New Descript: First Look and Reaction

Giant upgrade to Descript today. So pay attention. You're going to want to see this whole thing because it will affect your workflow. Today, with version 90 of the software, we have new automations with the speaker detect functionality, new recorder smart settings, and some major UI updates that I'm pretty excited about. And I'm going to play around with them for the very first time in this video so you can see my thoughts and reactions to those starting with Speaker Detect. Let's head over to the software. Right off the bat, you can see that the UI has been changed significantly. There used to be the composition name right here would just say untitled and you'd have to label it right there. So right away you're getting some more space in your transcript that really wasn't necessary. So now if you want to rename it, you have to do it up here using the three dots and then rename. But even bigger than that is right here in the transcript space, there's that giant upload a file button which you can't miss. And yeah, that's how you can start your project. You can either drag and drop something into there, or you can start a recording, ask AI to write, et cetera. So those functionalities are the same, but this UI is obviously significantly cleaned up and much easier to understand. So that's the first thing to notice is that the UI has been changed. And that's not the only UI change we're going to see today. The new feature is that the speaker detection tool has been automated. So let's test this out. I haven't tried this yet. I'm bringing in an audio file with two speakers. And what Descript is telling us is that we're not going to have to manually label, provide a speaker count and guess how many speakers we have. And actually this is the exact same as it was before. So it's saying, it says in the, in the change log. Here, let me pull it up. Uh, it says right here, the change is rolling out slowly, so if you don't see it right away, it should be enabled for you within a few days. So I guess I do not have this feature yet, so I still have to do it the old way. But you might see on your screen something different where it'll automatically label the speakers. It'll. It'll automatically guess how many speakers are in your file and then you can rename them using the speaker label menu. So I'll keep you updated on that once I'm able to do that. And I'll just go ahead and Start transcribing this file. So the next new feature is related to Editor Recorder smart settings. So before you had to always, when you're doing a recording, you had to always choose if it was going to be record into the script layer, Record into a new layer, meaning a layer above the script layer, or if you were just going to record over a specific selection of your file. So I'm going to show you in a moment here, when this is done transcribing, how this works. Okay, so it's done transcribing. So let's start a recording and let's see where it says recording to script. So I guess this is just going to put it before. Yeah, just inserted it before. But now let me just select a portion and I'm going to say record and do record. Test, test, test. Says recording descript again. Let's see what this does. Stop it. That didn't do what I expected it to. I thought it would. Oh, there it is. Okay, it did work. So it automatically put that test, test, test, insert over the part that I had selected. So it deleted the selection and then inserted the new recording. And then the last thing that it should do with the smart functionality is if I have nothing selected and I'm in the middle of my speech, it should automatically in the middle of my file, that is, it should automatically add the recording as a new layer. So let's try this out. I have nothing selected. I'm just 14 seconds into my file. Let's see if it'll record as a new layer. Starting recording. And test, test, test. Am I a new layer? Let's see. So it didn't, it didn't behave how I expected it to. And looking at the change log again, it says to record as a layer, select the desired destination scene for that new recorded layer. So maybe what I should have done is just clicked on the scene and let me just create an arbitrary new scene. Let me just click put a new scene right here, scene two. And I'll start recording. Test, test, test. Am I a new layer? If so, let's see if the smart recording is working. Okay, there we go. So we got the two and we got two channels as well. So again, the difference is before you had to select if you wanted it to be a new layer, if you wanted to replace a selection, or if you want to be in the script. Now it does that automatic automatically, and it doesn't even give you a option to choose right here. And now the third update and you're going to be seeing that I'M going to be seeing this for the first time with you. I haven't looked at this yet, so these are gonna be my reactions and kind of figuring it out as I go. Here is the new ui. So if you come to settings, you go to the big D logo in the top, you go settings. And then right here where it says Labs, toggle on this thing that says New Editor, Layout and underlord. I know that's kind of a crazy name, but toggle it on and you can see that things change in the background as well as here in our settings. But the timeline is a little bit more round. It's got rounded edges. And then every the, the properties bar is much more slimmed down. And here in the top there's a home button instead of the D. That's much clearer in my opinion. There is these three lines for the menu. You got your quick actions there. So the quick actions bar is gone at the top. So that's interesting. You have to access it from this dropdown now. And then things are mostly the same here. It looks like you got all your normal settings. And then here's another thing though, is your project and composition names are here in the top middle. So you have to click on this thing to get the dropdown of your compositions that are inside of your current project. And you can still go into write mode in the top right of the transcript that hasn't changed. And the buttons look a little cleaner, a little more modern. And they, they got that background behind it, they're rounded. You can jump to markers right there. So if I had a marker, I use the hashtag and I say marker one and let me come down and do like a second marker, marker two, and then I can click on this and scroll to my markers to quickly navigate through my project. And these markers, of course, if you export to YouTube, become your chapters in YouTube. And the playback thing, that hasn't changed at all. Timeline tools, those haven't changed. And there's a layer size, so you can do big layers. Let's see how that looks. Okay, check that out. There's default, they're kind of slim. And then you switch over to large and they double. And look at that. I can scroll up and down through my layers. That's really cool. Couldn't do that before. You'd have to play with the dimensions of everything. What do we have here? Canvas only. So that puts my canvas like full screen stacked, puts my transcript down below and the canvas on top. And what else do we have side by side? Is the Original, like legacy view, I guess we could call it. And aspect ratio settings are still in the top left. Now here's that underlord thing. Curious about this. That's a strange name, but let's see what they got going on with it. So it looks like this is the AI features. So we got edit for clarity, remove, filler, word, remove retakes. So basically this is the Ask AI functionality that they're now calling underlord. And there's some stuff that's grayed out. It's telling me I need to select things in order to use green screen or eye contact. That makes sense. Studio sound also needs a selection. So I have to select the script layer and then apply it. And then once applied, it looks the same as before. It's got that toggle that you can just toggle on and off, change the intensity. Nothing's changed there. Files are now over here on the right. So basically, yeah, everything, the entire properties bar is all consolidated into the right side of your screen. Here we got captions. Oh, and we got a bunch of different default captions. These look cool. Some of these include waveform. If you hover over them, you can get a preview like this. Very cool. Elements. So looks like we have here our text elements. We have our shapes, which they're just calling basic dynamic text. That would be like your timer, the title marker and speaker labels. Waveforms, the four different types of waveforms, progress bars, three different types of progress bars. And then these are like what was in the templates before is now in annotations, overlays and frames. So interesting change there. Music, you have sound effects and music. And you can do a search as before. And looks like you just hit that plus button to apply it as before. You can preview it. Very cool. And then media. So same. Well, I guess this is different because these are just the stock media. This isn't the. Your media, your files. Which is now a separate. A separate label here. So that's interesting. And then layout. So this is what used to be templates. So there's a gallery which is descripts built in ones. And there's fewer options here now because they moved some of the other ones like annotations to the elements one that we saw. But we got some more templates here for social media. These look nice. Very cool. Vertical, vertical form layouts, multicam, those all look the same. So yeah, we got. We got pretty much the same templates that we had before, plus a few. There's a record button over here. And as this all looks similar. Audio Only camera or screen. And. And then you can choose your. If you want to toggle on which microphones. Comments. Looks like this is about similar functionality, but the it's not up there anymore. It's just here on the side properties. So that's our properties for the specific layer. So this is where we could do things like change the audio level, mute it, apply studio sound, apply ducking. All that stuff has not changed, but it does look a little bit different. And then files. This is what used to be in our media bin as well, locked in with our media bin. And this is where you could upload Your raw files, raw video, pictures or GIFs, images, audio, whatever you want. You can put it in here. And then you could use this upload button to browse your computer. Or you could drag and drop and then yeah, back to the underlord, which is just our ask AI. But this is kind of. It just looks a lot cleaner. You got a sound good section, you got to look good section. So this will affect the visual component of your video, this will affect the audio component of your podcast or video and then repurpose. So creating clips out of your long videos, publishing stuff like generating a YouTube description. Generating. Where's my favorite one? Oh, here it is. Add chapters. This is one, one I always use. I love add chapters. Oh, and this is cool. So it says defy divide into chapters and add markers and asks the number that you want to create and it defaults to auto. But I could type in a number there so I could prompt it to create five chapters out of this specific project. I say submit, it says underlord is thinking, rummaging through the script and there's the five things that it came up with. And I can hit add to script. And here they are once again. I can go to markers and navigate through them there. Very cool. Oh, and we got a little glitch there. It's kind of, it's not liking that position. Scroll up a little bit to get rid of that. So yeah, all the same stuff there. Oh, and generate an image. Let's see how this looks. Hand drawn image of a dog. Whatever underlord is thinking, oh, that didn't, that didn't go well. It crashed it. So maybe avoid the image generation there. Crash my descript. All right, so that's it for the underlord. I'll pause, I'll stop it there. And I guess one last thing we can look at is the publish. Instead of the big blue button, it's now a big black button. Everything looks the same there. As far as third party platforms that you can publish to and export. Looks the same, except for that the button's now black. So yeah, that's it for the big changes. Pretty cool. I'm excited about this and I'm going to be redoing my entire Descript Mastery course based on the new ui. I'm probably going to give it a couple more weeks, but you can expect a brand new course and if you enroll now, you will get the updates as soon as I publish it. Thanks for watching. Talk to you later.