Record Face and Screen With Descript's Built-in Recorder

To use Descript's built-in recorder, from inside of a blank new project, you can click the record button here. This is if it's, if it's completely blank, but once you've already added stuff to it, then there's a record button down here. This one's always here, so you can always access this one. And both of them, when you click on it, it has this popup here with 4 options. There's camera, screen, audio only, and record with others. And so if I come down here, there's the same ones. Record with others is Descript's rooms, which is sort of like a Zoom functionality where you can have a remote interview. So somebody at their home office can have a conversation with you wherever you are in the world. These other three depend on what you're trying to create. Camera is gonna be only you, only your video and your audio. And if I click on it, First of all, I get a popup. It says web.descript.com is asking you to use available microphones depending on your browser, depending on if you're on Windows or Mac, and depending on if you're on the Descript web browser or the Descript app, this is gonna look a little bit differently, but you might have to grant permission. So go ahead and click allow. And then here I am. You can see my wonderful white sheet background, and this is a preview of my video. That's gonna get recorded. And this is a meta recording because I am recording what you are seeing right now with Descript. So I have, I'm using Descript to record me talking about recording Descript. And then on the bottom here, you have a little X button where you can close out of this interface and you can go back to editing your video if you want. Or next to that, you can choose your camera. So right now I am on my camera that has this name, or I could turn my camera off if I want. And then next to that, you have your mic selection. So you click on this, and if you have multiple microphones, then you can choose that. So make sure, pick your best microphone. If you have a microphone plugged in, make sure you select that and not your built-in microphone, whatever that might be. Okay. And then if you want to share your screen, you can. So again, I'm recording this using Descript and I have my entire screen selected. It looks like this. And once I'm all set, I can click on this record button. Or if I want, I can click on the teleprompter button there that opens up this interface and I can add a script in here. I can paste it in, I can type it in, or if I have it on a Word doc, I can import it. And this is a teleprompter where it's gonna scroll through the script that I've written. And I can change things like how fast it is, how big it is, all that kind of stuff. And you can even use this on an actual physical teleprompter if you have it. But I'm gonna close outta that. Next I have settings. So if you wanted to do a countdown when you hit the record button, you can turn that on. It'll do like 3, 2, 1, go. I leave it off. I like to just go as soon as I hit record. With the microphone, if you want it to automatically transcribe as soon as you hit stop recording, then toggle that on. To me, there's no reason not to do that, so I leave it on. Default speaker, this is if you're gonna be using AI speaker functionality. Studio sound, if you want it to automatically apply the studio sound feature where it's gonna cancel out your background audio. Then turn that on. I like to have it on, so I leave it on. Auto gain control, this is gonna change the sensitivity of your microphone automatically for you. I also leave that on. And computer audio, so as opposed to your microphone audio, this is picking up your voice, computer audio will pick up what's playing on your computer. So let's say you're showing your screen, you show a YouTube video, and you play that YouTube video. If you want the audio to be picked up in the recording from the, the YouTube video, then make sure you toggle that on in your settings and you can choose to have that transcribed. You can choose to apply studio sound to it if you want. It's up to you. Camera resolution, go to whatever your webcam actually is. 4K is the highest, 480p is the lowest. So if you have a 4K webcam, make sure that's set to 4K. If you have a 1080p camera, make sure it's set to 1080. And I'm gonna go ahead and close that. And over here on the right, you can see my— it's a preview of my audio. So this is a good way to test if your microphone is in fact picking up audio or not. You want this to be bouncing up and down and it should go into the yellow, but never the red. The red means your microphone's too sensitive or a little bit too close to your mouth. And if it's not getting into the yellow, it might be a little too far away from your mouth or not sensitive enough. So a little bit of yellow for the peaks is good and it should be bouncing up just like this. In the top right corner, if you click on this dropdown, you can click Center Me and that puts in this little outline of a person. And this is a really good look. If you put your eyes on approximately that line and your head right there, your head's not getting cut off, you're nice and centered. This is a good look, good safe look for YouTube, for courses, things like that. Mm-hmm. Of course I would change my background, but the, the positioning is about what you want for most things. I'm gonna go ahead and turn that off. And you can also put in a grid. So this grid is also useful if you're familiar with the rule of thirds in design where you want to put key objects of interest on one of the top third, right third, left third, et cetera. Then this is a really good way to see that. I'm gonna turn that off. And when you're ready, you're all set up. You hit record. And I am now recording. Everything that I'm saying is going to get transcribed, and this is going to be my video that I actually have to work with in Descript. Um, if I don't like what I'm doing, I can hit this delete button to record what I'm doing so far. I can hit this undo button to reset. It'll keep the recorder going, but it's gonna start over from scratch. I can hit this pause button. The, the recording is still going, so whatever I do after I unpause it is going to be the same video file. But this allows me to take a breath, gather my thoughts, go up and refill my coffee, uh, go to the bathroom, whatever I gotta do. And then as soon as I hit this again, it starts going. Oh, and there's my dog coming out on the, the side there. Um, and you can see here at a preview. how many seconds into this video I am. And as soon as I hit that button, it's gonna stop this recording, transcribe it, and allow me to actually edit it. I can pull up the teleprompter again, like we saw before by clicking on that button, and I can even change my settings, or at least look at my settings. I guess I can't change 'em. They're all grayed out while I'm recording. But this is it. Once I'm done, I go ahead and click that stop button. It puts me back into the editor. So there's my video. You can see it says initializing. And in just a moment we'll have the actual transcript ready, but I can start editing it immediately. You can see down here my sound waves from my speech. You can see a little preview of my video. That was a 57-second video and I can start grabbing it. I can start trimming it if I want. Anything that you can do other than the transcript edits, I can start doing immediately. And you can also see it says processing recording, 66% done. So I'm going to go ahead and let this finish and I'll come back when it's done. And there it is. So it automatically gives it a name because I was talking about transcription. It called this transcription-based recording tutorial overview. And here is the transcript down below. And so that's it. That was my recording into Descript. Now it's your turn. Go into your project, click on that record button and practice recording into Descript.