You can search for anything you want. And a Wide variety of different photos available to you. There's illustrations which, like they sound, are either illustrations or digital art or something besides just photos. And then you can apply those to your video. Then there is the unsplash library. I'm not exactly sure what differentiates the unsplash from the photos because they all come from unsplash, but that is another place to search. And then lastly, there's a text to image. And this is pretty cool. This is like Dall E or Mid Journey. It uses AI to generate a photo based on a prompt that you give it. So you could say airport and let's see what it comes up with. And it just takes a moment to process. And there we go. Generated some photos from an airport. Not, not great. Probably not dolly quality, but you get the idea. And that'll probably get better over time. And then the last thing we have is audio. You got within here there's music and sound effects. Music are long, usually a minute to five minutes long. And as always with everything else, you could type in something here you could type in a genre like let's type in jazz and we'll get a bunch of different things. If you hit this play button, you can preview the song just like that. And then to apply it, you just click on the name of the track and there we go. It's been added to our project. And note the green layers denote that it's an audio file and it also has the sound waves. Versus blue is everything else. Video, pictures, titles, everything else. So green is audio and it is now in our video. And then if we scroll back up, we got music and then sound effects. And you can add things here. Like let's just type in drop, like box drop, water drop, shoe drop. So same thing. You can preview it with the play button and then add it with a click and there we go. And we'll talk more about layers. But you can reposition these on the timeline and choose where to put that particular layer. That is stock media in a nutshell, how to add it. And we'll talk more about considerations with stock media later. It's time to look at our timeline tools. We have five available to us. These are them just above your timeline on the right hand side, your first one. And this is the one that is default. You have it selected if you haven't changed it. It's called the select tool. It looks like a cursor, looks just like your mouse. And then we have the blade tool, range tool, slip tool and hand tool, which we're going to talk about in the following videos. So our select tool, once again, if you haven't changed it, this is what you have selected. You can get to the select tool with the letter A. And just like name implies, this allows you to select things. I can select my layer in my canvas, I can come down to the timeline, I can select layers there just like this, just like I'm clicking around and selecting things. It also allows us to resize things, resize scenes specifically. So I can click, I can drag to resize. If I drag to the right, it expands it. If I drag to the left, it shrinks it and let me just undo that to return to where it was. I can also, with the select tool, grab a word and shrink a gap or even get rid of a word. Look, if I click this word organize and drag to the left, it gets rid of it. If I drag to the right, it creates a word gap. That, that asterisk there, that tells me that there's no sound. It's just a freeze frame. If I play this, it's just a frozen picture of me. In this instance, I can also select things and move them around. If I want to take this freeze frame, I can move it to the other side of that layer and there it is. So your select tool is the most general. It's useful for selecting things, moving things, resizing things. That's your select tool. Our next timeline tool is right to the right of our select tool and it's the Blade tool. You can find it by clicking it right there or hitting B on your keyboard and you'll switch into blade mode. Now when you do that, you can see my mouse. When I put it down on the timeline, it turns into a red razor blade looking icon. And if I drop it down to the timeline, the layer itself, it turns black. And what happens if I find a place in my timeline and I click it splits the clip into two at the point where I clicked. So now there is a smaller portion of that clip on the right side and a smaller portion on the left side. And I can do that anywhere on any layer. I can split a title scene, I can split a script, I can split audio, it doesn't matter. That just breaks our clip into a smaller piece. And there's a lot of ways that you can work with that. So maybe I, I click it where I want to delete everything after it. I just split that title right there. I can then switch into my select tool with a. I can select the part I want to delete and hit delete on my Keyboard, I can hit B again, back into my blade tool. I could cut here in the script. Now I have this little section back into, select and delete, just like that. Next we have our range tool. It's this little icon right here in the middle. It's the third of our timeline tools or the letter R on your keyboard for the hotkey. And the range tool allows us to select a start point and an endpoint. So, for example, if I click on my timeline, I keep my mouse down, so I'm dragging, clicking and dragging. And I select to a point where I want this range to end. And also notice when I release, the part that I have selected is light gray on my transcript. So I can see the words that I have selected as well as on the timeline. I can see it. And what I can do is I can select this portion. So I could select it, I could move it just like that, without cutting the scene. All I've done is just select that range. I could change the duration of it. Right now it's at 1x, but I could bring that to, let's say 3x. And now it's a sped up portion. It doesn't make much sense to do right there when I'm talking. But where this range tool is extremely useful, where I've used it a lot in the making of this course, is where something's loading. Like let's say I'm adding b roll and descript takes 20 to 30 seconds to download that media file and then add it. I can select that range where it's just. Nothing's happening, it's just loading the piece of media. I can select that range and make it 3x4x5x so that I'm not wasting your time as a viewer of this video. You can also select a range and you can copy it. You could just hit Control C to copy it and then paste it into another composition or another project. When you select a range and then you right click it, you can add a tag for that range. I'm not gonna be able to do it for this portion, but I'll. I'll demonstrate on another portion in a moment. You can replace it with a gap clip. So if I click this, it's gone, my audio's gone, and it's just a black empty space. Let me demonstrate another thing. If I click the range right click, I can realign the words in the range. So sometimes descript gets misaligned the transcript to the words itself. And you can manually realign it by clicking words and range. We'll talk more about that later in the course. Okay, and then the last thing I want to show you with the Range tool is if you select a supporting layer that is not your script layer, you do a range on your supporting layer. You right click, then you'll have an option to include in script. Including in script means it'll become your base layer and it'll get transcribed by description. This is just B roll. There is no, there's nothing to transcribe in this case, but you could just include a small portion of your supporting layer in the script. So I could click include in script. And now it is down here on my timeline. So that is the range tool. Very useful for just selecting and manipulating small portions of a clip. Moving on to our fourth timeline tool, the one to the right of range is Slip. The hotkey for slip is the letter Y on your keyboard. If you press Y, we are now in slip mode and you only see the Slip tool when you hover over a layer that you can apply it to. So if you look at my cursor on my script layer, you can see those arrows pointing to the left and to the right. And the Slip tool allows us to shuffle the, the audio in a file without moving the boundaries of the clip. So right now when I'm hovering my mouse, you can see that in the Black it, there's a 00 on the left side and then there's a 08 on the right side that's telling me that this is an eight second clip. And within that I can move the timing of the audio. So if I'm, I'm clicking and dragging and you can see the words, the transcribed words moving. But that remains an eight second clip. But what's moving is the section of that clip that gets played. So it's now from 06 seconds to 14 seconds. So click and drag. And it is shuffling through that audio clip, moving the transcript, moving the video, moving everything in that clip clip within its place. Our fifth and final timeline tool is this one on the right. It is to the right of the Slip tool. It is called the hand tool. And the hotkey is easy to remember. It's an H just like the first letter of hand. So I go ahead, press H and I am now in the hand tool and the hand tool, you'll see my cursor turns into a hand anywhere on my timeline and what I can do is click. And if I drag to the right, I slide my timeline to the left. So it's like grabbing that part of the timeline and Sliding it to the direction that I click. This is purely a navigational tool. You can't move anything with it. You're just sliding your view on the timeline to the left and right. That is all. It's purely a navigational tool. It's time to go deep on one of descript's most important and most used features, which is transcription. Transcription, of course, means that it takes your video or your audio, it detects the words that are being spoken and it turns it into text on your screen. And then, of course, descript is built around the transcription, so it's. It's really important that we do everything correctly, that we get our speakers labeled and that we know how to make changes to our transcript. So the first thing is, let's take a look at our settings. So if we go into the D logo at the top and we go to Settings and then we go to these settings right here, there's the default transcription language and you can set whatever language you want. I believe There are currently 23 languages on this list. If it's not English, then you can select that. But I speak English, so I'm going to put that there. And then below that there's a thing that says, always ask before transcribing. And this is asking you if you. It'll give you a chance to say, yes, I want to transcribe, or no, I don't want to transcribe. When you import a file, and the reason you might want to do that is if you are on the free plan of descript or for any other reason, you end up using up your transcription hours every month, you might consider turning that off. Rather, you might consider turning it on so that you have the option to turn it off. I have never come close to hitting my 30 hours a month, so I just leave that off. I don't want it to ask me if I want to transcribe it. I just always want to transcribe it. Okay, those are your main settings with Transcription. So let's go ahead and close out of settings and then we're going to import a file. And so if I go into my downloads, I'm just going to find a file and I'm just going to drag and drop it in. And you can see right there, it's a little bit blurred out because of this dialog box just popped up, but it's already starting to transcribe it because again, I turned off that setting that would prompt me if I wanted to do it or not. It's got the name of the file right there, you can set the number of speakers. So if this was an interview where multiple people were on the same track, that is where you can set it. If you're unsure, you could set that as well. But it's just me. So I'm just going to say 1. And notice how it says detecting speakers. So now after it processed, it turned into a button that says identify speakers. If I click on says. The speaker detective has found multiple speakers in this file. But who are they? Listen to each speaker and identify them. And then I'll click get started. I need to introduce you to one other very important concept before we go on. So it's playing a sample of me in this case talking. And it just says clip one of one. But sometimes there might be. If it picked up 10 distinct voices, there would be clip one out of 10. And it gives you a chance to look through each speaker and then label them. So it's me. I'm going to say Ross and I'll click on there and it says that's it. If you need to adjust the speaker labels, simply drag and drop and I'll hit close. And now you see that it says my name. And the importance of that, of having your text labeled with a speaker is if you're going to use AI voices. So we'll talk about that later. But it is important that you label your, your speaker. If it's just you and you don't plan to use AI voices, then you can skip that step. But I recommend it. I briefly touched on this in the previous transcription lesson. But we're going to talk about detecting speakers. We're going to go deeper on detecting and labeling speakers. So let's say I'm going to bring a file into my project release and I'm going to get the transcription pop up. And here we go. In this one, I have a bunch of different voices. There's a bunch of AI voices added. So I, I am going to say I could say more than eight or I could say unsure. I'm going to see what it comes up with. And it's detecting speakers. This is a 2 minute and 40 second file, so let's see how long it takes. Okay. And it says multiple speakers detected in trying all of dsp. Yeah, that's just the file name. Don't worry about that. I'll hit Identify speakers. The speaker detective has found multiple speakers in this file. But who are they? Listen to each speaker and identify them. Get started. Descript has 21 built in AI voices. Okay. And so it's saying it found nine different voices, and this first one is me. So I'm gonna put in my name. And there we go. And now it's. Now it's showing me clip two, everything. It turns out the answer is 42. I'm just gonna say I think that AI speaker's name is Audrey. So I'm gonna say Audrey. Add Audrey a speaker. Why don't robots use pencils? Because they can't draw circuits. And so. So you see, as soon as I label it, it takes me to the next clip, and it. It's detecting these automatically as distinct voices. So I'm just gonna say this one is Evan, whatever I once tried to make. And so you get the idea. I would go through and label all in the. Like, let's pretend these are my guests on a podcast. I would label all nine of them. And then I'm going to close out of there. And. Oh, you know what? Don't close out of there until you've successfully detected all the speakers. So that brings up an important point. If you close out of there before you've detected all the speakers, it won't lock in those changes. So this is a good learning opportunity. If you come back into your media bin and you go to the file that you added, you go to these three dots, and here is the identify speakers. So this can take you back through that sequence that we just had when we added the file originally. So I'll hit identify speakers. This looks familiar. The speaker detective. Get started. Descript has 21. And I'm just going to go ahead and label all these. Okay. So now that I successfully labeled all of them, then I get the speaker labels added, says, that's it. If you need to adjust the speaker labels, simply drag and drop. And I'll hit close. And now look at this. Each speaker is automatically labeled. There's me, there's the next one. And they're the words that they said are cleanly underneath their label. And if I show the timeline, the color of their sound waves corresponds with their name. So Audrey is purple, and her words are purple on the timeline. Now, just a couple weeks ago, just in a recent update, descript added some more stuff that we can do with this. So if I go to one of these names, I can click on it, and I can change who that speaker is, which I can change who that speaker is. I can click these three dots next to it. I can change the label color so I can make myself black if I wanted. I can hit these three dots again. I can say, replace in project with another speaker, I can remove from project, so it doesn't remove the audio or the. The words in the transcript. It just removes the label. Um, so let me add myself again. And there we go. And again, this. Besides organizational stuff, the color coding, all that, the. The speaker labels are important when it comes to using the AI voice, because if I change a word in here and I replace it with an AI voice, my AI voice, it needs to be labeled as me in order for that to work. And we'll talk about that in the AI voices lesson. But just know for now that it is important that you have all of your speaker speakers labeled correctly. Now, the other thing I got added with the recent update in descript is you can click on this to the left of the name and move these around so you can click and I can say I can move the. The speaker label there doesn't make much sense to do because she's talking, starting right there. But that's a quick way to. To move it around. You can also hit that little X to. To get rid of her. And now it looks like this is me talking, but I'm gonna undo that. And then the other thing is the hotkey. So if. If this is Audrey, the first sentence, but then the second sentence is somebody else, I can use the hotkey at the at sign. So it's Shift 2 on a US keyboard. So if I hit Shift 2, I get the prompt to label this speaker, and it's detecting it as Aubrey, because it is. But let's say it was gina, then I can simply change it to gina. That is identifying speakers. One of the primary reasons for upgrading from a free plan to creator or Pro is transcription time. If you're on the free plan, you only get one hour per month of free transcription. If you're on the creator plan, you get 10 hours per month, and if you're on the Pro, you get 30 hours per month. So depending on how much you're going to do, this could be a very important factor for you. Because, of course, as we know by now, descript is completely based off of the transcript. So if you're doing a heavy amount of editing or, you know, I've had clients who are college professors, and they're putting up 50 hours a month. And so transcription time is very important for them. So if that's the case, you can also upgrade. You can bump into the enterprise plan or pay separately. Let me see if it's on here. You can pay just for more time. Yeah, right here. Can I purchase additional Transcription hours. If you're looking for a permanent change your monthly hours, you can increase your transcription limit at $2 per hour here. And then there's a link you can follow if you need a set amount of hours added to a given month for a backlog of work coming through a pipeline. So you can just do a one time boost at a rate of $2.50 per hour. That's important to know is how much are you going to be transcribing and how to bump up your hours if needed. If we go into Descript, though, I'm going to show you how to find how many hours you've used. So you can go into the D logo at the top left, come down to Settings, and then inside of your Settings window there is this tab called Transcription Activity. And if you click on that, it tells you the file name that it transcribed and how many minutes it used. And if I'm not mistaken, it rounds up. So this video that I had that says it's that used three minutes, I believe it was like a two and a half minute video. So it rounds up to the nearest minute. And it says I've used 14 hours and five minutes transcribed since December 23rd. That's a long time ago. It should be for just this current cycle. I'm not sure why that's going back so far. So only an hour transcribed this week. Last month I did 4 hours, 41 minutes. I point this all out. If transcription is an issue for you and you plan to do a lot of it, then you can keep your awareness of how much you've used and how much you have left. One major shortfall of Descript transcription is when it makes errors on uncommon words. So like last names, company names, company jargon, even the word descript itself, as we're going to see, it messes it up in the transcript. So right here I showed you, there's. I just said some random words. I said my last name and it spelled it wrong. I said descript and it came out the script. I said a place that in Mexico called Xochimilco and it totally butchered it. And so what you can do with those uncommon words is you can add it to something called the Transcription Glossary. And the Transcription Glossary is basically training the AI to detect these uncommon words and to have a higher percentage chance of getting it correct in the future. And the way you add something to the transcription glossary is up here on the D logo. You click on it, come down to tools, and then over here to Transcription Glossary. Click on it and it says add uncommon words to this list. To increase the chances that they get transcribed accurately, enter each phrase on a separate line. So I'm going to put in my name spelled correctly, Z, E, I, G E, R. I'm going to put in descript and I'm going to put in Sochi Milko. It's probably still going to butcher that because it's not a normal word, not phonetically it normally spelled, but you get the idea here. You could add your company, your name, any unusual words that descript tends to mess up a lot and then you'll hit done and the next time you transcribe it, hopefully it'll get it correct. In the previous lessons in this module, we learned how to do your transcription and then how to label the speakers. And beyond that, if you want to correct your transcript and make it perfect, like edit all the little typos out, get all the punctuation correct. If you want to do that, you don't have to. But if you plan to make it into a blog or you otherwise distribute your transcript, because you can export it from description into a word file that you could post on your website or whatever you want, or even if you have captions on your video, then it would be important to have an accurate transcription. I say all that because if you don't need an accurate transcription, then you can skip the rest of this video and the entire next module because we're going to talk about how to clean up your transcription. But in this one I'm going to talk to you about how to use AI features to clean up your transcript. And it's gonna be at a high level because there's separate lessons for each of these features that I'm gonna show you. There's an entire module on the AI tools and then the entire module 5 is correcting your transcript. But right here is the actions button and that's all of your AI tools. This is quite literally ChatGPT. So if you've ever used used ChatGPT before, then this is, this is it. You can ask it to remove filler words. So if it finds words like and, and other things like that, it'll find those shorten word gaps, it'll find places where there's no speaking and it'll help you remove those. You can add scenes by active speaker. That's if you have multiple people. Like if it's an interview, um, you can search in the script or there's this just general ask AI1 and there's some built in prompts here, but otherwise it says what would you like AI to do? And you can prompt it in plain English. You could say one useful one is remove retakes. That's the first one there that it'll find areas where you repeated yourself and it'll help you identify those and remove them. You could ask it to fix up all punctuation mistakes. You could ask it to shorten it, to lengthen it. Anything you want you can do there. The other thing is this button right here that just says write. And if you're in write mode, then you can add things like if you see I'm adding words to the script and notice when I add it, it they're blue and it's adding down here, there's no sound associated with it because it's just words at this point. But if I hit done writing because it's labeled, it'll turn that into an AI voice and you can see it's pulsing. And again, there's a separate lesson about that as well, going deeper into that. But this is just at a high level to get you thinking about, do I even need to worry about cleaning up my transcript and then exposing you to some of the things before we go into module five, where we're going to correct our transcript and make it all look really good. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to use correct mode to fix words and entire sentences or even paragraphs. So let me find something that we could change. Okay, let's say right here where it says female voices. I actually said male voices, but the transcript was incorrect. So I can double click on that word and this pops up over it and I can replace it. I could record over it if I wanted. It's disabled because I'm currently recording this video I'm speaking to you on. But that would normally be an option. I could do overdub, which is the AI voice, or I could regenerate it, which we'll talk about these features later. But correct mode is where we can just change it on the transcript without affecting the audio or video. So I'll just change that to male and I could say correct all, and it would find every instance of the word female and change it to male. Or I can just correct this single instance with the correct button. So click on that and look at that. It changed it down. It changed it there and it changed it down here and it did not change the audio or the video. So if I play it the female voices. And so notice on my timeline, if I zoom in a little Bit here, there's a little bit of gray. And that's just saying that there's some unidentified sound there because, because now it's incorrect. I, I made a, a correction to it. That's incorrect. So that sound fee sound is that gray part there. So that's correct mode. And that was a double click on one word. If I want to change an entire sentence, like this next sentence that starts with feel and ends with a round, I just highlight that whole thing and when I release, this pops up again and I just go to correct mode and I can change this whole sentence or I can change parts of the sentence. Like if I want to change the word use to utilize, then I can just hit correct. And once again, there's the change there and there's the change down here. And it might misalign things if, like the word use was lined up with the words where I said that, and by adding a longer word, it might cause the sync of that, the transcript, to be a little bit off. That is how you do corrections in your transcript. In this lesson, you're going to learn three hotkeys. How to quickly punctuate your transcript, how to quickly correct your transcript, and how to quickly capitalize or lowercase words within your transcript. This is one of my very favorite features in descript. When I found out about this, I was kicking myself for how much time I had wasted doing this a slower way and the things you're going to learn about today. The three hotkeys are Z, X and C. Let's start with Z. So if inside of your project, you hold letter Z on your keyboard, Z as in zeta, notice on my cursor, okay, I have to be hovered over a word to see it. You see the, the uppercase a and the lowercase a. And if I find a word like this word going, and I click on it, you can see it's going from capital G to lowercase g. So that can be really useful for names. If it missed a name like this word Audrey, there's lowercase, I'm still holding Z. I click on it and it capitalizes it. The next one is the letter X. So if I hold X on my keyboard now, you see there's a little icon with a period and a comma below it. And this is how we toggle through punctuation. So let's say after this word, voices, I want to put a period there. I click and it adds a period. I click again, it adds a comma, click again, it removes it. And watch what happens when I Add a period. It capitalizes the next word. So it uses proper sentence structure, capitalizing the first word in the sentence. And if I un. Take. If I take away that period there, it's gone. It uncapitalizes the next word. So super handy. The next one is letter C. C as in cat. So if I hold cat now there's a little pencil icon beneath my cursor and if I click on a word it enters correct mode and ignore this little, that, that thing that just popped up, I think that's a foreign language. Let me do that again. Yeah, that's, that's just my computer doing that, that popping up, that little, the C thing there. Um, but this is what you should see is the correct box and I could change feel to. Let's say I meant to say fill and it just heard me wrong and then I can correct it. So that's it again. That was the Z, X and C key. And it, there's a little toggle or a little button down here that says hold Z and click on a word to quickly toggle capitalization. So sometimes there's little hints and tips that Descript gives you so you can pay attention to those. In this lesson you're going to learn two important functions called ignore and delete. So first of all, I always recommend that you use ignore. There's very few situations where you need to delete. However, even if you do delete, descript is a non destructive software meaning nothing is ever truly completely gone. You can always restore it either through the version history, through undoing, or one other method that I'm going to show you in this video. So let's start by talking about ignore again. I always recommend that you use ignore. It's just a better, cleaner way to edit. So when you select a word or a sentence, like I'm going to select this first two sentences here we get our menu. This is pretty familiar at this point. And you can see this strikethrough icon. It's an S with a strike through it. And if I click on it, I have just ignored that sentence. And you can see it turned into a light gray. The text turned light gray. It's got a strikeout through it and it's gone. So but the words are still there on the transcript, but they're completely gone from the video. So the corresponding video and audio with that word, with those words are gone. Um, but I maintain awareness of it when it's stricken out. So let me undo that so I can show you what deleting is. So let Me. Let me select highlight and select the exact same sentence and I'm going to hit this little dropdown arrow. And now we can see ignore media or there's one below it called delete media. And if I delete it now, it's gone from my transcript and it's gone from my video. So the difference is I can't maintain awareness of it. I can't maintain awareness of what I got rid of. Like I can with ignore. So that's why I always recommend ignoring. And when you ignore, those words won't show up in the transcript. If you export your transcript, it won't show up. So you don't have to worry about that. It won't show up in your captions. Because remember, captions are reading your transcript. It's displaying your transcript in sync with the words timed with your transcript. So it won't show up there either. And let me go ahead and undo that. So for all those reasons, that's why I Recommend Just ignore vs delete. Now, the other things you can do if you click that dropdown again is you can do replace with gap. So I'll do that. And now it got rid of those words, but it added a black frame. So there's. There's no video there and there's no sound. It's just a gap. So that could be useful if you have a very specific section you want to replace and you want to put B roll or something else over it. But I don't use that one often. But let me just select this once more. I'll hit the dropdown. And the last one is Remove from transcript. And this is a brand new one. Descript just added this, but watch what happens when I click it. Oh, and it's only. You can only do that for a max of 100 characters. So let me do it with a smaller sentence and I'm going to come back here. Remove from transcript. And notice it didn't affect my video. So it didn't remove anything from the video, but it turned my words into these little icons here, which normally indicate that there's no audio in that section or at least no detected words. So that's how you can remove things from your transcript. And this would also remove it. If you're exporting your transcript, it would not show up on that word document. And the next way to delete something is, let's say right here where it says, here's Audrey. I don't want her to introduce herself. I just want her to go straight into what she's talking About I can click on this word I've and I can simply click it and drag it to the left. And that has the same effect as deleting it. So it's gone from my transcript and is gone from the video. And if I want to undo it, well, I can hit command Z. I can go to file, edit, undo or remember. Descript is non destructive. You can put your mouse right on the boundary of the clip, click and drag and it restores those words. And I can also delete it that way as well. I can do the opposite. I can cover it up and it's gone. But I find it really handy to use the words here to close gaps or to get rid of words. So for example, there's this gap right here before the word but. I can click on the word but and drag it to close that gap. And you can see that number that says 0.35 seconds. That's telling me how long the gap is between the previous word and the one I have selected. So those are several different ways to use delete and ignore. And remember, I always recommend ignoring. It's just a cleaner workflow. It allows you to maintain more awareness of your edits. The next thing we're going to talk about is creating compositions. So we have our project. This is what you set up for from your workspace view. And every project has at least one composition. This is a composition inside of a project. I can make multiple compositions by clicking here. This is the name of the project. And I can say enable multiple compositions. And then it adds that slash and now there's a dropdown. So there is the composition that we're in. I can create a new composition. And this is like a sub portion of my project, my bigger project. So we could do, we could take the highlights that we had, we could copy that into our new composition. This composition could be a clip of our bigger one, or it could just be a related topic. All of the modules for this course are projects and each lesson is is a composition. So that's another use of how you can think about the two. And you can even create folders within your project. So if you have tons of compositions, you could keep them organized in that way. My personal recommendation from experience is don't put too many compositions in a single project. I've had 20 compositions in a project before. And if one of the files gets messed up, if something gets corrupted, it can affect the whole project. So I find that if you keep it small, like five videos or less per project, that you're going to have a more stable result, let's return to our first composition, and we're going to tie everything together, all of the different the scenes, the markers, the highlights, and the compositions together with a way to sort through them, which is to go to the Actions button and go to this that says Jump to. So if I click on it, you can jump to marker. And if I click that, it asks me which marker I want to jump to. Do I want to jump to the chapter 1, the section 1, or the marker 3? If I click, jumps me down to the marker called marker 3. Back to the AI actions. If I click it, I can go to Jump to. I can do Jump to time. And this makes more sense for longer videos because you can't really get granular with seconds. So you can't type in, like, colon 43 and go to 43 seconds. You can only search for minutes. So if I typed in a three there, it would say, Seek 23 minutes. And then I could click it and it would take me there. But this project's not long enough to even show that. Okay, back to AI actions, jump two. And then the last one is the jump to Composition. If I click that, we just learned about compositions. I made a new one called Untitled, and I can click it. And now I'm in my Untitled composition again. Some of these things don't make sense unless you had a ton of compositions and they were hard to find them all, or a ton of markers. But this at least gives you the idea, and if you had a really long project, you would know how to organize it. The next key skill in organizing our project is highlighting highlights allow us to visually make things stand out. Like right here on my screen, I have this highlighted in orange there. So you could highlight different speakers, you could highlight key parts. You can also have this effect when you export the transcript. If you export it to a word document, you can have your highlights show up there so that things stand out more. Or the really cool thing about highlights is you can copy them into other compositions. But for now, I'm going to just show you how to make a highlight. You can just click on a word or a line of words, a paragraph, as many words as you want. You can select it. And then this menu pops up. And then there is this right here. This is your highlight tool. You can hit this dropdown and you can choose one of these colors. Sand, rose, salmon, mint, et cetera. Let's do mint. And it looks like that. What we can do with that is go into our actions AI actions at the top left and then it says what would you like to do right in copy highlights right there, that first one that pops up if you click it. I have a sand highlight, I have a salmon highlight, and I have a mint highlight. And there's also an all highlights. So if I do all highlights, all three of my highlights will be in my clipboard. Or I can get more granular and just do the particular colors that I copied. I'll just copy all three highlights. And then what I could do is I could go into another project like so opening in just a blank new one. I can click into the transcript and I can paste and there it is, there are my three highlights. And then I could make a social media clip out of it. Or maybe I just, maybe this is my final thing. I just cut all the fluff out and these are the most important parts of my video. That is one more tool in your organization toolkit. In this module, we're going to talk about organizing our project. So if you have a really long flow file, like let's say you have a 45 minute podcast, you don't want to just have that as all one continuous piece with no markings in it where you can quickly scroll to them. So we're going to talk about ways that you can break it up into more manageable pieces and quickly get through it. Starting with creating scenes. Scenes are the smaller unit of our project. So right now, this project, it's a one minute video, is all in one scene. And I can tell that because right here on the left side, this is our scene thumbnail and there's only one scene thumbnail. If I had multiple, they would be stacked below it be scene one, scene two, scene three, etc. You can have unlimited scenes. And the longer your video, the more complicated your edits, the more scenes you're going to have. Okay, so scenes, there's smaller units of your project and whatever you do to a scene is going to apply to that entire scene. So if I add a title, for example, like that, you can see that blue layer there. If I zoom out, I hold command and I'm using my scroll wheel, I'm zooming out, that is showing me the entire layer and it's applied it to the entire scene because it's all one scene. So I'm going to go ahead and delete that by clicking on it and pressing delete and it's gone. Now I'm going to add a scene and we can add a scene by. There's two ways you can in your timeline you can move your playhead to where you want to add a scene. So right after where I say, I'm going to talk for a minute, I'm going to put my playhead there and I'm going to press slash on my keyboard. And it put it in my transcript. And there's now it says scene two on the timeline that's telling me that is the start of scene two. Everything in the gray is scene two, as well as the thumbnail, the scene thumbnail. We have 1 and 2. And I can click to navigate between the two, or I can click on the thumbnails to navigate between the two. And now what happens is anything I apply to scene one is only going to apply to scene one. So I applied a title. It starts right at the beginning of the scene, and it ends at the end of that scene. Now, I can still make it longer. I can drag it into the next scene, or I can make it shorter so that it doesn't fill the entire thing. But it's going to default by filling up the scene where I applied it. Now, one thing to be careful of is if I do extend this, notice how there's a darker blue and a lighter blue on the part where it's in scene two. What that's telling me is that any changes that I make in scene one, you see how it's split, right there, are not going to apply to scene two. So if I, let's say I drop my title down there to my chest and then I go into scene two, my title is now back up there because it only applied to the section that was highlighted. If I wanted to apply to the whole thing, I can select it. I can go to the three dots in the top, right? And I can say, apply properties, the properties of this title to all scenes. Click it. And now if I look at scene two, it's been applied to that scene. Okay, So I showed you hitting slash on the keyboard. And the other way is you can hit slash in the timeline. I'll click it. And now it added a little bit before on that next line. And just for organization purposes, this is personal preference. I always put a space or a return so that my scenes are always the start of a new paragraph. Like so it just keeps it a little cleaner, a little easier to keep track of where my scenes are. Okay. And then the other way to add a scene is when you have your cursor there, you see that there's a little slash right there on the keyboard. You can click it. Or yet one other way is to right click insert and then scene. So all of those are ways to add scenes. And you see, I now have five of them. Scene 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Now we're going to talk about how to change the scenes that you just made. So the first way is you can reorder them. So if we look at our thumbnails on the left side, I have my five scenes that I just made in the last video. I can click on one like this is scene one, and I can drag it like so. And now the order has changed. So I can reposition these like that. I can also change the length of each scene so I can put my mouse on the boundary, the leading edge of a scene. I can click, and if I drag left, it'll extend it, and you can see it's going into words that had been previously edited out. So it's extending is bringing those words back. And I can do the opposite. I can drag to the right and it'll get rid of words. So one. One important thing with Descript is where you put your mouse is very important. So if I put it down there, that happens what you just saw. If I put it here on the words, I can tighten up word gaps or I can create a word gap. But the other place where you can put your mouse is here. Where? Right next to where it says scene two, there's this, the boundary between the two. If I put my mouse there, I get those double arrows. And if I click, I can change where that scene boundary is without changing any of the layers under it. It does create a split where that scene boundary is, but everything else remains the same as far as the layers are concerned. So I can drag it and change where that scene starts and the one before it ends. Now, I can also get rid of scenes. So if I find the slash on my transcript where a scene occurs, I can simply delete and that scene is gone. I'm down to four scenes now. I can also. I showed you repositioning them from the thumbnails. I can also click on the scene in the timeline and I can drag it. And you see that purple line that's telling me that that's going to get put right there. And it deleted the scene and combined it with scene two. We understand scenes and we understand highlights. The other thing we can do to organize our project is markers. Markers are mostly internal. They won't affect your transcript. They won't show up in your captions. But the way that you add a marker is with the pound button. So if you hold Shift and three on your keyboard, that is the pound, the hashtag. And when I clicked it, you can see that it added the marker thing. And it's just highlighted so that we can type something in there. So I'm going to say let's call this chapter two, whatever you want to call it. You can split your project into distinct parts. If, like, this is the part where we're talking about topic one, and then this is the part we're talking about, topic two. That is how you do that. So let me add one more, and I'll just add it here in the middle of a paragraph again, hashtag section2, like that. And then this is a new thing that Descript just recently added. But we can. Right here, with these little dots to the left of that marker, we can click it and reposition it so I can drop it, I can move it like that. And now it's changed where my marker is. So the other place you can see your markers is right here, section two, chapter two. And when I click it, it scrolls to that. That point. So you can see if you had a really long video, how this would be useful to break it up and be able to find things quickly. Let me add one more marker just to drive this point home and add it hashtag marker3. Okay, so there it is. I can click it and it takes me there. The other way I can get there is right here in the top. Right. This button only appears when you've added markers, so we haven't seen it until now. But if I click it, there are my markers. If I hit the top one, that's just the name of my project that takes me to the very top, so that acts as a marker. And then chapter two, section two, marker three, like so. And as I mentioned, this doesn't affect your captions like this. These words are not going to appear in your captions, but they will appear if you publish this to YouTube. These will become your chapters, your timestamped chapters on the video. Description. In this lesson, you're gonna learn how to add titles, text and captions to your video. Now, text and titles. The differentiation is that text and or titles, I'll use those words interchangeably. Do not move. Once you set them, they're static. So you. You type in a word and it stays the same on the screen captions. Read your transcript so they are synced in time with your video and with your transcript, and they're moving based on the transcript and to add them both, it's the same method. So you'll select the scene where you want to add it. You'll come up to this key in the top middle of your window. Click on that and you can see we have title, subtitle, and text. These three are the same. Those are all titles. They're static, they don't move. Captions are the ones that read your transcript. So let's start with just adding this title. And there it is. You can see it by default, filled my entire scene from the start to the end. So be aware of that. If you want to fill your whole project, you'll need to click on the layer and expand it to fill the whole thing. Or maybe you only want it to be a few seconds, you'll need to shrink it down and then move it to the part where you want that specific title. You can add fades. You can, you know, have fade in or out or do whatever effects, other effects you want. But once you click on the title, then you can change the properties of that title, which is the topic of our next lesson. And then I'm going to go over into my second scene and I'm going to come back to my T logo and I'm going to go to captions and I'm going to add captions. And there on the bottom of my video are the captions. And you can see here on my transcript it says feel free to utilize the chapter markers to skip ahead. And that's the same words that are right there. And you can see my cursor is on the word utilize and utilize on my captions is red. That's because I have it set. A certain effect is set on that, which we'll talk about in the later lessons. But here's how the captions look when I hit play the chapter marker to skip around. I've been calculating. So as you can see, it's just displaying in time what's on my transcript. So that is how to add titles and captions. In the next lessons, we're going to talk about how to customize these and, and get deeper in how to utilize them. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to take the title and the caption that you just added to your project and change how it looks. Changing the font, changing the size, changing the color. So the first thing is select the title that you added. When you have it selected, you can move it. So if you don't like where it is on your screen, it defaults to the middle of your screen. But let's say we want to move it up here to the right so you can do that. You can drag it around your screen just like a PowerPoint. The next thing is over here in the Properties bar, there's a text section. And this probably looks familiar again from something like PowerPoint, where you can simply change the font. You can change the weight of it from light all the way up to black, black being the heaviest. You can change the size of it. So that's the font size. It defaults. The first title one, the one that we added, defaults to size 200. But you could make it 100, you could make it 300, anything you want. And then you can resize this box by clicking on the border and dragging it to make it bigger. If you do these dots, you can do both the height and width at the same time. And notice that doesn't change the font size. The only thing that changes the font size is this number. And you can click in there and type a number, or you can click and drag to the left to make it smaller, drag to the right to make it bigger, like so. And you can change whether it is center aligned, which I currently have. You can make it left aligned, right aligned, top aligned, center aligned, or bottom aligned. So I'm going to do left, left align, and centered, like so. And then I'm going to just make my box a little smaller like that, so it sits in the top. And then notice how the T in title is capitalized. I can make that entire word capitalized, like everything capitalized by doing uppercase. And notice it made it too big, so it. It resized it. I just need to make my box a little bit wider so it fits the whole word in there. And let me just. I'm going to click in there. Oops, I accidentally repositioned it. There we go. So double click in there to change the wording. So I'm going to make this say title and captions, and then I'm gonna double click in there again to highlight all the words. And it's size 273, but I'm gonna make this, like, size 175. Nope, I want it all in one line. 160. 150. 130. Okay, 130 allows me to fit the whole thing in there. Now that I got that set, the other thing I can do is change the color. And this thing that says fill, there's a little white dot right there. If you click on it, it opens up a color swatch. And you can use this eyedropper to match something. Like if I match my background, you can barely see it. But maybe you have a brand color. You could type in the hex code or the RGB code. These probably look familiar, the red, green and blue numbers or the hex code once again. But I'm just gonna select one of these presets. I'm gonna do this light blue color. There we go. And you can change this. The second bar here is the transparency. So you can make it so it's slightly transparent or 100% opaque. And as before, you can click in there, you can slide to drag it, or you can click and and type in a number. Like, I could make it 80% opaque. Whatever you want. So that probably all looks familiar from other other tools. And if you hit the negative button, it gets rid of the whole thing altogether, makes it completely transparent. But I'm going to undo that and bring it back below that is border. So if I click plus, it added a black border around my words and it's a border of size 10, 10 pixels. I could type in a 5 there and make it a little bit thinner. And then I could also change the color so it defaults to a black border. But I could make it gray with a little bit slightly opaque, 45% on the opacity and a dark gray. So that's border. And. And to get rid of it, you can just hit that minus sign. You can add a background, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a background being behind the text. And once again, it defaults to black. And once again, you can click on it and change the color to anything you want. Let's do dark green. It's a little bit hard to read. Let's do yellow. That's got a good pop to it. So I'll do that. That is it for the colors and sizes. The styles and the effects of our captions is the topic for our next lesson. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to apply styles and effects to your captions. The first thing we need to do is select our captions layer. So here's my captions. And again, captions are dynamic. They're reading my script, my transcript. And when it's selected, you see here, there is a style heading and an effects heading. The effects. If you click on the plus button, you can see we have a couple choices. There's a shadow chroma key, color adjustments, all this stuff is a little more advanced. Chroma key is for getting rid of a green screen if you have a physical green screen behind you. Color adjustments is to basically apply filters so things like exposure you can make it darker, brighter, stuff like that. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of that, though. These aren't. These are more advanced. So if you want to dig into those, like, you can add a blur. You can. And then I'm just going to toggle that off. You can add film grain, pixelate, zoom, blur, which is. Look at what that did. That makes it totally crazy. Um, so I don't recommend those. Those are more for image layers. But the one that I do recommend in a lot of cases is shadow. Watch what happens when I toggle shadow on and off. It's not super dramatic, so let me make this a little bit more extreme. You can set the color of the shadow. You can set the amount of the blur on a shadow. You can set the position of the shadow. So if you want it to be offset, if you want it directly behind your words, then that would be zero, zero. But if you want it to be a little bit of a drop. So, like, I want it to be X, but I want it to be lowered on the Y axis, then I'll put in a number on the Y axis and I'll close that and let me make this bigger so it's a little easier to see. Okay. And then I'm gonna click on it again and find my shadow. And then if you see when I toggle it on or off, that shadow is getting added and it helps it to pop a lot. So this is why I like to use the shadow, because in this scene, it. It's kind of harder to see the shadow. Let me drag it around the screen, make it look bigger. Okay. And now watch what happens when I toggle it on and off. You see how it helps it pop. And I could also change the color of that. Like, since I have a pretty dark background, if I make it a white shadow, you see how that helps it really stand out. And it's a subtle thing where the viewer might not realize there's a shadow applied, but it really makes a difference in readability of the effects. I recommend adding a shadow. The other ones you can play around with and see if it helps. Now the other part with captions. Our other option is style. And as you can see, I have it where the active word, the word that is currently being spoken and shown on the transcript, is the word skip. That is called the active word. And right now the active word is red. The future words, the words that have not been said yet is this black color, black and hollow. There's no color inside of it. And then the already said words are white markers. 2. Skip is my active word and around is my future word. Okay. And so those are called style. The style is the effects that we have on our captions. So those are currently the custom one. I'm going to hit this text style settings icon and I can go to clean. So these are default classic. Karaoke and clean are your defaults. And it shows you a little preview here. Under. In this. In this gray window. The fill is white. The border is size 5 with a black border. The background, there's nothing active word. The fill is white and the background is a transparent or slightly opaque. Completely opaque. So transparent. The future word is transparent as well. So here's what clean looks like. I'm going to close my style box and hit play. Skip around. I've been calculating the meaning of life, the universe, the and so it's a little hard to see. But the future word has the black border with no fill and it's white. I could of course change the color. That's for the fill word of the already said words. The active word is white and the future word is black. With clean and you can get rid of the fill color. So it's just a holo. It's got the black and the active word is white. Chapter markers to skip around. So that's clean. The other one is classic. Classic looks like this sound I've been calculating after markers to skip around. Classic is just static with no change to the future word, no change to the password or anything like that. It's just more of a boring look. And then karaoke is where the active word has a background color. In this case, it's like that light blue. And the fill word is white inside of there. Let's change it to black just to show you a little bit how this works. And the previous words are. It shows as red. Let's see how this actually looks. And I've been calculated. It looks like it's doing a white or a hollow. Let me do a fill. Okay. There's the fill. So it's showing red. Even if I don't have the fill active, it's showing the color that it would be. So let's make it red and let's bump the border size up 10. And future word is let's make it white. See how this looks. Seeing the meaning of life, the universe. And that border is too strong. I usually do like a somewhere between three and five. So it's just. It's more subtle and notice that. So I started with the karaoke Default. But once I started making changes, it changes it to custom, which not really important. Those are just more starting points anyways. But you get the idea. You can customize that however you want. The background is. Let's make this blue. There's a background. I think that's the last thing I haven't shown you. So background over the whole thing versus background over just the active word, which was right there. Background for the active word and then background for the whole thing. That one, I'll just toggle it off. That's. That's how you add effects and styles to your captions. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to add custom fonts to the existing descript library of fonts. So descript comes with a few, not many fonts. If you go into your text and then you click on the font, it always defaults to Roboto. But you can see the other ones that are here. They're pretty standard ones. Arial. Some of these I've added myself already, like Cabin. Um, but that's how you can change your font. But if you want to add your own fonts or fonts from Google Library, you want this button right here. It's the cloud with the little up arrow. Click on that and you can click into this search bar to search through Google's fonts. So my favorite font is Montserrat. You can type that in. And they have Montserrat alternatives. Montserrat, Subrayada and Montserrat. If you click out of there, you can see this link that says, browse Google Fonts. And when you click on that, it automatically opens up a new browser window, which I'm going to bring onto my screen here. And you can see it's got a really clean layout where you can. You can see a demonstration of that particular font. And so there's a whole bunch Google. Google Fonts has a giant selection, including other languages. So you got Alexandria, you have. That looks like Thai or Cambodian. So all sorts of different options here. And it gives you this nice preview. And then if you click on one, you can see it in different sizes in different styles, from light, which is a weight of 300, all the way up to bold, which is a weight of 700. And then you can even change the text that it displays. So you could say test font, and then it shows you that exact phrase in those fonts. So that's a way that you could test out if you have a logo that you want to try a certain font on. You could do that here. Okay, so that's that's the Google Font library and how to sample it the other way. And the Google Font library, I believe, I believe all users can do this. Even if you're on a free plan, if you're on the creator or pro plan, then you have even more options available to you. You can go into Google and you could type in a really popular one is the bold font. You'll see those on a lot of TikToks and YouTube shorts and it's just called the Bold Font. Dafont.com is a popular one and you can download just any font as a TTF file and then you can put that onto your computer, upload it into descript using the choose a file, browse to your computer, find that file, upload it, and then it'll be in your drive. And the fonts on that note are at a drive level. So if you have editors or people that you're sharing your drive with, then they will also be able to access those fonts. And then once you've gotten it added. So in the case of the bold font, I can just click on it and it'll take a moment. It has to download on every single project. So it'll say downloading font, the bold font and then it's been downloaded successfully to project and there it is. And from there you can make any of your normal customizations. You can change the size, you can change the alignment and so on. And the last thing I want to show you with captions and titles is using templates. And there's an entire templates masterclass portion of this course. So if you go back to the course homepage, you can find the templates masterclass and learn all about how to make them and apply them. But just real quick, I'll show you the easiest way and I'm going to first delete this caption layer, the one that we've been creating in the last couple episodes. And I'm going to come up to this box right here, the four squares icon. And these are all different captions that I've made. There's also, if you come over here to the gallery, there's this. These are pre built ones by descript and you could come into the title one and you could say for example, this one right here and that's descript's pre built title. So this is something that you could put for example at the beginning of the of your video to introduce it. And then basically what you would do is you would just change each of these individual portions to make it relevant to your video, but I'm going to undo that and I'm going to come back to templates. I'm going to go back. I'm going to go to my drive and then this one right here that says subtitles and captions. You can actually download this for free on my templates page of descriptmastery.com I'll leave a link in the resources of this video. Um, and this is the idea with this is I made it to look just like the Netflix captions, so you can click on it. It didn't apply it for some reason. Let me try that again. Okay. I'm not sure why that's not working. Let me go back to this other part of the video. There we go. Now, it added it and for some reason it wasn't adding it to the long part, but that's okay. What I can do is just extend the layer so it fills the whole thing. Um, but now you can see it just applied it and it's loading the font. So it's not completely done yet. But if you had a brand font, you have a size that you like, color all that stuff, you can make a template out of it and set it once and forget it. So super easy. Check out the Templates Masterclass for more on how to set up your template. In this lesson, you're gonna learn how to add static shapes to to your project. So the way we do it is we find the shape icon at the top. It's a little square with a circle on top. When you hover over it, it has a dropdown that says shape. You click on that and we have six different options here. Rectangle, ellipse, line, and arrow are our static shapes. The other two are dynamic, meaning they move with your audio. So the waveform is like your sound waves. And then the progress bar tracks along with the progress of your video. You've probably seen that where it moves slowly a bottom along the bottom, like, you know, like the YouTube bar. And those are for our next lessons. But in this one, we're going to talk about the static shapes. So let's start with the rectangle. And when I click on it, it automatically adds it and it's square. All the sides are the same shape, but you can drag this any of the corners to make it longer. You can drag or rather the sides. If you drag the corners, it keeps it. You can change both dimensions at once, and it's when it's selected. You can change the color with the fill right here with that white dot, you could make this red. Let's. Let's go ahead and lock that change in. Yeah, that's fine. You can add a border. So in this is number. It's a number one. And that's the thickness of the border in pixels. So let me make it like a 10. And then it's black, so it's blending in with the background. But let me make it like a white border. And now we can see how that looks. And I'm gonna change the color again to make it just a little bit brighter. Okay. Um, and then when you select it again, you can add shadows to it, just like we saw with text, with the text layers. And if I look on my timeline, you can see that it's just a blue layer like anything else. And I haven't changed the length of it. So by default, when you add it, it is five seconds long. So. And it'll. Yeah, it's five seconds long. And you can grab the edges and you can make it longer by dragging to the right. You can drag it to the left to make it shorter. You can do whatever you want. You're probably getting by now the feel of how layers work and that they all have similar properties. So you can. You could add an animation to this where it gets bigger or smaller. Check the animation lessons for that type of thing. So that is the rectangle. It's got four sides, it's got four corners, and it's fairly straightforward. You can also. I guess the last thing is you can change the opacity as well. So you can make it so it's like partially invisible. And I'm just gonna make this smaller and get out of the way. Let's push it off to the corner and then let's go back to the shapes. Now let's do the ellipse. Now the ellipse also has four corners and four sides. So you can shrink it and it gets flatter, turns into more of an oval shape. You can shrink the other side to make it more circular again, shrink the corners to shrink both at once. And as before, all the same properties. Opacity, fill, border, color and shadow, as well as the ability to animate it. And then back to shapes the line. Now the line is where things get different. We have just two white dots. This time there's a start point and an end point. Lines are obviously very different. And so, yeah, you can change. That's. That's it as far as moving it around is the start point and the end point. You can also grab it in the middle and move the whole thing together without changing the size of it. And then as before, we have thickness. And in this case, the thickness is just the thickness of the line. So let me bump this up to like 25. And now it's a super thick line. And of course, we can change the color. Let's make it like a pink or red or whatever. It doesn't matter. But the important thing is it's just two dots. And again, all the same properties that we had before. You can animate it, you can add a shadow to it, you can do anything you want. I'm going to change the background here to. Let's make it like a different color so you can see this. Okay, now back to the shapes. And our last one is the arrow. And the arrow is more like the line where there's just two dots. There's a start point and an end point. But the difference is it has an arrow head on it. So as you can see, it's got that little tip, like the tip of an arrow. And let me make this extra big so you can see it. So there we go. We got the arrow pointing. And obviously you could see how this would be useful for annotating something if. If you're pointing something out, drawing attention to something in your video, then you could add this arrow. So that's it for the static shapes. Next, we're gonna talk about the dynamic shapes. In this lesson, you're gonna learn how to add a progress bar to your project. As before, we go back to our shapes icon in the top. And actually, before I do that, I need to make this audio because it's a AI voice. Okay, so shapes. And then you go to the one that says progress bar, click on it, and it automatically adds it to fill the entire scene. So this whole project is. Oh, I have it in two scenes, actually. So you can see that that dark blue, that is my progress bar layer. And it's gone from the very start of my project to the end of the first scene, the scene that I put it in. And I can, as with all layers, I can click on the boundary. I can make it longer if I want this to span the entire video. And now when I play it, let's see what happens. Welcome to our journey through the fascinating world of shapes, where simplicity meets complexity in the most intriguing ways. And if I fast forward a bit, you can see the. The progress bar moves with the progress of the video. This is a layer. So as always, we can move this. We can do anything we want with it. We can move it Up. We can move it to the top of our page, we can move it to the bottom of our page. Um, really cool is we can change it from a bar. So right here on the Properties bar, where it says bar, you can change this to a ring and let me move these other shapes out of the way now just delete them even. And so, so then you can resize it. You could make stays proportional. So even if you grab one of the sides, it makes the whole thing bigger or smaller. But it's a normal layer just like everything else. You can move it around, you can resize it. And then right here, the white, you can change the fill color. So let's make it black. There we go. And you can change what percentage? So by default it goes from zero percent to a hundred percent. A hundred percent in this case being a closed ring. But you could make it where it only goes to 80% or 90% or any other partial fraction of that ring that you want. And then right here, you can get even more granular with the start and end point. So like I said, by default it starts at zero percent and it ends at a hundred percent. And then the thickness, so you can change the thickness of that ring. Let's bump this up to 60. And now it's a lot thicker. And then the black was the fill of the part of the. The ring that's already been completed. But we can change the background. So let's make that part white and let's make it a little bit more opaque and change the transparency there. I guess it turned to gray. There we go. And let's stick with that. And then you can add a shadow. You can animate it so it could pop into your screen through an animation. So all sorts of options you can do here. And then the other one is the pie. So similar to the ring, but filled in. But let's go back to the bar. Put this at the bottom. I'll resize it and then let's play it. It's perfect. Symmetry speaks to the balance and harmony found in nature. Okay, so you get the idea. The progress bar. These are especially great for shorts like TikTok YouTube shorts, et cetera. They're very popular to let people know. It gives you. It gives you an idea of how long the video is. So, you know, like, oh, okay, I'm halfway through already. One more visual clue for the viewer. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to apply waveforms and audiograms. As before, we go up to our shapes icon, click on it, and Here is the one called waveform. Click on that. Notice the layer in our timeline, the blue one right here, that is our waveform. And as always, it defaults to fill the entire scene that you place it in from the very beginning to the very end of that scene. And as before, we can make it longer to fill our whole video or we can make it shorter, whatever we want. Now, by default, our waveform is lines. And for this to work, I should mention, you have to have audio. So you can't just apply this where there's no audio or there will be no waves. But these waves are mimicking the waves, the sound waves in the timeline. These, these sound waves generated by your voice or by the music or whatever it is that's in your project. And so if I hit play journey through the fascinating world of shapes, where simplicity meets complexity. And that's how it looks. And so some people, if they have an audio only podcast, they'll make something using waveforms to make it a little bit more interesting to then post on YouTube to make a video out of an audio only type of project. We can click on our waveform, we can make it bigger, we can make it bigger to fill our entire canvas. You can make it taller. Those will make the waveforms taller in the most intriguing ways. And we can. With that property still selected, you can change this from line. Those are. That one right there is called lines. You can make it a circle. Let's dive into the wonders of circles, lines and rectangles. You can make it a ring. Angles and uncover what makes you can make it a wave. Let me start over so I can. Welcome to our journey through the fascinating world of shapes. So a lot of options and of course, as always, you can change the color. So if you click on this little ring right here, it's. It defaults to white, but you could make it red or black or I'm gonna do green. Yeah, let's do that. And then let's click on the wave again, the style. And you can change the fill color. So we can make it like do like a bright red. Yeah, that's fine. And then you can change how thick the line is. Look at that. You can change the fidelity. So higher fidelity is. Well, you can see what it's doing. So low fidelity is like very low. Where simplicity meets complexity. Almost no movement at all. And then high fidelity is like really close together. Most intriguing ways let magnitude is how big those waves are. You can make them bounce off the screen practically. Let's do that. Let's dive into the wonders of circles, lines and rectangles. Pretty funky looking waves there. Mirror would just flip it or it could uncover what makes symmetrical. So in this case it's horizontally flipping it, mirroring it around the horizontal axis. You can also turn these so I can make it vertical like this. Each of them uniquely captivating. And then let's go back to trying some of the other circle. Welcome to our journey through the fascinating world of shapes, where simplicity meets complexity. So a lot you can do with that. Um, you get the idea, play around with it until you get one that looks how you want. Now the other way to add those is by applying a template. If we go to our templates, first of all, you can create a template out of the waveform that you make. And you can check out the templates masterclass portion of this course on how to create templates. But Descript also has some built in ones. So if I come over to the gallery and I come down to audiograms right here, then you can choose these different ones. And some of these are different aspect ratios. So this one's portrait, so it's that, that vertical mode, the tall and skinny. This one is a square, so it's a even length and height. But this is the one I want, the landscape one. And if I click on says applying template and there it is. And so it's got captions built into it and then it's got the audio waveform. It's more than just a round figure, it symbolizes unity. And so you could build your own template like that. And you can also change this text, you could change this even after you've applied this template, but that is it. That is how you apply waveforms and audiograms. In this lesson, you're going to learn more about the eyedropper tool with most properties in descript or particularly these audiograms. The shapes, the text, you can change the colors of them and you can do that by selecting it. And then in the properties bar, in the case of text, actually those are captions. So it's going to be here under the style and then you, you'll click on those dials and the fill dot right there. And you can use this, probably look familiar from a lot of other softwares, this swatch where you can just move your mouse around, hold, click and hold and drag your mouse around and you can find different colors that you want to use. And then so this goes from black in the bottom to white in the top left to the purest color in the top right. What I Mean by purist is you have this secondary bar where you can go to yellow, green, blue, and so on. And it remains the similar pattern where the black is on the bottom. You got the white in the top left and then the color in the top right. And then you can find any variation in there. And all of these colors, every color on the color spectrum has at least colors that the human eye can pick up, which is all we're talking about here. Um, you can have it, it generates a hex code and, or an RGB code. And so if you have a brand like your company uses a certain shade of blue, let's say, then you can type that in if you know it, if you know the hex code for it. I'd say hex code is a little bit more common than rgb, but they're both, they're both similar. And if you don't know it, then that's what this eyedropper tool is for. And the eyedropper tool, it. It brings up this magnifying glass and it has in the very center of it that little square. And that square is looking at a particular pixel, a particular pixel on your screen. So if I wanted that dark blue line right there, then I could click on that and that captures the, the specific hex code of that pixel. And in this case it's 05 AAF and it captured it and it changed my text into that color. So that's how you would do that, is pull up a picture of your logo if you want to match the color or any other image you want to match the logo, the picture of, and you can do it like that. Oh, and then I should also mention there's a bunch of presets down here, and you can change the opacity from a hundred percent to zero percent, zero percent, meaning it's completely invisible. So you can set something on this gradient there. And the eyedropper tool, aside from being here in the captions, is also on the border. You can do it on the border, you can do it on the background. So every time you have an option to pick a color in descript, you will have that exact same color swatch. So if I click on the circle, I go to fill and there it is, there's that familiar color swatch, and I'm going to match this orange, and now my circle is orange. So that's it. Eyedrop. You're going to see it a lot, and it's very useful. In this lesson. You're going to learn how to nest or stack shapes and unfortunately, there's no way to group the shapes together. But I'll show you what I mean. So let's say that I want to add a circle, and then I'm gonna make this green. And then inside of there, I want to kind of like create my own logo inside of descript. So I'm gonna add another circle. I'm gonna make this one a little bit smaller, and it's not quite a perfect circle, and I'm gonna go ahead and delete that shape. So now you can see I have one circle on top of another circle, which gives it that border. And of course, I can create a border using the native properties. Like right here, I can just add a border that way. But this is just to give you an idea of how you can stack shapes. And then inside of there, I could add the name of my company. I could say Descript Mastery, and I could make that a lot smaller. Five. And then black. And just like that, I have, like a decent, simple little logo built in descript. And then let's add one more little thing. Let's add, like a rectangle. Let's just put this here. Let's make it a little smaller. Red. Pretty atrocious logo, but it is what it is. I'm going to move the layer for the words up. Okay. And now that, like, let's say this is my logo, I want all these shapes to be locked in place. What I can do is select a shape, select it on the canvas, right click and hit lock layer. And now that layer, I can't move it anymore. It's. It's part of that. It's part of the canvas. And so now it's locked and there's no way to select it on the canvas anymore. I have to either select it here. If I want to change the size of it, for example, I have to come into my layout to do it, and then if I want to unlock it, I have to click out of the frame and click right here. So that's a way to click to lock and unlock it as well, aside from right clicking. But when it's locked again, I can't select it here. So I'm going to select the inner circle and I'm going to. Right click. I'm going to hit lock layer. And now if I click away, that one is also locked. Oh, and unlocked my bottom one. There we go. Okay. And I'm going to lock my rectangle and I'm going to lock the text. And now all that stuff is like, effectively a flat background. I Can't move those. And it, it's stuck there. And now I could add my, you know, captions over here or my waveform or something else. But this is just to give you a quick idea and give you some ideas on how to stack and nest shapes. By now you should be pretty comfortable adding layers, manipulating layers. But we're going to go over all the different ways to add an audio file and really any file. But specifically we're going to be talking about audio in this module. So the first way is through the Media Bin, and if you go to Files, the first default tab there in the Media Bin, you can go to Add Files. Click on it, and then you can browse your computer to pull up a file, and then you just click open. The next way is you can add a file from a link. If you click these three dots in the bottom right of the Media Bin, there is a file from link. So if you had a link to a podcast, for example, or something, some audio file that's hosted on the web, you could click on that and then paste in a Zoom link or giphy link, it says there. And then you could add it in that way. Now back onto the default project page. If you click Add File, this gives you the same effect. It brings you to your Media Bin, where you can add files like we just talked about. The next way I'm going to show you there's one more button here for Add File. And then the next way is this plus button where you can add a layer. And once again it gives you the Files option. You can add audio there or any other type of layer. And then the last way I'm going to show you is to simply drag and drop. So if you have some files on your computer like this, you could just take, take the audio file, click it, drag it, and you can see that little purple add to script that just popped up. Release. It'll prompt you for the transcription language. And it is now in your project. So lots of different ways to add an audio file and they all get you to the same result, which is having that file in your project. Now that we know how to add a layer, let's talk about changing the volume on a layer. So this was the file I just imported and I have it selected. You can see it's light blue, telling me I have it selected. And then here in the Properties bar on the right side, you can see an audio heading and it's minus 2.5 decibels. Now, I didn't set that. Descript automatically levels your Audio files. So it is decided that negative 2.5 decibels is. Is the level where it'll sound best by default. Now I can play it and maybe it's too quiet. I could click and drag this to the right to raise it, or I could drag it to the left to lower it. And decibels go negative. So it's not. It's not silent even though it's negative 7.5 right now. It just depends on the particular track that you're working with. A 0 might be way too loud or a 0 might be barely audible. So you just gotta play around with the volume to figure out what works best. And you can see when I move it, the sound waves are moving as well. They're growing and shrinking as I toggle through the layers. You can also click in there and type in a number. So let me do 7.5. And now it's really big and it's actually gonna sound blown out. So let's play it at 7.5 and see what that sounds like. I use this. So yeah, it's a little. It's a little too blown out when you do that. Now I could. Let me just add another layer in here for demonstration purposes. Let me add a music layer. There we go. And as I pointed out in the last video, supporting layers of just audio are green. And if you notice when I put it in, the sound waves are really big and then they shrunk down. That's because Descript was automatically redoing the volume level and it made it a negative 11.9. So let's play that. I use this thing for. So not bad. I usually. If I want just a soft background music, I usually go with negative 20 to negative 25. I find is about right. What I could do if I wanted to get rid of that layer altogether. Well, if I wanted to keep it in my project but not hear it, there's also this button right here which if I click mutes the whole thing. I could do the same thing with my script. Mute it and it's gone. It's still there. You just won't be able to hear it. And it shows that it's a negative infinity decibel level. Let's go ahead and bring it back. And then there's these three dots here. And these are your advanced audio layers. So once again, you can change the audio layer decibel right there or mute it. And then there's a pan. So this is for stereo sound. If you have a left and a right speaker, you can set it so that your audio just comes out of the left side with negative 100. Is this thing for. Or you can switch it and pan it all the way to the right with positive 100% just for my my desk. And I don't know if you can hear that through the recording, but it's playing just left side and then just right side with those settings. So that is setting the volume of your audio tracks. Quick note. Before I get into this lesson on Studio sound, this one is going to be recorded without Studio Sound on. And the reason for that is if I apply Studio Sound, you won't be able to hear my example track that I show in the video. And also because you'll notice the difference, this entire course has Studio Sound applied. So in this video, if it sounds different to you, it's because there is no Studio Sound on it. Okay, let's talk about Studio Sound. Perhaps my favorite feature in Descript is Studio Sound. Studio Sound makes it so that with a click of a button, you can edit your audio to sound just like the name implies that you're recording in a studio. Before this, if you ever used an audio software like GarageBand or Audacity or anything else, it was tedious to just get everything sounding right. Studio Sound use AI. It'll take out background noises, dogs barking, construction echoes, and I love it. Let's demonstrate it and then let's talk about how to get best results with it. So for the sake of demonstration, I made this short recording to show you what it sounds like when I'm recording with my laptop's built in microphone and no Studio Sound applied. So let's take a listen. Listen for the echo, a little bit of background noise, some cars going by, things like that. Testing, testing, testing. This is going to be my audio without Studio Sound applied. I'm a few feet away from the computer, I am not using my external microphone, and again, no Studio Sound sound. And to apply it is really simple. We just click on the track that we want to add it to. In this case, it's my script layer. It's highlighted in blue now that I've selected it. And then once you've selected an audio layer, you'll see this Audio Effects heading underneath the audio heading in your Properties bar. If your Properties bar isn't there, toggle on this icon right there. Hit the plus button and the very first thing you see is Studio Sound. So click it and it automatically starts applying it. You'll see that little wheel spinning right there. It just tells you that it's processing and as well, you can see it right there in the top left. We'll just give that a moment to apply and check in on how it sounds. Okay. And it's already done. So what we can do is, first of all, let's listen to it. Be my audio. Without studio sound applied, I'm away from the computer. I am not. So big difference. Big difference. And one thing I should say about studio sound is it tends to work better the worse your audio is. So if you're already in a really nice studio, you have a really nice microphone, then you might not even need studio sound. You might not notice a difference. But if you got a lot of background noise, then you'll notice a big difference or a poor microphone. The one downside of studio sound is sometimes it's too strong, and it can make you sound like a robot. It can take out some of the tone in your voice. It can remove laughs because it doesn't pick that up as spoken word. So it'll just cut it out. And it's kind of an awkward robotic noise that it makes. What we can do is turn down the intensity. And this is really all you can do with studio sound. You can turn it on and you can just see intensity. There's nothing a lot that you can do here. So we can click this effect settings. It's like this little dial icon, and all you can do is adjust the intensity. You can click in there. And I usually go. With my setup, I usually go to 90 or 95%. And then that just kind of takes the edge off of the. Without studio sound applied, I'm a few feet away from the computer. So studio sound is doing something like dropping my S's or my laughs. If I just dial it back a little bit, that helps to make sure that it's not so strong. And then if we don't want studio sound, if you want to remove it, you just simply. You can toggle it off like that, or you can hit this little negative button, and it'll completely get rid of it. And the last thing I need to tell you about studio sound is that it is project and file wide. So if you apply it to your file, it'll apply to every composition in your project. Like. Like, let's say you have that same clip, the clip I just played for you, and it's in multiple compositions. You know, I have different sections of it cut up. If I apply studio sound to any of them, it's going to apply to all of them. So if you want to be more granular, in how you and where it's applied or not. You would have to export the audio with or without Studio sound applied and then re import it into your project in order to have more control over where studio sound is or is not applied. So be aware of that. If you apply it in one place, it applies it everywhere in that project. Now we're going to talk about the Dynamics tools when it comes to audio editing. So we're going to select an audio layer that we want to apply these to. And our options here are Compressor, limiting and Ducking. And we're going to start by talking about the compressor. So again, with your audio layer selected, if we go to the audio effects, hit the plus button, drop down to Dynamics again, you got your compressor, limiter and ducking. And we're going to hit Compressor. And what compressor does is it takes the range of your audio and just like the name, compresses it. So it limits that the dynamic range, both the low and the highs, and it compresses it into a smaller range. You can hit these effect settings button and you get this dropdown. There is a default which you can with all of these you can set the threshold, the ratio, the attack, the release and the knee. If you're really into audio, that is an avenue to go down is setting all those. I always just do this dropdown since all of mine are my videos are voiceovers. I just do the dropdown and classic voiceover. And these are the default settings with that 1, negative 24 decibels, 1.5 to 1 ratio and so on. And then we can close that. You can toggle it on and off with that button and it'll just sound testing. This is going to be different. Now the other one is the limiter. If we go back to our plus button and audio effects, Dynamics and then limiter, then limiter is like Compressor, but it only applies to the high end of of your audio range. So if you have a lot of loud noises in the background, like fireworks going off or unusually loud things that are happening, you could just limit the high end of those with the limiter. And there's a number of default settings here, soft limit, crunchy, raised and so on, you could apply that to your audio. And then the next one is is ducking. Ducking is if you have multiple tracks, if you have multiple audio tracks. So this is especially useful for music. So let me go ahead and apply some music to this. Going to my Media Bin audio and I'm just going to apply the first song on there, give it a moment to load. And what this does, what ducking does, is it'll automatically lower the sound of the other tracks to a predetermined level. If I go to my effect settings of ducking, right now it's at 10%. And what that's telling us is it's going to make this audio layer, the green one, 10% of its volume while I'm speaking. So let's see what that sounds like in testing. This is going to be my audio without studio sound applied. Let me turn that up so it's a little easier to hear sound applied. I'm a few feet away from the computer. I am not using my external microphone, so it's very soft. So I turned up the decibel level and is now playing it at 10% of that decibel level because of the ducking setting. So if I turn this up, let's say I turn it to 50%, it's now going to be playing the music at 50% of its decibel level, not using my external microphone. And again, no studio sound, and that's much louder. And the really cool thing about ducking is it can make for a really epic effect if there's parts where speaker is pausing for like, say, 10 seconds and the music just smoothly gets louder to fill that empty space. And then it drops down again once the speaker starts talking again. It's a really useful effect, especially if you plan to use music in your background. And the next things we have in our audio settings are the EQ Creative and Reverb effects. And first of all, I'm going to go ahead and get rid of the compressor limiter and ducking just so we can see this as they are. So the EQ is your audio equalizer. It allows you to visualize and then adjust the frequency ranges of your audio. So if you click on the effects setting button, you get this view where you can adjust the different frequencies that you get. I'm not going to go in depth in this lesson about how to set that, but what you can do, you got your settings down here. You can set the different channels or you can go to your presets. There is a default which is just flat across. You can go to Boxy, for example. You can go to Warm and Boomy. I usually do presence for just a voiceover, a single speaker, and that usually sounds pretty good. Moving on, we have our. If we go to the plus button again, we have creative. And the first thing we have is Bit Crusher. And I'm going to show you what Bit Crusher sounds like a few feet away from the computer. I am not using my external mic. It's kind of got that distorted, staticky sound, kind of like a radio. Again, these Bit crusher, distortion and flanger are under the creative category. So these aren't things that you would use all the time, but they're things that you would do if in the video you're creating somebody is talking on the phone or you know, that type of effect that would be temporarily but probably not applied to the whole audio file. And next let's play the distortion. Just going to turn off Bit crusher and that's like a really blown out, exaggerated sound. Next let's try flanger and let's apply it later and see how it sounds. That's more subtle. It's more of like a testing, testing. This is going to be my audio without echoey, twangy type of sound. And the last thing we're going to do is reverb Studio sound applied. I'm a few feet away from the computer. I am not using my extra. It's echoey and that could be like an effect. For example, if a character that you're making the video for is thinking, you know, you want to create a distinction between what their thoughts are versus what they're actually saying. So that's some of the ways that you could use these creative features. Back in Module one, we talked about setting the aspect ratio of your new project. So that's important to do at the very beginning if you know what the aspect ratio is that you need for your video, if you need to change it. For example, let's say I have two compositions. I have this one that's in Landscape, but I also want to make a portrait version so that I can upload it to YouTube shorts or some other platform where a different dimension is required. So the way I would do that, I made a copy of it. And you can do that by hitting these three dots and saying duplicate. And then it gives it the same name. It's just called Copy of Studio Sound Demo. And you change the aspect ratio the same way that you set it originally, which is by clicking into your canvas. This appears in the top left. You can click that dropdown. It's currently on landscape. You can see the check mark there. And it's telling us on the right that it's 16 by 9. I can change it to square by one by one. And here's the important thing to know about changing the aspect ratio is it keeps my frame the same. So my frame is still going to be landscape, but now it's in a square. And so what it does is it just adds a black border around the outside. But let's change it once more to portrait. And now that black border is even bigger. So here's what I have to do. If I wanted to use this for a YouTube short, I can click on the image itself and I can resize it. If I just drag directly up, it'll keep me centered. And now I fill that whole frame. And I could use this as a social media clip. So that is how you adjust your aspect ratio. You can get a little bit more advanced with this bottom one that just says advanced. And here you can set a specific pixel width and height. If you do like, let's say I type in 1200 here, pay attention to the height, it automatically goes up. And the reason is, is because these are linked. If I unlink them, I could make this, let's say 2400. And now you can see on my video, it added a black bar again because once again it's trying to keep my ratio to what I had previously set. If you do this dropdown, you can change the quality of the video. So you can go from 4K all the way down to 720p. You're going to be limited in export by what your camera shot at. I usually recommend for talking head stuff, just 1080p. 1080p is adequate. Most cameras can handle that. And it's a lot smaller file than if you're dealing with 4K. If you have 4K, things are going to run a lot slower. It's going to take a lot longer to export. It's not always necessary, but that's for you to determine project by project. And then lastly is frame rate. You can go from 24 frames per second all the way up to 60. I've talked about that in previous videos as well, but that is how you set your aspect ratio. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to change the speed of a video clip or an audio clip, as well as how to loop a clip or play it once. You can choose either. And finally, we're going to talk about how to change the playback speed within descript. So the first thing is we click a layer. And so here's a little GIF that I found. And with any layer, any video layer, or any layer at all, it could be an image layer. It shows you how long that layer lasts. Right here in the upper right, this is your duration. So this one is telling me that it's 1 second, 0.8, 1.8 seconds long, and it's telling me that it's playing at 1x speed and that it is playing once. So the way that we change the speed of this clip is by typing in a number here. So I can just select in there and I can lower it. So I can make IT play at 0.5, which would be half speed. And if you notice, on my timeline, it just doubled in length. It's now going to take twice as long to play through that whole clip. It's effectively slow motion. It's more than just a round figure. I'm just going to mute the, the audio. And then. So, yeah, it's basically just slow motion. If I play it and I can go even lower, I could go to 0.2 and now it just got even longer and shorter or longer and slower. And I can see right here that it plays for 10 seconds or 9 seconds and I can lower that number. I could, I could type in 0.8, but that doesn't change how fast it plays back. It's still playing back at 0.2, but this clip is only 8 seconds from beginning to end, but still playing at 0.2 of its original speed. So it's. It's chopping off a second effectively. Let's play it fast. So I can also go to 2x. And now it's going to play at double speed. Now it's super fast and it's only playing once. So you can double. You can make this loop where it'll just play as many times as it can to fill up the scene that it's in. So if I change this to loop, there's my layer that is playing once right now, that dark blue layer. If I zoom out, this is my entire empty scene two here. Now watch what happens when I make this loop. Now that GIF fills this entire scene and it's playing at 2x speed. So watch what happens when I play super fast. And I could do 3x, I can do 4x super fast, and it goes all the way up. The max speed you can raise this to is 30x. So this is gonna be like really fast. You can't even see it. I think it's. I think I. I'm crashing Descript by doing that. But you may not know this, but throughout the rest course, I've been using the speed a lot when I'm doing these tutorials. If there's a part where I'm waiting for something to load, like right now, right there, I can Select a range. So let me zoom in on my timeline here. And this is like totally slowing down my computer. This is super weird. I've never had this happen before. But be careful when you. When you bump it up to 30x, I'm going to pause it and let it. Let it process this. We're back. I'm going to come back down to my script layer. The audio portion of this video. I'm going to unmute it because I muted it previously. And like, let's say there's a part where I'm doing a demo for descript and something's loading, such as applying green screen or applying studio sound. What I could do is highlight that portion with the Range tool. Again, Range Tool is right here, Hotkey R. So let's say this is the portion where it's loading. And first of all, if I want to get rid of the audio there with that range tool selected, I can just mute it. So now that's gone. And then I could change the duration. And this is 5.6 seconds, that range that I selected. So what I like to do is just. Is keep the loading no more than a second long. So I'll just bump that up to 5x. And now that's gonna play at 5x speed. And it's. This isn't the best example because there's nothing there, nothing visually to move at 5x and there's no audio now. But you could see how this would be useful. So that is changing the playback speed as well as how to loop a video or a layer. Now the other thing is how to play back at a faster speed. And it's this button right here. When you hover over it, it's like a little clock icon, says playback speed. And when you click on it, you can slow down your playback speed to half x all the way up to 3x, or you can incrementally change it with the Shift J hotkey, Shift K to reset, or Shift L to increase the speed. Watch what happens when I play back at 2x. The circle finds its way into our daily lives in many forms, from the celestial bodies above to the wheel. So it plays the whole thing at double speed. But this does not affect the export, it doesn't affect the video itself. So when I publish this to YouTube or I export it, it's still going to be a normal video that's only for me reviewing the video that's only for playback. So that is how we manipulate clip speed in descript. If you've ever used Photoshop before or canva or even PowerPoint. You probably understand the concept of layers, but basically every single element that we add to our project is a layer. If it's a video, it's a layer. If it's an audio file, it's a layer. If it's a title, a caption, anything else, those are layers and we need to adjust them, the size of them, when and where they appear, all sorts of different elements about each layer in order to get our video to look how we want. So the first thing is our base layer is our script layer. And whatever is in your script layer is what gets transcribed. And your transcription, of course, is this part that I have highlighted in blue. So if we want to add a layer, we've done it before in other videos. We added audio, We've added different things before, but I'm just going to add a video like this. Click and add. And there it is. It's now on our project and it's covering my face. So it is a layer in front of my script layer. And I can click it and I can move it around, I can resize it, all sorts of different things that I can do with that layer. Now let's add a sound layer. I'll go to audio, click on a sound music, and there it is. The music layers are green. Everything else is blue. And you can have multiple sound layers. So I could have. That is music. I could have sound effects on top of it if I click that. And now the second green layer is my sound effect. And let's add one more visual layer. I'm going to add another. And there we go. So we have two layers on top of my script layer. And aside from your script layer, layers go from top to bottom. So my top layer is going to be the one that goes on top of everything. So this, the one I have selected is this blue, dark blue one. And if I drag it down, it covers up my other two layers because it's my top one. I can adjust the layer order by right clicking on it. Say select layer. I've already got the one I want to change selected. But I could change to my webcam 1. If I click that and it's telling me it's the script layer script colon. But I can go to layer order. I can say bring to front, that'll move the layer all the way to the top. I can say bring forward, that'll move it one layer forward. So if I had a bunch of layers, it would just move it one layer forward, send backward, moves it one layer back, and Send to back moves it all the way back. And in this case if I do that, I can't see it at all because it's covered by my script layer and it's covered by my other visual layer. So that is one way is right clicking and changing them. You can also use hotkeys if you do bracket. So if you do bracket left, it pushes it all the way to the back bracket right open or brings it to the front. You can do shift bracket to move it one space back and shift bracket right to move it one space forward. Or you can click into the gray spot of your canvas and there is this layers option and from here you can just click and drag these to reorder them. So right now my script layer is all the way in the front. Once again, the top one is the frontmost layer and the bottom one is the backmost layer. So we can just reposition them like so. The last thing we need to talk about in our layers module is cropping and reframing. So to do that in our video, if we select the layer that we want to change to either crop or reframe, then we will select it. And then these little, this purple layer, purple line appears around the perimeter. You can select one of the flat edges and click and drag to resize it like that. You can do the top and do the bottom. Or if you do the corners, there's little white dots on the corners and that will shrink the image, shrink the layer in proportion. It'll maintain the aspect ratio and shrink it like that. If we double click this is our crop, so it's not going to resize it, but it is going to chop off the corners or whatever aspect, whatever part of it we don't want. So you can shrink it like that. And once again, if you do the corners, you can do the vertical and horizontal at the same time like so you can hit done. There is also a crop button here with the layer selected. When you have the purple border you can hit crop and it brings you into your crop settings. There's also this number here. You can zoom in and out. So right now it's at 115%. I could drop it back to 100. I could double click again back into my crop mode. I can bring it up to 150. I can hit enter or I can click done and it zooms in. There's also options here for some pre built like a circle landscape portrait. So that's basically like our aspect ratio that we looked at earlier or you can just conveniently Fill the screen. And I've already cropped it, so it's, it's filling me way too much. You can just see my face there. But you get the idea of how that might be useful. Okay. And the last thing is to reframe it. So if you enter your crop mode again, double click, you can drag within. It'll maintain the aspect ratio that we set, but you can adjust what's being displayed in that window. So if I wanted to just show my microphone, I could do that. If I wanted to recenter myself, I could do that. If I wanted to put myself just show my hands or just show the top of my head, you could do it like that, by clicking and it adds those grid lines so you can see where. If you wanted to add myself to the left third or you know, position myself where my eyes are at the 2/3 point, you can do all of that with those grid lines. And the last thing in our cropping and reframing lesson are these two the flip options. You can flip horizontally. If I click it, I'm now on the other side of the frame. If I flip vertically, I'm now upside down. So these are all the ways that we can reframe and re crop our layer. So now that you have a basic understanding of layers and how to reorder them, I'm going to show you another way that we can make changes to them. So you can click on a layer and here in your properties bar, and if you can't see your properties bar, you can toggle it on and off with that icon right there at the top you'll see this heading called Layout. And if you expand it and again you have to have the, the layer that you want to change selected. You'll see there is an X and Y coordinate. There is a width and height as well as a chain link to link the two numbers together. There is this thing and this box here, which we're going to talk about in a moment. So the first thing is the X and Y. Notice what happens if I click on this layer and move it around. My X and Y is changing. And if you remember back to junior high math, X and Y axis, your X is your long left and right. See that? It's moving left and right. And your Y is your vertical, your up and down. And so that's all corresponding to pixels on the screen. So right now it's at 1600. I can click in there and I can change that to 1450, for example, and it shifts a little bit to the left. I Can also click it and slide right and left to adjust it like that. Same thing with the Y axis. If I type 600 in here, boom, it drops down. And so with X and Y, smaller numbers are left, bigger numbers are right. With the Y axis, smaller numbers are up, bigger numbers are down. So if I drop this down to 900, boom. Drops down like that, even to the point where it goes off of my canvas or what's displayed on my screen. And then with the width, right now it is 379 pixels wide. I can click the corners to drag it, to resize it. That is, I can click the sides to make it wider, or I can click in this box itself and expand it like that. And notice that the height is expanding with the width. If we want to turn that off, we can click this link here. And now the width and height are going to move independently. Or once again, I can type a number in there. Let's type 400. And it just got to a 400 pixel wide box. Same thing with height 500. Whatever I want to do, I can do it there. Relink those. This next one is showing zero degrees, and that's telling me that it's flat. The bottom part of this layer is 0 degrees. If I want to shift it 90 degrees, turn it 90 degrees to the right, I can type that in there, hit enter, and it's now on its side. I can do 180. I can do 270, 360, which is really just zero. And it's back to where we started. So you can adjust things in that way. You can also put your mouse in the bottom corner, and you get that curved arrow. If you click it and drag it, it'll change the angle in that manner. And let me just click out. And then you can see in the layout box, it's moving with my arrow. There it is at 64 degrees tilted to the right. And the last option in our layout box is the radius. And this is our corner rounding. So right now it's a perfect rectangle. It's got sharp corners, but let me just knock that down to 20. And you probably can't see that very well, but let me just make it bigger. Click on the layer Again, type in 20, and you can see the corners are slightly rounded. You can do 50, you can do 100. You can do 300. You do 500. And it's almost a perfect circle now. And you can do that with your script layer. I could select this. This layer go down to layouts, and let's take it to 500. And now it's like a little oval. You could do that with a webcam if you want to make it your circle, like so. But that is the layout option and it's just another tool in your tool belt of ways to adjust layers. In this lesson I'm going to show you some changes to the layer UI since the previous layer lessons from this module. So right here I have an image layer. This is my image. It's just a piece of stock media and when I have it selected, this is the menu. And this is going to look different than those previous lessons that I recorded back in November of 2023. So that's one of the problems with descript is it's updating all the time. So it makes this course is a never ending project. So this position button right here, when you click on it, there's a new thing that just says fill canvas and it automatically fills the entire canvas. You can click on it, you can say bottom left and it puts it in the bottom left. And it also made it a little circle. I think that's because I set that. But you can change it to original and now it's a rectangle again. You can set bottom right, top right, et cetera. I don't need to show you all them. You can do circle, which it already is. And it looks like when I change the position it does automatically make it a circle and you can make it a square. You can make it portrait or landscape, which was original and or you can do what we previously saw, that everything in the previous lessons are still accurate. Like you can still grab the corners and resize it like that. You can enter crop mode with this button. And now you have those squared off corners with the grid lines. And it doesn't shrink the image, it just cuts it. And then you can hit done to lock in the change. There's a zoom number here so you can zoom in on your your image. And look at that. I'm zoomed in at 10,000%. Let's drop that back to 100. Just type it in there. And before we had the flip horizontal and flip vertical icons. Now there's only the flip horizontal, but we do have the rotate button. So you can just rotate it, you can flip it and then you can hit these three dots and you can do change the layer order. You can view the media in the Media bin. You can replace the media, which we'll talk about later. There's the flip horizontal again and there's flip vertical and hide layer lock Layer, delete layer. So that is just to show you the latest updates with the ui. Everything else is pretty much the same as it was in the previous. Descript recently replaced what they originally called Overdub, which is their AI text to speech tool, which allowed you to. You could type something in to descript and then you could have an AI version of your voice or somebody else's voice that you've trained the AI on to read it using the AI voice. So they've relabeled it as AI speaker, and it's a much better. It works much better, it's easier to train, and it sounds better, in my opinion. So to get there from your workspace view, this is for training your speaker for the first time. You'll have to go to the AI Speakers tab here on the left, and there'll be a button right here in the middle that says new speaker. Or if you've already trained an Overdub voice in the past, it'll be here in your list. I have two voices that are trained. And then you can go to New speaker. You can label your speaker. So let me just call this one Ross 2. Hit confirm. And now this is the script that you need to read to train and authorize descript on your voice to do this for best results, read this statement with a lot of range in your voice. Descript is going to use the data that it gets from you reading this script to train the AI. So read it with a lot of range in your voice. Train the AI on your highs and your lows, on your ways that you emphasize words and read it at a natural pace because you want it to sound as similar as possible to how you normally talk. You'll hit record and I'll go ahead and do it. For demonstration purposes, I want descript to create an artificial version of my voice. Every day we tell stories, ask questions, and share jokes. And then when you're done, hit the stop button. And I sped that all up because I don't want to bore you, but you get the idea. You'll read it. Took me about 31 seconds right there to read it. You can play it back so you can hear how you sounded after you recorded it. If you want to re record it, you can hit this button here that says rerecord. And then you just. There's a little statement that says, by submitting, I authorize descript to enable speech generation for this speaker. No one will be able to use the speaker to create speech without my consent. And then you'll hit Submit. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. And it says authorizing speaker. And let's see how long this takes to do. It usually only takes about 20 to 30 seconds. So timer starts now. And there we go. Speaker authorized. You can now use ROS2 for speech generation. Now, there's one other way you can train an AI speaker if you do the same process. New speaker. Let's call this one Ross, or let's call this one three. Whatever. Confirm. You can upload a file. So if you're creating an AI speaker for somebody else, you could send them a screenshot of this clip. Just have, say, record this in an MP4 file and then send it to me when you're done. And then you could upload that file right here and say, choose a file and then you'll be taken to your computer's browse option. So browse your computer, find the file, and then submit it. And that will be the training data for that person's AI speaker. Next, we're going to talk about how to actually apply this AI speaker now that we've trained it videos. Now that we've trained our AI voice, let's learn how to add it to our project. So in your project where you want to add it, you can come over, put your mouse into the transcript, and the very first thing that you're going to need to do is label who's speaking. So in this video, it's just me speaking, but you can see this RODE NT USB mini and facetime HD camera. So descript will label it based on the name of the microphone and the webcam that you used to record whichever layer that is in it by default. But you also get a chance to label the speaker when you first import the file into your project. If you haven't done that, this is what you'll have to do. To label it, you'll have to click on the title, the labeled speaker. In this case, it's my microphone and my camera. And you can see here that it can change it to computer audio. Or under that, there's my AI speakers, Dr. Johnson, which is another person I've trained it on, and myself Ross. So if I click on myself, it is now labeled as me as the speaker. And you'll have to do that for each paragraph. So for some reason there, it thought this was a different speaker and it asked me again to label it. So I'm going to label it as Ross once again, Ross. Okay, now my whole project has been labeled. If I find a part where I Want to put in my AI voice. I can put my cursor there, click into the transcript, and go into write mode by. By clicking this button in the top right. And there it turns into a blue thing that says Done Writing, which I'll click when I'm done. And I'll click where I want to add my words. And I could click anywhere in the transcript, but I'm clicking here into this blank space for demonstration purposes. So let's just say, hello, my name is Ross. I am an AI version of the other Ros. Nice to meet you. And then now that I'm done, I'll just click Done Writing. And look at that. You see how it's pulsing? It's pulsing dark blue to light blue. That's telling me that it's processing. It's automatically doing the overdub. So that's all I had to do was just type it in and hit Done Writing. And let's give it a moment. It's all done. You can see on my timeline, it is these red sound waves here. And you can see it even added spaces, like after a period, which is pretty cool. The old overdub wasn't as good about that. But let's see how it actually sounds and we can determine if we want to keep it or not. So let's hit play. Hello, my name is Ross. I am an AI version of the other Ross. Nice to meet you. So that's actually not a very good example. It doesn't sound super good. I've had better results. That sounds pretty robotic. Just depending on the words that you're. You're using, it'll sound better or worse in certain cases. But here's the next thing to know. If you're not happy with the result, you can simply undo it and it'll go. It'll revert back to just text that you've written, or you can get rid of the text altogether, or you can lock in that change by hitting Convert to audio. And now it is an audio file which you can edit just like anything else that we've done so far. Now, the other thing to note is there's no video with this. It only created the audio. So if I look on my canvas, it's just a plain black screen. So I could. This could be an area where I add B roll or some other effect to cover up the lack of video at this portion. And the next thing we're going to talk about is how to correct words using the overdub feature. This was creating overdub from original Text. The next thing we're going to do is correct mistaken words with overdub. So if we just want to make a spot correction, like let's say in our video, we said the wrong thing. Like right here I said markers become chapters. Maybe I meant to say markers become modules. Well, the way I could change that is I can double click on the word or select a range of words and then hit replace on this menu. That pops up and I can say overdub and then it gives me a warning. Performing overdub on media containing video sequences or remove any video for the generator range. Do you want to proceed? And I'll show you what that means in a moment after we do this. So I hit continue. And again I'm going to change chapters to modules. So I could just type that in there. And then I hit overdub. There is our pulsing, letting us know that it's loading. It goes from dark to light gray and it gives me that little spinning mark telling me that it's generating. And it is now done. So let's see how it sounds. And we can hit Play right here to preview it. Become modules when we export to YouTube. Let me listen to it one more time. Become modules when we export to YouTube. So I like it. Not a bad change. If I didn't like it, I could hit regenerate to try it one more time. I could hit keep to lock in that change. And one more. I want to play it one more time. And notice the video Become modules when we export to you. It cuts to black. So that's what Descript was warning us about, that it's going to lose that video portion of our project. But we could add a freeze frame if you wanted. You could add B, roll over that. Or something else to distract from the fact that there is no video along with that word there. If I wanted to once again regenerate, I could hit that and it'll process it again. It'll give me just a different version. I can hit play to preview it. Become modules when we export to YouTube. And not bad. If I hover over it again, I get the menu. I can restore by hitting that back button. That's basically just undo. It'll go back to before I made that change. Or I can keep it, which I'm going to do. And now we have that change. And notice on the timeline it creates a crossfade, a very small crossfade between the overdubbed part and the adjacent clips. And we now have our overdub correction in place as you know by now, using AI speakers, it's crucial that you have your labels, your speakers labeled correctly in order to assign the AI voice to the correct person. I'm going to show you how to label them with some recent changes to descript. So first of all, if it's unlabeled, let me just delete this label right here. So there's add speaker, so I can click on that and I can select my name easy enough. But if I'm in the middle of a paragraph and I want to change the speaker, I can do the @ sign, which is shift +2 on a US keyboard and it adds another prompt and I could say it's me, or I could choose a different voice and it can become that person, even though it's not. It's just relabeled as such. And then notice it's color coded. So Dr. Johnson is green and Ross is purple, and my sound waves are purple on the timeline. So the other thing we can do is if you click on my name and then in this dropdown, if I go over to the right to these three dots, I can relabel myself there or right below that, I can change my color so I can make myself orange and it changes me to orange on the timeline as well as in the speaker label. But that's not all that. Also, if I export my transcript like I come up to export, I export my transcript and I export it to a word doc that will be labeled in that color if I want it to be. So right, right there where it says speaker labels, you can toggle that on or off and you can choose to keep that. So you can choose to keep that speaker label in, and if you do, it'll be colored in that transcript according to the color here in your project. So that's how you change your speaker labels and colors. One of the downsides of descript is it's super limited in the transitions, but we do have a few available to us and these are different than the fades that we just covered in the previous module. So if I click into a scene, then I have right here on the right side in my properties, there is a transitions heading. If I click on that, there's two options, in and out. And this is relative to the scene that we're in. So if I do the in transition, this would be either a fade in, a cross blur in, cross zoom, et cetera. And then we have the exact same options for the out. And this is what will happen when the scene is ending. And let's go ahead and click on one. My favorite one is the cross zoom. So I click on cross zoom and this was for out. So watch what happens in the last about 1 second of this scene project. So it does like a big zoom in and like a rotation around kind of effect. So let me go back to scene one. And there is the cross zoom. You can click on it, click on the name of it and you can change it. You can change across blur dip to color, which is just kind of like that fade out and fade in and star wipe, which is literally a star that expands. But let's go back to cross zoom. And then here on the effect settings, if I click on it again, you have an option to change which transition is being used. You have an option to change the duration. I like to do like a half second duration because I think the default 1 second is pretty slow. So I always bump that down to about a half a second. And then you can change the blur amount. You can make it even stronger than it is with a percentage out of. Looks like 500. Yeah, 500. Or you can go down to 100. Whatever you want. You can set that there. And then let's take a look project. So now it's like really big and drastic. And then what I'll also often do with that is add a sound effect right there between the two scenes. Like a whoosh sound. Like Whip Wish is one that I like to use. But that is it. It's really simple or it's really limited in descript compared to a lot of other editors. So that's one case where you might consider doing your rough cut in descript and then go over to something else. Like DaVinci or even iMovie has more transitions. So you might consider adding your transitions at the very end with another software. Just like with transitions. Animations are unfortunately very limited in descript. And in my opinion, the interface for creating animations is pretty clunky. But I'm going to show you how to do it. And they're extremely useful. They're extremely powerful to add into your your videos. They can add movement where you're just talking about something. And I'll show you some ways that I like to use them and how to add them. So on your screen is the different types of animation. So you have linear, ease in, ease out, and ease in and out. And I'm going to explain these as we go. So first of all, to create the animation, you can animate any layer. So you can animate a video, you can animate title, you can Animate captions, it could all be animated. Now, the way that you do that is you select the layer that you want to animate. So I'm going to start by animating this circle right here, this white circle next to the word that says linear. And what I'm going to do to add the animation is over here in my Properties bar, where it says animation. I click the plus button and I go to. There's some presets. There's one called Zoom in, Pan, Zoom in and spin. And you're welcome to use those. I only ever use the custom one because it gives you the most control. So I just find it the most useful. And that's the one I'm going to teach you. And if you know how to use the custom one, then you can experiment with these other ones and they'll make a lot of sense to you. But I'm going to go ahead and click on custom. And now what you can see is over that layer, over my circle layer on the timeline, I have a blue box over the starting point and a blue box at the end point. Those are my starting keyframe and my ending keyframe. So the way that you read this is, however, this circle appears on the starting keyframe is how that animation is going to start. And then if I click on the end one, and right now they're the exact same, there's no animation applied yet. However, that circle is going to be positioned by the second keyframe is what will happen in this animation. So the way I'm going to demonstrate this is the second keyframe. I have it clicked on, and I'm going to move the circle to the right side of the word linear. So now it's over there. If I go back and click on my first keyframe, it's back in the starting position. If I put my playhead anywhere in the middle of those two points, you can see that that circle is moving. Each frame of the video, it's moving a little bit. So let me go ahead and play this and actually, wait, there's one more step. So I'm going to click on that again, and then I'm going to find the animation. There's this little thing that says edit keyframes and Timeline. If I click on it, it pulls up my keyframes. If I click the one next to it, the effect settings, the animation settings in this case, then I have the ease setting and it defaults. The first option is ease in and out, and I'll explain that in a moment. But I'm going To start by doing the linear one. This is the one that's going to make the most sense. So I click on that, close the animation box and I hit play and pay attention to the white circle. So it goes smoothly from the starting point to the ending point. And the word linear. The setting linear means that it's moving at the same speed. It's at a linear speed. The speed does not speed up, it doesn't slow down. It's just consistent from the moment it starts to the moment it ends. So that is the linear animation. The next one I'm going to show you is the ease in animation. And this is going to go faster because you've already seen how to add the animation. So I'm going to click on the green one, the green circle. I'm going to scroll down, find animation, click the plus sign, go to custom, scroll down, go to the. Oh, and notice how it applied the starting keyframe on my timeline to where my playhead is. So what I'm going to need to do is shift that starting playhead all the way to the start of the video. And now my starting keyframe is at the zero marker and my ending keyframe is at the five second marker. So I'm going to click on my ending keyframe. I'm going to take this green dot and I'm going to slide it to the end of the canvas. And then I'm going to go to the animation settings. Click on that for the ease in. I'm going to do ease in this time. And now let's close this and pay attention to the green dot. Let's see how it looks. So you can see it didn't even start right away. And when it started it was slow and then it was accelerating throughout that whole five seconds to the point where it caught up with the white dot and they ended at the exact same time. So I'll play it one more time. It's not even moving yet. Slowly picking up speed. And there it goes. So that's the ease in effect, it eases in to the animation. The next one is the ease out. We're going to repeat the same thing. I'm going to click on the yellow dot and now I have that layer selected. I'm going to add the animation. I'm going to go to custom, I'm going to go to animation settings and I'm gonna do ease out this time, close the animation box. I'm gonna go to my second keyframe on the timeline and select that box and I'm gonna move the yellow dot to the end of the canvas. And now that is where it's gonna end up by the final keyframe. Let's start the video over and let's pay attention this time to the yellow one. And again, this is the ease out effect. So the opposite of what we had with the green one. It starts fast, it slows down throughout the animation and then it ends at the exact same spot as the green and the white. The last one. And for this one we're going to select the red dot, we're going to select the one that's labeled Ease in and out. I'm going to select that layer, add the animation, go to custom, I'm going to go to the animation settings. And this one is already to the default, which is ease in and out. So I'm not going to change anything there. I'm going to close the box, go to my second keyframe, my ending keyframe, and I'm going to move my red dot to the end of the canvas. And now that is going to be the end point of that red animation. I'm going to start the video over. Pay attention to the red dot this time. This is the ease in and out animation. So there you go. I'll play it one more time. It starts slow, that's the ease in. It gets fast in the middle and then it slows down at the end. That's the ease out. You get the idea with all that. The next way I'm going to show you just, just a couple things for fun that I like to do with animations. So let's say that you have some titles and you've probably seen this with my personal pop up where it says Descript Mastery. It's got my name and then the logo of Descript Mastery. So the way I do that, that's a template is it's an animation that that little box that pops up and the words that pops up. So I can do a custom and you can see my starting keyframe on my title there and my end keyframe. So the starting keyframe in that case is outside of the canvas, so you can't even see it. And then by the end of that animation, it's in my canvas like so. So let's see how that looks. There you go. So it slides into the view and that's a very slow animation. A lot of animations I will make really short. So let me show you how to do that. So right now the starting keyframe is at about 5 1/2 seconds and the end keyframes at about 10 seconds. To make it longer, I could drag this to the right and drag it to 11 seconds, 15 seconds, whatever I want. And that's going to make the animation slower. To make it faster, I bring that time down and now if I bring it to the left, it's only about a half second animation. And let's see how that looks. There you go. Just like that. So it pops into the frame in half of a second. So the last thing I'll show you that I like to do with my own videos is if I have a static image like this, or like, let's say it's a page with quotes. I'm just going to make the background white here for effect. So I have this image and I'm showing it and it's kind of. It's boring to look at, like viewers on YouTube, short attention spans, people click away. So it's a good idea to add motion with animations to something like this. And the way I would do that is select the layer, hit the plus button, go to custom and then. And it put my playhead at the beginning of the video. For some reason you can see my starting keyframe and my ending keyframe. And for this one, I will do a slow zoom in because I want it to just add a little bit of motion, just barely perceptible, where the viewer probably doesn't even realize it's happening. But it keeps their brain a little bit more engaged than if it was just a static image. So if I go to before that scene, pay attention to the keyboard when I play this. And actually I don't like that it does the. The in and out. That's a new feature, by the way. The in and out thing just got added about a week ago as I record this. Until now, all we had was the linear option. So this is an update video due to descripts update. But linear actually works better for this type of thing. So there we go. Add some spice to your videos. Make your videos a little bit more exciting with animations fading and cross fading. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to create fades with both video and audio and how to create fades with video and audio separately, as well as how to crossfade between scenes. And I'm going to start by bringing in a couple of video files into my project so that I have something to fade between. I'm not too worried about the transcript for now. Just skip to the end. Okay, so now my file is in here. I'm gonna make my timeline bigger and to add a fade, you just hover your mouse over the layer that you want to create a fade on. And you can do this on any layer. It can be your script layer or it can be any supporting layer. It can be a title. They can all be faded. And the, the approach is the exact same. You hover your mouse over the layer and then up here in the top left corner there's a little white dot. And when you hover your mouse over it, this little dropdown that says click for more options. And it's a 0s. It says 0s. That's telling you it's a 0 second fade. But you can click it and you can drag it to the right and that number increases. So right now it says 5.56 s s and that's telling me that that's a five and a half second fade, which is really long. That'd be a really slow fade. So let me make it like a one second fade. Most of the fades I use are between like 0.3 and 0.5 of a second. So they're very short half a second. So this one that I just made, and let me zoom in here a little bit more, you can see it created a gray triangle on my timeline on my layer that's, that's showing me the fade. So I'm making it smaller. Right now it's 0.8 seconds. So I'll leave it right there. And what this is, is at the very first frame, at the start of that frame, it's black. It's completely. My video layer is completely transparent. And then it fades smoothly to a hundred percent opacity by the time it reaches the end of that fade. So I'm going to hit play and let's see how this looks. I need to introduce you to one. So there we go. It fades from black. I need to introduce you to one other to completely opaque. But the other thing to note is it's not just the video. The method that I just showed you, it fades the audio with the video. So it fades from completely silent to completely loud. My full level of noise, whatever I've set the decibel level to, if I want to fade them separately, which I can do, I can click on this white dot. And now see, we have it broken out by video and by audio. And if I want it to be just a video fade, I can hit this, this minus sign right here. And it dropped my, my audio fade duration to 0 seconds. So now let's play it. I need to introduce you to so it starts at full volume and the audio isn't affected. If there was another scene adjacent to this one immediately before it, I could. Crossfade would be an option, but there's not. So I can only fade it in. But anyways, so I could do the opposite as well. I could do.05 seconds fade in on the audio and I could do no video fade in. Let's see how that sounds. I need to introduce you to one. So now the video stayed opaque the whole time and the audio started from silent and faded in. Okay, I think you understand that. Now let's go to the end of this layer, this end, the end of the scene. And hold on, there it is. So right here where the, where this scene, this clip ends, I can do the opposite by clicking the white dot and dragging to the left. And that is a fade out. So once again we have the gray triangle starting where the fade is going to begin. And then by the time it reaches the last frame of this clip, it's gonna be completely transparent. So descript like that. And now. And once again, you can click on the white dot. You can separately change the video and the audio fade. So to create a crossfade, it has to be on in the method I'm about to show you, it has to be on the same clip. So I can't crossfade into the next clip without another method that I'm going to show you in a moment. So I'm going to split this clip and let's say I edited out a portion and I don't want a jump cut. I don't want it to be a drastic change. So what I can do is, is grab my fade dot and I can simply drag it into the next one. And now you can see the 027 second black frame below it. And it's a little bit of a different icon with that crossfade. And the gray on my timeline looks different as well. And I've just created my crossfade and let's see how that looks. Why is a huge hit. A huge hit. And it's kind of hard to see, but my webcam view, there's a cross that. That's the portion being crossfaded and it just kind of smooths it out. It fades out of one and then fades into the next, both audio and video. And not to beat a dead horse here, but you can click on the white dot and you can separately control the video and the audio fades. So that's, that's one method. The second method is if this was between scenes. So I'm going to create a scene here. They have a brand new scene, different clip on the right side, different clip on the left side. And I can click into my canvas without selecting a layer. And then right here where it says transitions, you can click on the plus sign, you can do out. And then you can do any number of these transitions that we covered. But there's this one called crossfade. And now that is a crossfade. It's not marked on my timeline like the other one that I just showed you, but it's the same effect. So here's what it looks like. Descript has 20. Edit. Descript has 20. So it fades out of the first one and fades into the next one. And you can change. The only setting here is you can change the duration. So by default it's set to one second, but you can make it a half second. You could do whatever you want to speed it up. Once you apply a crossfade, it applies to both sides of that scene boundary. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to publish your project to descripts cloud. So you would obviously go to publish. Once you are completely done with your project, you're ready to push it to the Internet. And I need to define a term here real quick. There's this publish button in the top right. When you click on it, you have two options, export and publish. And the two terms you need to know is that export means it'll put it to your computer's hard drive. So either your podcast mp3 file, your podcast wav file, or your video project in MP4 format, that would be export. That'll export it to your hard drive, as well as exporting audio, gif, timeline, transcript, subtitles. We'll talk about those later in this module, but for now we're talking about publish. And the publish options mean you're going to push it directly to a platform on the Internet. And by default it wants to push it to web link. And when it pushes it to a web link, the web link will generate a URL on descript. It'll be share. Descript.com/some randomly generated code that'll be unique to this video. And then that link you can then share with anyone. You could make it public, or it can just be there just for you, whatever you want to do with it. So we're going to talk about how to publish to the web link. And another, another way to frame this is if you've ever used or been sent a loom video loom is a way that people do screen recordings like I'm doing right now, or employee training, that type of thing. And then you can send it to people and it can save a meeting. If it's, you know, training employees or walking through something, it can save a meeting. So it's tremendously useful for a lot of different reasons. Now, the first thing is the title. It automatically takes the title from your project. So this one's called fading and Crossfading. And if I go to publish there is the title. That's what's going to show up on the Descript web link. I can also set a thumbnail. I can change the frame to somewhere inside of this project and that can be my thumbnail. Or I can upload something custom. I can say, use frame and there we go. It's going to take a moment to process for resolution. If it says max, that means it is going as high of a resolution as it can possibly go. Given in this case, I was using a 1080p webcam, so I can't go above that, obviously. And it's not even an option. I can't do 1440 or 4K. But if your camera supported that, then you would be able to choose that. And you might choose to go lower. If you want this video to to render faster, to be able to be a smaller file. And then you can choose who gets to access it. You can make it public, meaning that it's publicly searchable. It'll be, let's see if it says right here searchable on Google. Yeah, exactly what it sounds like. Or you can make it anyone with the link. This would be like the equivalent ofUnlisted on YouTube where somebody has to have been sent the link directly from you in order to access that file or project. Access required is obviously the most restrictive. And this means that you have to personally invite somebody into your project in order for them to be able to see this file. Then there's this little gear icon and you can say show transcript. This would be to have the transcript be visible on the page that it generates. You can have it allow comments or not. So if you're doing editing for clients, this is extremely useful because clients can leave comments at specific timeframes on your video and, you know, leave feedback. Say, hey, could you cut this out? Could you change the transition here? Just that type of feedback. Super useful for editors. The show author. That is going to be the name of you as a creator of this project, whether or not you want that to be shown. Allow sharing from embeds that would be if somebody could take your video and embed it into their website. This entire Descript Mastery course are embeds on descriptmastery. Com. So obviously I have that enabled and custom branding. This would be whether to show your branding, the branding that you have. You can see right here I have my disc script mastery drive. And so that shows up on my web links. And that's it. That's all the stuff you can do. And when everything is set, you hit publish. And it takes a moment to process. And then you see a couple new options. There's this one that'll open up a browser, open up the link that this video now lives in the browser, which is the topic of our next video. There's this link button which if you click it, it copies it to your, your clipboard and you can paste that in somewhere. Let me open up this comment thing just to demonstrate that. I'll just do a comment and then I can just paste. And there is the link. So it's share. Descript.com view and that is what I could email to somebody, I could text it to somebody, whatever. You know how links work. Back to publish, I'll discard my comment and I can download it. And this is a very important and a little, little tip with descript is once you publish it to the web, it gets rendered by Descript servers, it gets rendered in their system and it usually takes a few minutes. And I can actually see. Let's see if it's done. I'm gonna go ahead and open it in the browser. Okay, so it is done. And watch how quickly if I click download this will download it to my computer. It's effectively the same as exporting the video file. But watch how fast this goes. So it's asking me to name it, I'll click save. And look at that. Downloading it took like three seconds. So the reason that's able to happen is because all the rendering, all the heavy lifting that normally happens when you go to export gets done by descript in their, their backend. So if you've ever seen in their marketing where, where they say use the web Link to download 10, 10 times faster, that's what they're referring to. And it is amazing. So I definitely recommend that if it fits your workflow, okay, in the next video, I'm going to go more into the share page and break down how that can be useful for you to publish directly to YouTube or another podcast platform, which Descript allows. We have quite a bit of options. So if I Go back to Publish, I click this dropdown. There's YouTube and then there's all these different ones, E, webinar, podcast, co, and so on. It's similar to the process we did with the web link, but there's a couple extra steps and I'll start by saying the. I've only personally done the YouTube one. I don't use these other platforms, so I can't personally walk you through those. But with any of them, if you click on them and you click Publish, it's going to open up in your browser, it's going to ask you to sign in to grant access to your account, and then it's going to allow you to sign in that way. And most of these are really simple. Like this is Headliner. There's nothing you can do here other than click Publish and send it to Headliner. And same thing with Podcast co, same with Blueberry. The only thing that is different is YouTube. And with YouTube, it gives you a couple more options. Like you can set your description, you can set your title, all that kind of stuff right here before you sign in or before you publish it. So once again, we can set our title. This is how it's going to appear on YouTube. You can set your thumbnail. But I actually recommend doing that inside of Studio. So we'll go over there and then you can set or. Sorry. So this first title is the title of your project. So if you change that, it'll change your project name. This second title here on the second line, that's what'll show up in descript. The next one is your description. And notice there's this second line here that says 000 fading and cross fading. So that's actually a marker that would become a chapter in descript. And if I had multiple markers, and I've talked about that in this course, then those become the chapters in YouTube. So it's super useful and a good idea to get all your markers in descript before you publish it. Then you can set your category. Typical stuff there. You can set your tags again. I rec. I usually don't touch this in descript. I like to do it inside of Studio. It's just a little bit better. And it might be better for the algorithm too. So keep that in mind. And then the final one is access. You can make it private, public or unlisted. I always recommend make it private so that you have a chance to edit everything in YouTube Studio before you make it go live. Oh, and one other thing is to get best results, I recommend that you have published it to the web link first. So that way all the rendering of this video is done and it just makes it a lot smoother in the publishing to YouTube. If you haven't done that, then there's a high likelihood that this process won't work. Yeah, I highly recommend that you publish to the web link first. So hit sign in and it'll open up your browser, it'll take you to your Google accounts, select the channel that you want to publish it to. Hit continue. You're going to have to grant access. And by the way, this is something you'll have to do every single time. Unfortunately, descript doesn't remember your login, so every single time you publish to YouTube, you'll have to go through this process. Hit continue again. Tells you to go back to the app. And now this is important. Don't click anywhere yet. You, you gotta click this publish button one more time before it starts pushing it to YouTube. There it is, YouTube. Your video is being published. And because I already rendered it to the web link, it says publishing to YouTube completed successfully almost immediately. So that is the process. It is now inside of my descript account and I can go over there, I can make all the normal changes and hit publish. I won't show you all that right now. Maybe later in this course, I'll do like a YouTube section of the course, but that is it. For the descript side. This module is all about the AI features not previously covered in the course. So Studio, Sound, Transcription, Green Screen, for example, all of these are AI tools, but those are covered in their respective sections. So what I haven't covered yet is descript's newest capabilities, which is its Ask AI features. And to find it within a project, inside of your transcript area, go up to this button that says Actions or on your keyboard, Command K or Control K on Windows, click on it. And then you get this drop down. And we're familiar with remove filler words, shorten word gaps. Those use AI. But the one we're going to look at today is this bottom one that says Ask AI. Go ahead and click on it. And if you've ever used Chat GPT before, that is exactly what this uses. If you don't know, descript as a company is invested in by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. And they use Chat GPT. So this is in fact Chat GPT. I'm not sure which version, if it's ChatGPT 4 or ChatGPT 3.5, but yeah, it's ChatGPT. So if you're familiar with prompting ChatGPT, then this will be very familiar to you. Now you can type into here where it says what would you like AI to do? You can type anything in here in plain English. You could say write me a script. You could say remove all the sentences with the word system. I have a word, a sentence that says system right there. You could say change all the word all the times I say system to process. So whatever you want, you can just type it in plain English right here. Now below that there are a bunch of pre made ones and they're filtered by categories. So there's edit and within edit you can do remove retakes. So if there's parts where if you're rolling your video while you're recording and you mess up a line and then you just repeat it, the AI can detect that and remove the bad take and then just keep the good one. There is edit for clarity where it can, you know, take out unnecessary parts or clean things up to make it easier to understand. You can automatically add chapters and markers. So each time that you change topics in a distinct way, it'll automatically mark that and add a timestamp to it. So I won't go over all of these. But then the other categories are find. So you can find good clips for social media, for example, publish is the next one. You can have something summarized, suggest titles, social posts. So these would be like LinkedIn posts, Twitter, etc. Text post. And I should say with all of these, they're, they're using text. It's not going to edit the video. You can't do something like automatically add B roll to my video. You can only edit the script, make changes, additions, et cetera to the script. And when you click on one of these, it's not going to automatically make the change. It's going to give you an opportunity to edit it. So here's another one. Improve and rewrite script. Shorten this, expand on this. I'll just for the sake of demonstration do expand on this. And when I click on it, this is the prompt that that click adds to my ask AI. It says draft an updated script that expands further on the topics contained. And I can click right there to start it, or I can press enter on my keyboard and it says AI is thinking I can stop it while it's in progress or I can let it run and it gives a response like, sure, I have revised and expanded your script. The changes have been made to provide more detail on the topics discussed. And then so that's in kind of a gray and then below it in black text is the actual updated version that it is writing. And so I can review it. I can decide if I want to keep it or not. If I want to keep it, I hit add to script. Replace in script would replace the script. Add to new composition, would create a new composition with this version of the script. The suggested version, I can click start over to scrap it and let it run the prompt another time because it will change. The output will change randomly each time. So I could do start over to just get a different one or I could hit close to just close out and be done with it. I'm gonna go ahead and do add to script. And now it has added that entire thing to my video, to my project. Let's go back to AI actions. Ask AI. One that I find really useful is Add chapters or markers. I'm gonna go ahead and click on that and then here's the prompt that it defaults to add chapters to this script. Aim for and then it puts dots. So whenever there's dots, that's like a variable that's asking you how many chapters do you want to make overall? And let's say there was. It's a video about here's five ways to level up your business. Since there's five distinct things that you're talking about. You could ask AI to look for five chapters overall and it's not going to work well on this. This is only a two minute video and I don't even remember the topic. But just for the sake of example, aim for five chapters overall and let's run it. AI is thinking. And here we go. Introduction to project organization, the importance of highlights and markers, etc. It's given me five chapters and I can do add to script. And now check that out. These are markers. I have one that they call the power of AI voice. With a trained voice exploring the AI jump to feature, understanding scenes and transitions. So super helpful. And you can imagine if you had an hour long video, you could say look for 12 chapters and it would save you from having to go through and manually put in all those. And it's really just limited by your imagination. Whatever you type in here, you could ask change this into a story about aliens or whatever. You can just do something totally crazy and AI will figure it out. So that is the Ask AI feature. In the next lessons that I'm going to make, we're going to go deeper. Next we're going to talk about how to use this Ask AI feature for generating Ideas. Let's say you don't know what you want to make your video or podcast about. Well, you can use Ask AI to get ideas and you could come in with a general idea like this. My podcast is about mindfulness, so please give me ideas about mindfulness. And once again, this is just chat GPT. So you could type that in here. Give me ideas about mindfulness and meditation for a podcast, and then you hit enter, it'll think about it and it immediately gives me an answer. Introduction to mindfulness, Mindfulness, breathing, and so on. But for the sake of this module, we're going to use the built in one. So there's Brainstorm ideas with me. So it says brainstorming ideas with me about dot, dot dot. You hit delete, it gets rid of those three dots and then you can say brainstorm ideas with me about mindfulness and meditation. I hit enter and it comes up with these benefits of mindfulness and meditation in daily life. There's seven different ones here. And so what I could do is I could take one of those and it lets me add it to script, which doesn't really make much sense in this case, but I could copy one of these, highlight it, hit Control C or Command C on Mac and hit close, go back to Ask AI. And then I could have it outline a script, draft an outline for a script that's meant to be spoken out loud and recorded about. I can get rid of those dots and I can paste in the topic that was just generated for me. So it's about benefits of mindfulness and meditation in daily life. Hit enter, thinks about it, and it comes up with a outline for that script. And I could say add to script. I could apply edit, which also adds it to the script. I can hit copy edits new composition, copy to clipboard. Or I can start over, which would just have it just generate the idea again. And this is more in an outline form. Sometimes with AI, the results are unpredictable. Like every time you run the prompt, you'll get a different answer just because of the way that it generates the text, the way that these language models work. So keep that in mind that you may have to start over a few times before you get an idea you want. And you may have to get more specific in your prompt. So if I type start over, it allows me, it gives me the option to do this prompt once again and I can be more specific. So benefits of mindfulness and meditation in daily life. And then I could say, give me the response in 10 bullet points that can be used to Turn into a script. AI is thinking. And now it gives me it more in this bullet form, this bullet point format. So that is a quick sample of how to use Ask AI for generating ideas. Next we're going to talk about how to use it for actually writing the script. In the last lesson, we used AI to generate ideas and then generate an outline for our script based off of those ideas. So the next thing we're going to do is have it actually write our script. So we go back to AI actions, Ask AI and then this one that says write a script. And once again, you could prompt it anything you want, natural language, natural English, or you can use this pre built one which is write a script. And the prompt is draft a script that's meant to be spoken out loud and recorded about. And then where those three dots are, I'm going to click it, delete and paste in the outline that it just generated for me. So here's 10 points. If you remember, in our previous example, it was a podcast about meditation and mindfulness. So the 10 points that it came up with is what is mindfulness meditation, benefits of mindfulness meditation, and so on. And then it says in the style of. This is back to the prompt that it, that it has pre built for us in the style of. And I could put in someone famous here, I could put in, you know, someone in the mindfulness space, some yoga instructor, meditation instructor, if that's what you wanted to do. Or I could just get rid of that. No, I'll leave it in. I'm going to leave it in. And I'm going to say in the style of a patient and wise teacher for an audience of beginners with no knowledge about mindfulness, like that. And then I'll hit enter, AI is thinking. And look at that. Is generating our entire script. Just give it a moment to finish. And you could also put parameters on like aim for a 15 minute talk, aim for a 5 minute talk, aim for 1000 words, anything like that. And then you can read it over if you want to. If you want to redo it, you could click start over. Or you can hit add to script. And look at that. The entire thing is now in our script and it's showing. It assigns it 4 minutes and 33 seconds. And what that's telling me is that's 4 minutes and 33 seconds if I turn this into an AI speaker. So what that means is if I click on this part where it says add speaker, I can do myself. There's me, Ross. Or I can click browse Stock speakers. And I can add, for example, Alan. And now you can see it kind of pulsing. And I'll give that a moment to go ahead and show you what this becomes. It's done processing. So now this has all been assigned to the stock speaker, Alan. And watch what happens when I play it. In today's session, we will explore the practice of mindfulness meditation. And of course, you could do this with your own voice if you trained it in AI speaker. I've talked about that in previous lessons, but you get the idea of how to use AI for writing. So in the first lesson, we had askai ideate for us. It brainstormed, it came up with ideas, then it came up with an outline. We then used that outline in the last lesson to write a script. And now the third and final step would be to have AI edit our script. And there's a lot of different ways we can do that. The first way is to just read over it the manual way. This isn't AI but the manual way is to read over it and then make corrections. We've talked about that previously. AI I find, has a tendency to use way too many words. It uses a lot of adjectives and adverbs. And so let's see if I can find. So right here where it says, find a quiet and comfortable space, let's say I want to get rid of the word comfortable. I can simply click on it and press delete, and it's gone. We already know how to do that from previous lessons. We've been using editing through our transcript a lot in this course. But if I want to use the Ask AI, I can come back up to actions. I can go to Ask AI. Click on that. And right here, the first thing you see is the edit section and Remove retakes is really great. If you click on that, detect and delete all the repeated takes from this recording, I go ahead and run that. It's not going to find any, because this. This part was written by. Or maybe it'll find something. We'll see. But this is more useful for if you're recording yourself speaking and you mess up a line, you resay it. That's a retake. AI will find that and it'll cross it out like this. So it did find a few things. And basically that's just saying these are parts that are redundant or parts that we detected that you repeated yourself. And you can take that out. So I can go through. See all the times it looks like that was the only one. And if I hit Apply Edits to script. Look at that. It did the ignore feature on it and now it's. I hadn't converted this to audio, so it's going ahead and processing it again in the ASKAI voice or in the AI speaker's voice. So I would have had to convert that to audio and then ignore it in order for it to lock in that change. But anyways, I can hit continue editing with AI. I can hit close, go back, Ask AI and I could say edit for clarity. And then here's the prompt. Edit this down to remove any speech disfluencies, repeated sections and tangents that distract from the core ideas AI is thinking. It looks like it cut it down to just one line. Apply edits to script. I'll hit close. I'll do another one. Ask AI. And of course we have our remove filler words, shorten word gaps. We've talked about that early in the course. And then my favorite one, add chapters or markers. Add chapters to this script AIM four. And then you put in the number of chapters you want. I'm going to put in three chapters overall. AIM AI is thinking. And there we go. Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation. Understanding the technique of mindfulness meditation. Benefits of mindfulness meditation. And what I'm going to do is add timestamps and that gives it timestamps along with the topic. And then when I hit add to script, those have been added as markers right here. And this one didn't work very well. You can see that it only put one paragraph. It didn't put anything in here that's kind of weird. But these become markers in our scenes thumbnail. And then if we export directly to YouTube, these become our timestamps in the YouTube video. So that is editing with Ask AI. And the final thing we'll learn about in this module after having ideated, written, edited using Ask AI is how to publish and find clips using Ask AI. So once again we go back into actions. Go to Ask AI and you can scroll down and you can see the ones that are already in here. Well, first of all, there's the Find good clips that would find moments in our transcript that it can make social media clips out of. So let's start with that. Click on it. So it defaults the prompt to find five options for clips I can pull from this script. Each clip should be around 30 seconds long and it's a short script. So I'm gonna just make this Find one option for a clip I can pull from this script. Each clip should be around 30 seconds long. I'll Hit Enter and let's see what it comes up with. And here's the clips it found. I can hit select in script. And there we go. It automatically highlighted the parts that it thinks will make good social media clips. You can see over here on the right, there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, just like we prompted it. And what I can do is right here it says duplicate to new composition. Or if I had an existing one, like I had one that was YouTube short or something, I could copy it there. Or I can copy it to clipboard. I'm going to do duplicate to new composition. And if I do duplicate, it's just going to do that one that is selected. If I say duplicate all it's going to do all five. I'm going to go ahead and do that. And then now it says selection added to new composition. I can open it. And there are the five parts that it has identified as good social media clips. So I could select each one, I could do whatever to copy that and create the, the clip that I want to use for social media. Okay, so that is the find good clips action. The next one is back to Ask AI. There is publish. Under the publish heading. I could do, summarize, write a short summary of this script. Yeah, I was thinking about it and this I could use in my podcast description or my YouTube description or anywhere that I want that this is going to go. This could be my blog, et cetera. And I could hit copy to clipboard and then that becomes my teaser. I hit close back to AI actions, Ask AI publish. I could do suggest title. Suggest some options for a title. And I could, I could replace some with 10 options, five options, whatever it is. I'm gonna do 10 options for a title and there it is. It just lists them out and I could pick my favorite one. Or sometimes I just get ideas from these. I, I very rarely go with AI's idea, but I like the path that it's going down or the words that it's using like cultivating calm and clarity. So maybe I'll use that and then mash it up. Cultivating calm and clarity. Colon A beginner's guide, something like that. So that is getting the titles from it. The next one is social posts draft. Some options for text posts I could post on social media to promote this. Hit enter. And here are some things you could post like with hashtags, hashtag mindfulness, hashtag meditation, and then, you know, questions. So things like that that are meant to get engagement out of your social posts. So if you Hate writing social posts. That's an easy way to do it, to get some ideas. And once again back to publish. We can do a blog post. It can generate an entire blog post out of your script. In today's session we will talk about yada, yada yada. This is one's obviously very long and we'll close out of that ski down to publish. You can do show notes again for your podcast or you can do YouTube description. So you get the idea on all those. This is just a way to generate using what's in your script, the context of your script to generate three things for the publishing step. Next, we're talking about how to comment on projects so you can communicate amongst your team within a project. So on any project that you have shared access with somebody else, you can leave them comments. And the way you do that is you leave it on a specific range of words. So let's say I highlight this section here, this menu pops up. And over here on the right side of that menu is comment. Or you can do hotkey, shift, command, M, shift, control, M on Windows. And when I click that, this pops up on the right side. And notice that the part I selected is highlighted in that sand color. And that's telling me where my comment is going to be applied. It also has a timestamp there. So it's telling me that it starts at about the 6 second mark. I can leave a comment. This is my comment to you and I can hit that button and it sends it. And now I can add a comment to my own comment or on the other side of somebody else that is receiving this, somebody else in my project, they can add a comment and leave it. Useful comments are things like, can we change the title here? There is a typo, things like that. You get the idea how you could just. Whatever your feedback is, you can leave it at that specific part of the video. You could say, can you please cut this out? Can you please make this faster? Can you please remove this word here? So a lot of things you can do. And then in the top right of the comment there is a little check mark and it says resolve. So if I click that, my comment now is archived, as you can see at the bottom. Gives you a chance to undo it. And now my comment is back, but I'm gonna go ahead and resolve it once more. And there's these little filters at the top, so you can sort them by sort. If you had a long list of comments, you could sort them by timestamp, you could sort them by age. You could sort them by the newest one. Or at the bottom here, you can show archived comments. So if I click that now, I can see the comments that have already been marked resolve, I can unresolve it. If it's still an issue that that comment hasn't been addressed yet, I can unresolve it. And now it's back. Okay, so that is leaving comments among your teammates within a project. There's also a way that we can do it from the Descript view. For example, here's my video, here's a course video, and if I open up a new tab, I open up the Descript project. I can leave comments as a viewer right here, this comments button at the top, I can do the exact same thing we saw in the project view. Right here. I can say this is my comment and I'll have to click the button and it automatically left it on the very first word because I didn't select anything so specific. But let's say my playhead is 45 seconds into the video right here. Now that is where my comment will go. This is my 45 second comment. And now you can see it's right at the 45 minute mark. And here on the transcript, there it is. It's highlighted in the sand color as well as underlined. And as before, we can mark it resolved, we can leave a comment on it. We can sort by timestamp, by oldest, by newest, or show the archived comments, in which case there is none here. But you get the idea of how commenting works.