Slash Your Descript Editing Time with Layouts
Learn how Descript layouts cut editing time by letting you apply pre-built designs to your footage. Build a layout once with intro, speaker, captions, and B-roll templates, then reuse it across projects by saving custom scenes as layout packs.
What's the difference between a video that takes you 30 minutes to edit in descript and a video that takes you three hours or more? It comes down to one feature that you're probably not using correctly. Layouts. So in this video I'm going to show you how I use layouts to edit fast and efficiently. Here's a RAW video. I haven't started editing this at all yet, but I am confident that I could edit this video in just a few minutes by using layouts. Here's how I would do it. Well, first of all, I'd make my cuts to it. So I'd select my bad takes, I would just delete those and then I would find my hook like this. And right when I highlight those words where I want my hook to be, I can click Change layout. And these are all of descript's built in layouts. I can use any of these or I can click Change Layout Pack. And you see over here on the right side, it opened up a bunch of other options and there's different starting points, like different colors. You can do like a dark one or a light one with this blue text or Descript standard ones are this black one or this white one. I'm going to do this white one. I'll say C layouts and it takes me into here. So what I could do here is right at the top, this one that says default layout. If I click on that, it drops that layout onto my selection. So from the word most to the word videos has been replaced with this particular layout. So now from the very beginning of my project until the end of where I had selected has now become my intro. Using that layout that I selected. And with this layout applied, everything inside of it are normal descript layers. What do I mean? This thing that says default intro, I can simply click on it and if I do a double click, it turns into an editable text element. So I can write in something like. The topic of this video was filler word removal. So I'll type in filler word removal and then for the subtitle I'll do the same thing. How to use it and beyond that I can click on the text layer and I can change the font, I can change the weight, the size, the color, all that kind of stuff. I go into those in more detail in lots of other videos on this channel. But that's the gist of it is you just go through select sentence that you want to apply a layout to. You select it on the transcript by highlighting it. You click Change layout And then I'm gonna go scroll through here to select one like speaker. These are different categories and they give you a little preview of what the layouts inside of this category look like. So for outro, you can see you got like little social media logos. Chapter, it's gonna put a chapter title on one side and the speaker on one side speaker. It's going to put some text over the speaker. So If I click 5 more, you can see I have different options here. And some of these, you got to be careful, are for different aspect ratios. So like these two are for portrait mode. These two are square. So I'm going to want to use one of these top two here and I'm going to select that one. And here's what it did. It put in the speaker name and the speaker title. And it went from where I started my selection to where I ended my selection. And you can see on the transcript, it drops these little thumbnails, these little images right where the scene starts, the next scene starts. So then I'm going to go from here. I'm going to make another selection change layout, and this time I'm going to do a caption. So I'm going to find the captions pack. I'm going to click nine more and I'm going to click on this one right here. And now over that part of my video, it's putting in captions. So it's reading off of my transcript and it just put it over a white background as before. I could change this background to a different color. I could change the font of that text, I could change the size of that text. All of that kind of stuff is under my customization. And let's just do one more before I show you how to save these as your own. So I'm going to click select my next selection change layout. And let's say in this part I'm going to put some B roll. I'm going to put an image over my shoulder to do that with a layout. You see this little preview right here where there's this little gray box that is a preview of a placeholder element. So it's something that I can replace with my own media. And so I'm going to click on show 23 more. I'm going to find one I like. So there's my over the shoulder that I said I was going for. I click on that and it drops it in. And now with that in, I can click on this placeholder element again. The placeholder element is this gray box. I say Add media. And I can add something from my computer, something that I've already got in my project files, or I could add stock media, which I'll do for the sake of demonstration. And I'm talking about AI. So let me just type in AI, let's see what comes up. And I'll just pick, pick this first one here. And there we go. So using my layout that I selected, I have now placed in this nice B roll up above my shoulder. So now that you have the gist of applying these built in layouts and a little bit on how to customize them to save one of these as your own. Like let's say that I take this layout that I applied from descripts built in library and I want this B roll to be a little bit bigger and I also want it to have a border around it. I'm going to put a white border around it, just gonna make that a little thicker. And like this. I want this to be a standard layout that I'm gonna use in all of my projects forever. What I need to do to save that as my own is find that scene thumbnail on the transcript. Right there it is. I right click on it. And right here where it says save scene as new layout, I'm gonna click on that. And over here is my options to save it. So first I need to give it a title. I'll call this B roll over shoulder. Be descriptive because if you have a lot of layouts, it might be hard to know which one is which. Add two. This is where you can have your own layout packs. So I've already got this one called Demo. So I'm going to save it in there and I'll hit select to use that layout pack. And then where it says scene type, this one is going to be media and the scene type. Choosing the scene type. This is optional, but again, if you have a lot of layouts down the road, it's a useful practice to get into. So I'm going to save it as media and I'm going to hit add and that it says adding layout to layout pack. And there we go. So to actually use this somewhere, I'm going to go do the same thing. I'm going to find just a random sentence later in my video I'm going to hit change layout and it's already got the pack that I just made pulled up by default, my demo package. And so I'm going to click on the one that I just saved called Media called over the shoulder. And there it is from the start of my selection to the end of my selection, it has dropped. In this particular layout, the one that I just saved, and then I could click on that image. This image is only a placeholder, right click and say replace media. And then I could change that image, that stock media image that's in there with anything else. I could record over it with myself. I could add other files from my project files, files that are already inside of my Descript project. Or I could add something from my computer, something totally different that's never been inside of Descript yet. If you want to go deeper on layouts, I have an entire masterclass inside of the Descript Mastery School, where I go into every possible aspect of layouts and check that out using the link for the Descript Mastery School right here.
