Descript v96 adds Rooms, a built-in video calling feature launching August 28, and Zoom import that creates separate sequences for each guest. Also new: AI usage monitoring, an intensity slider for Edit for Clarity, and Flattened Tracks on the web.
It's August 14th, 2024 and today, some pretty major announcements from descript and some big updates with version 96 of the software. The first thing that descript announced was that in two weeks they're going to add what's called rooms. And it's going to be something that you can add. You can start a room straight from your Descript workspace. And what it is is it's essentially squadcast descripts video calling feature built directly into your Descript app. So you won't have to launch your Web browser to squadcast.com in order to run a remote interview. It's all going to be done from inside of the Descript app. And right here, this thing that I have pulled up is feedback.descript.com and this is where they post all of what's new in the latest version. So they have a message from the CEO here, kind of walking through how that's going to work. But again, that's going to come out on August 28th. So that's, that's two weeks from today. As I make this. The first update of this week has to do with composition labeling. So if you notice here at the top of my composition, there's this thing that says name your creation. Now that's been gone the last few versions for about a month and a half or two months. You. The only way to name it was up at the top using the center composition label and then rename. But now it's added back here just like it originally was before the latest version of descript and then below that. And this is awesome. I didn't even think I needed this, but I realized how valuable this is going to be is this thing right here import from Zoom. So when you click on that and I'm not going to do it right now, I'm going to make a separate video walking you through how to do it, because it is a little bit involved. But when you click Import from Zoom, you can link your account, your descript account to Zoom in order to bring in your Zoom recordings as sequences. If you don't know what that means, go back and watch some of my other videos about sequences. But basically, Zoom, until now has only given you one file. So if you have two or more guests, up to as many guests as you want on a Zoom call, it's going to put all of them into one file, no matter what, by default. However, now with this integration, and I haven't tested this yet, but again, I'm going to make a video and show you how this all works. What they're telling us is that you're going to get separate sequences from all of your guests on a Zoom call, the way that squadcast currently does. So this is huge because so many people use Zoom. Zoom is reliable and it's familiar. So this is going to be a big level up and you're going to be able to put your work calls into descript to quickly edit them, to quickly parse out things that you need using AI. And again, didn't even know I needed this, but I'm super glad it's here. The next thing is you can now monitor your AI usage. So if you go to your Settings, come down to Settings and then down to Usage, this will show you how many of your allocated monthly AI usages you've used. Now, I'm on the Creator legacy plan, so I have unlimited usage of both Underlord Basic and Underlord Advanced. But depending on what your plan you're on, if you're on Free Hobbyist or creator, your limits are going to vary. So this is just a way that you can monitor that. Again, that's in Settings usage. And then it's going to look like this with letting you know how much you've used out of your allocated AI budget, and then it tells you when it's going to reset. So for me, my billing is in eight days and it's letting me know that next we gave a little bit more flexibility with the Edit for Clarity AI feature. So if you come up to Underlord and then you hit Edit for Clarity, then there's now an intensity bar. So low, medium, heavy. So before it was just submit, that was all you could do, but now you can change. How intensely do you want this thing to be? How intensely do you want it to scrutinize your grammar or your retakes, things like that? You can just say low, medium, heavy, and then you hit submit and it's going to run it through ChatGPT and then spit out a result on the back end. The next new thing with descript in this version is Flattened Tracks is now available on web. If you're not familiar with this feature or you've never used it before, Flattening Tracks is when you have a project with multiple layers and you click Flatten Tracks and then you find it right here. Flatten composition, either script only or all layers. And what that's going to do is put all of your layers into one track. So then you're basically starting with a clean layer, a clean script layer. Personally, I haven't had to use flattened composition much. But it does come in handy every once in a while and when I have used it, it takes a long time to apply. So they're saying that it should now be much faster, which is is great because it is one of the slowest things in Descript that I've ever used. The next new thing is the regenerate feature. It used to. If you applied this to a sequence, it wouldn't work very well. Well, first of all, if you applied it to a sequence, it would give you a warning that it's not going to regenerate the video. And what it would do is it would just place a black video over the part that you regenerated. Well, no longer. It's now going to actually retime the video content to match the new length of the regenerated speech. So it's going to work the same way that it does on a single file. And if you've never run into that issue before, you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it because it's just going to work now. So that is a very welcome thing. Regenerate is getting better and better. And lastly there is a whole array of bug fixes and things are just continuing to get better, continuing to work smoother, quicker and the software is getting better week by week. I'm excited to check in for the next one with the rooms update. See you then.
