A walkthrough/review of Descript version 98 highlighting new and improved features. Key additions: a built-in Ken Burns animation (direction, zoom in/out, speed, preview), 16 new OpenAI-backed stock voices (22 total with legacy voices available), ability to use AI voices with the Edit for Clarity tool, text-background improvements (corner rounding and 'hug' vs box wrapping), editor upgrades (deleting a scene boundary also deletes layers anchored to it), timeline export support on the web (Premiere/Pro Tools exports), Super Toast notifications moved to desktop, and general bug fixes.
Questions this video answers
Version 98.
16 new voices were added, for a total of 22 voices.
Ken Burns animation effect (zoom and pan with directional options).
On the web (previously desktop-only).
Today we have version 98 of descript. So I'm going to be looking through the changelog on feedback.descript.com and let's see what's new. So the first thing I see here is they've added a Ken Burns animation effect. So this is pretty cool because this is something that I normally add manually. I've added it manually up until now. So what happens is when you have a layer, it can be an image or a video you can apply. You hit plus animation to add an animation. And there's gonna be a new option called Ken Burns. So in addition to the zoom and pan or the custom, you're going to now have this Ken Burns. And as you can see on their little picture here, you can choose the direction you want this to go. So what it is is it's a. It's a zoom and pan, but you can choose if you want it to move up and to the left or up into the middle, up into the right, or et cetera, based on this little diagram here. And then you can choose if it's going to be zooming in or zooming out, or if there's going to be no zoom at all. And then you can set the speed of the zoom. And then there's this little button right here, this little play button, so you can preview how that Ken Burns effect is going to look on your clip. So pretty cool. Definitely check that out. And then they got new stock speakers from OpenAI. So last week, or in the previous version, they added six new voices. Now they're saying there's 16 new voices for a total of 22. And then all the old voices have been moved into legacy voices, so you can still use them. If you, as they say here, click the show button under the dropdown, and then you'll find all those old voices. But the new voices, they're supposed to be able to apply much quicker. They're supposed to be more natural with better intonation, they're supposed to read your script better and things like that. So probably you're going to want to just stick with those new voices and then Edit for Clarity with AI speech. You can now use AI Voices directly in conjunction with the Edit for Clarity tool. This is great for times where you're unable to rerecord anything based on the suggestions. So if I'm understanding correctly, before you couldn't use Edit for clarity with AI voices with parts that you had generated from a script, but now it's saying that you can. So effectively, this will edit your. Your script that you've written and used for AI voice. It'll now be editable with the Edit for Clarity feature. Moving on. Corner rounding and wrapping on text backgrounds. Oh, this. I've seen a lot of people asking for this, so this is going to be a very welcome thing. So you can now add rounding to the corners on the backgrounds of your text elements. Corner rounding, actually, that still might not be what I'm looking, what people are looking for, because people want the rounding on the captions. But anyways, this is a move in the right direction. Before, you could only have the square corners. Now, of course, you can round it just like any other element. That's pretty cool. There's hug lines, so you can choose how tightly that background will wrap around the text when it spans multiple lines. And then box, the background boundary will always be as wide as the longest line in that text span. Okay. And then some editor upgrades. Deleting a scene boundary will now also delete layers that are anchored to that scene boundary. This will make removing full scenes easier. In most cases, layers that are not anchored to a scene boundary will remain in place. Okay, so what I think this is saying is when you have like a bunch of different layers at the start of a scene where they kind of snap to the beginning of a scene, what this is gonna do is when you delete a scene boundary, it's now gonna delete all the layers associated with that at the start of the scene. So I'll play around with that and let you know how that goes. Timeline exports are now available on the web. So before they were only on the desktop version, and now you can do those on the web. So that is being able to export to Premiere or Pro Tools, things like that. And they brought the so Super Toast over from the web version of descript into the desktop app. That is the little thing that pops up in the bottom right corner that often says descript, a new upgrade, a new update, a new version of descript is ready. Or it'll say, like the progress of the rendering or anything that's happening in the background, it just kind of keeps you updated on the progress of those. And it says it's rolling out slowly, so if you don't see it yet, you'll see it by the end of the week. Okay. And then the final thing is just the normal set of bug fixes. So this was a pretty big update. A lot of new things and a lot of things that people have been asking for for a long time. So that's it for now. Thanks. For watching.
