Record Videos Straight into Your Computer (with Descript)

In this lesson, you're going to learn how to use descript's built in recorder. Inside of your new project, find this black dot at the top, the top middle, that's your record button. And when you click on it, you get this thing that pops down and you can see the corner of my preview in the bottom here. That'll be your webcam if you have it on. And the first thing we see is there's three options. You can do an audio only recording. You can do a camera recording, which is just your camera and audio. No, no screen. And then the last one is screen, where you can have your webcam, your audio and your screen showing. So when we do audio only, we only have two choices. You can have your computer audio enabled or disabled. That means the sound that is coming from your computer. So for example, if you're playing a YouTube video, do you want that audio to be in your recording? Yes or no. Then have your audio enabled or disabled accordingly. And then if there's a speaker for that person, you can label it. For example, if it's like a zoom call, the zoom call is coming through your computer audio, then you could label that person accordingly right here. And then there's some sound effects. You can apply studio sound to that audio layer and or you can transcribe it as it's being recorded using these settings. I'm going to go ahead and leave computer audio off. The next one is your microphone and you can toggle this on or off. And this is the microphone that you are recording with. Probably it'll default to whatever your computer is set to. So in most cases, if you don't have an external microphone, that might just be your laptop's microphone. But if you have an external microphone like I do, this one called RODE NT USB Mini, then you can select that once it's plugged in to then use that to record your audio. So very important to always check this every time you start a recording to make sure you're recording to the right place. And then as before, you can set a speaker name. This is me. So I'd label it as myself. And if you don't have it in AI voice trained, you can just type in a name there. And then once again we have input settings where we can apply studio sound to our recording as it's being made and we can transcribe it as it's being made. So that's the audio settings moving over to the camera settings and there's my preview and I can move it around the camera settings of course allows you to use your either webcam or if you have an external camera, you can find that as well right here. Camo Camera is a third party application that does some, some visual processing. So you can use tools like that. So in our settings here as before, we have the computer audio settings, but we have now a camera setting. And you can pick your camera. It defaults to my laptop's built in camera, which is called the FaceTime HD camera. But if you had like a external webcam or some sort of plugin, then you could select that here or you can turn it off and not have a camera at all. But I'm going to go ahead and turn that back on and let's move back to the camera one. Then once again choose your microphone, choose the speaker and apply studio sound or transcribe it if you want, moving on to the screen. This is our third and final one. As before you got computer audio, you got your webcam. You can record without a webcam and just show your screen if you want. I'll leave my camera on for now. And then there's the display option. If you toggle it off, it automatically reverts you back to the camera one, but I'm gonna leave my screen on and then the microphone setting. So pretty much more or less the same options on all three of these. Now the record into script. This is an important one to understand. If you record into script, this becomes your script layer. This is the layer that gets transcribed. You can think of it as your base layer. It's the most important layer for descript. Alternatively, if you click on this arrow, you can record a new layer. And if you already had a script layer, this would be a layer that it puts on top of it. It will not transcribe it unless you want it to, but this will be like a layer on top of your script layer. I'm going to go ahead and record into the script. Because I selected the screen recording option, it's now asking me to choose the part of the screen that I want to record, which I can do by clicking and dragging. Or if I press spacebar on my keyboard, it'll record the entire screen, my entire monitor. But I'm just going to click and drag and you can see this light window that's forming. And at the bottom right there's a little black box that tells me the dimensions of this box in pixels that would be recorded. And I can click in there, I can move it around. And again, this is the window that'll show up, that'll be created. That'll be captured and put into my Descript project so I can hit start recording and we're live. You get that little beep to let you know it's live. And there is off of the screen to the right side here, out of my recording window, there is a stop button and a pause button, as well as a timer letting me know how long I've been recording. And I can stop it and pause it there or at the top at the recording button. It is now this red stop button. And if I click that, that ends my recording. And you can see it transcribed instantly because I had it set. And additionally, studio sound is processing, so it's already, as soon as you stop recording, it begins that processing. And if I look at my timeline, I have a layer here, but inside of that layer, there's actually three different things going on. There's my webcam, there's my screen, which is just a black box because I was just recording the canvas on descript. And then there's also the sound layer. So all of that is happening with the screen recorder. Back into our recordings section, there's this little gear icon, and you can set a couple settings here. You can add a countdown by toggling on this first option here. And that'll do a timer where it starts at 3, and then it goes to 2, and then it goes to 1, and then it starts recording after hitting start recording. So it just gives you a little moment to prep and catch your breath before you go live. The next one is a transcription language. If you're. If you toggled on, you opted into transcribing, then you can set the language so that the. The system knows what language you're speaking. What language to transcribe it into default recording resolution. My webcam is 1080p, so I leave it at 1080pMoving on to the screen settings, there is the default recording resolution, and I put it at 1080p. If you have a really high resolution monitor, you could bump this up to 4k if you wanted. It does say it's in beta, so, you know, you might run into some little bugs and issues there as you're going. Highlight clicks when recording. This would be for it to add a little circle around your mouse every time you make a click. So it just brings a little bit of attention to it. If you're doing some sort of tutorial or walking through people through something on your computer, it just brings attention to that makes it a little easier to follow the confirm recording area. That's the box you saw where it lets you select a portion of your screen and it'll ask you to confirm that before it starts. The Minimize Recording dock. This has to do with the little thing on the side out of the right side of your screen that pops out and it tells you that you're currently recording and how long you've been recording. If you don't minimize it, it'll always be present there. And if you do minimize it, it'll it'll slide into the side and it'll only show up when you take your mouse over to the side, and then it'll it'll come out again. Hide descript when starting screen recording this would minimize your descript window automatically. Since I'm always doing descript tutorials and I'm showing descript itself, I have that off so that I can leave descript open. Those are most of your settings, and that is how to run a recording. If you have other or uncommon use cases like you want to record multiple microphones, that's something that has to be done inside of your computer's settings. I'm happy to make a video about that. Just leave your questions in the comments and I can address unusual situations with the screen recorder.