Ross Zeiger shows how to record interviews directly in Descript using Rooms. Guests join via a link on mobile or desktop, you get full-quality recordings that import as separate tracks ready to edit, and everything stays in one project.
Wouldn't it be amazing if you could record podcasts with guests directly into Descript? Well, now you can. What I'm about to show you today is called Descript Rooms and it's currently in beta, so it's not going to be available to everyone, but you can sign up for the beta@descript.com rooms and basically, if you join me in the software from Blank Project, if you come to the Record button, there will be this thing that says record with others in rooms. Alternatively, if you're starting from the drive, you can hit New Project, record with others. And it takes you into this view, which is sort of like a zoom type of room where you can select your camera, you can select your microphone and all of this kind of stuff. You can set your name. So I'm Ross. It asks you if you're wearing headphones, yes or no, and that's it. Super simple, super easy to figure out. And then you just hit join. And again, of course, this is from the host's perspective. And then you have a link here that you can just click copy link. And then you could send that by email or text or whatever to your guests and then they can join. Now, one thing that's missing, and I don't. I'm sure this is going to come eventually, but there's no way to schedule a call, so you can't say to schedule something in the future. Now, with that said, this link is always going to be the same. So you just have one link for your Descript account. And so this is the link that you would put into a booking email, or just email out and say, hey, at 12 o' clock on Tuesday, join this link. This is where we're going to meet. So that's what goes out to your guest. And I'm going to switch over to my phone to show you this to join that link. Okay, so I just clicked on the link and now you can see it looks very similar. I got. Of course, now I'm on my front facing camera and I can choose my camera, I can choose my microphone and I can choose my speaker. And then I set my name. I'll call this Ross 2 and I'll say request to join. And then it says waiting for host to let you in. And then on the Descript side, you can see this little pop up. Someone would like to join the room, Ross two guest. And I have a little green check mark to accept it or a little red X to deny him. So I'm going to go ahead and admit him in and There we go. Okay, I muted the microphones and so now I have myself and my guest and I can change, I can share the screen, I can leave the call, I can change between gallery view, speaker view, or change the aspect ratio from 16, nine to one by one. And of course, with my cell phone, it's. It's nine by 16, but if I rotate it, it switches to 16 by nine. And then when I'm ready, I can hit this record button and I'm now recording and actually, let me turn the mic on here and. Okay, we're going. So it says videos in the room may appear lower quality than the recordings, which are captured at full quality. So this is something that happened with SquadCast where it would reduce the resolution a little bit of the video, but it's recording into the browser and into descript at full 4k if have it, or 1080p, whatever, whatever resolution you're using, and then that's what you can edit with. But I'm just going to close that little notification. If I hit this invite button, that'll copy the invite link into my clipboard again so I can send that out to more people if I need. There's this chat box. So that's pretty familiar and it looks pretty straightforward. Not a lot you can do there. And then people, these are the people in the room. I can go to my guest, I can pin him, I can remove him if I want, just kick him out. I could, I can't mute him or unmute him myself, it looks like, which was something you could do in squadcast. You could change that, you could change your guest cameras, you change your guest microphone. But it looks like we can't do that in rooms. I'm gonna go ahead and stop recording, show you what happens now. So as soon as I stop recording on my guest's computer, on my guest's phone as well as on mine, you can see this little pop up that says keep this browser open. So what's happening is it's sending this video file up to the cloud so that all that information gets backed up and now it's all synced and so it tells both me and the guests all recordings were successfully uploaded. Got it. And now we can leave. So I'm going to go back to my phone here and say leave. And once I leave as the guest, there's a button to rejoin the room if I want. Or that's it, I can just drop off and I'm done. Okay, I'm back as the host. I just click. Got it. And if I'm done, I think I've shown you everything in here. So what I can do now is just click leave call and it says opening project, and it puts it directly into my descript project, where this can now be edited. And let's see here, I'm seeing a couple frames of black at the beginning, but then my guess view pops in, and as with squadcast, it puts this into a sequence. So if I go into edit sequence, I have track one for myself, track two for my guest, and then I could individually edit these tracks. So if like one person's microphone is louder than the other, or one person needs studio sound but the other doesn't, or anything like that, this sequence view is where I can do that as well as changing the sync, which I won't have to do because when it's coming from Rooms, it's going to automatically be synced up and I won't have to do anything in that sense. And then from there you would just edit this project, just like any other sequenced podcast, and it's right in descript all ready for you to edit. So I made this because a lot of clients have been asking, what's going on with Rooms? When's it coming out? So we have the beta, and I'm sure this is going to evolve over the coming months, more features are going to get added, things are going to get improved, and yeah, first impression is it's great. I like it a lot. It's simple, it's easy and works great.
