Slow Descript Tutorial for Beginners (2026)

Hello, my friend. If you're new to Descript, this tutorial is for you. I'm going to take you through opening your very first project in Descript, bringing in media, editing it, and then ultimately publishing it somewhere. So without further ado, let's get right into it. This is the first page that you see when you open Descript. So from here, we go to the top right corner to the new project button. Click on that. Your choices here are a video project or an audio project. For the sake of today's demonstration, I'm going to do a video project. So we click on that. And this is what it looks like inside a blank new project. Now Descript allows you to record directly into it with this record button if you want. However, I've already filmed something. And the video that I'm gonna edit today in this demonstration is a video that I just published on YouTube a few days ago, and it's already got 25,000 views. So, and it was edited with Descript almost entirely. So what I'm gonna do to bring that in is click on this upload button right here. Click on that. And it opens up a browser, file browser to find the file that I want to bring in. Now, keep in mind, everything I'm showing you today is on a Mac computer. So if you're on Windows, the Descript itself will be identical, but the computer things itself, like browsing through your files, is obviously going to be different. Hopefully you know how to find files on your computer if you're on a Windows. Um, but I'm going to scroll through here and the video I'm going to bring in is this one right here. Called Descript Mastery.mp4. I'm going to click open. And some things start happening right here in the bottom right corner. There is a, it's called a toast, a little notification that says uploading. And if I click on this little arrow right here, it tells me the progress. And it's only 4% uploaded. So what's happening is this video is going up to Descript's cloud. It's being saved there. And stored on Descript's servers. Now, even before that is done, I can start editing this video. I don't have to wait for it, but it does say transcribing right there at the bottom. And it's 0% done. So the transcription, the key functionality of Descript is that it takes your video and it takes the words that you or the subject of the video is saying. And it puts them into text. And as soon as that's done, we're actually going to edit from that. But while that's happening, I'm just going to familiarize you with a few things. We can click this little down arrow to close that and get it out of the way. So obviously right here is my video. This is a preview of it. Over here on the left side is where our transcript is going to go in just a moment here. You can see it says transcribing 95%. So that's already almost done. And then on the bottom, this whole section down here is called the timeline. So these all work together and you need to use all parts of them. So now we can see the transcript is done up here. And if I click somewhere, it puts my cursor there just like it would on a Word document or a Google Doc or anything like that. And wherever that blue blinking cursor is, is where this gray line is on the timeline. That's called the playhead. And wherever the playhead is, is the moment in time of the video that we see up here. And you can see some numbers down here. So there's like a 34, there's a 36. My playhead is roughly around 35. So that means that 35 seconds into my video is the moment in time that we're looking at. And then up here in the top left, we can see 34.9. So again, that's where that playhead is. And then /12:40.3. So right now this whole unedited video is 12 minutes and 40 seconds long, and I'm looking at 34.9 seconds out of it. Additionally, there's this little black dot right there. This gray line represents the entire length of my video as well. So I can click and I can slide to move through my video. And you can see that the video preview up here moves with that. Okay, so that is a basic, basic familiarization with what's going on with the editor here. If you want to start playing through it, you click the play button. Super easy to set up. It was, you know, another step in. And that actually starts playing our video. If you click on this left arrow here, That returns us to the very beginning. And you can see up here, there is a preview of the video at different moments in time. So if you pay attention to my head there, you can see that it's moving and my head is kind of tilting as the video goes along. So if I click to say right here, my head is off to the left side behind the microphone there. Okay. And then you can also zoom in and out on the timeline. So right now, I am looking from 0:00, very beginning of my video. Yep. To about 20 seconds. So I'm looking at a 20-second chunk out of my entire 12-minute video. If I see this number right here, the 119%, that is the zoom level of this current view. So if I click the minus sign, it zooms out and I'm now looking at about A 1-minute chunk. If I zoom out again, a 3.5-minute chunk. And if I click keep going all the way until it shows my entire video in one view, there's no right amount. Like you're gonna have to be zooming in and out because there's certain things in video editing where you have to get really detailed. You gotta go way in on it. And then there's certain things where you want to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. So the important thing is to familiarize yourself with this zoom option. Now, as we go along in today's tutorial, I'm also gonna introduce you to hotkeys, AKA keyboard shortcuts. So keyboard shortcuts are ways that you can use your keyboard to speed up what you're doing in the editor. For example, you can do the clicking I showed you, the plus and minus here to zoom in and out. Or if you hold Command and the plus button on your keyboard, that'll zoom you in and you can see the numbers there are increasing. So I'm holding Command and hitting the plus button. If you're on Windows, it's Control plus. And to zoom out, it's the opposite. So Command minus is zooming out and on Windows, Control minus. The other thing that you're gonna have to do is scroll in the timeline left and right. So right now my playhead is around the 5-minute mark. If I want to scroll just a little bit over to the left, AKA closer to the beginning of my video, then I hold Shift and scroll down, and that shifts my timeline. Closer to the beginning so I can focus my attention closer to the beginning. Okay, so those are really, really, really fundamental things is scrolling left and right in the timeline and zooming in and out. And oh, I didn't mention, but if you don't want to use the Shift, if you don't want to use a keyboard, you can also use this gray bar down here, click and slide left and right. So that's another option for you. So I highly recommend if you're at all confused about what I just showed you, then pause this video right now, back up a couple minutes, play it again, practice it in your Descript editor, because this is super foundational. You're going to get really, really frustrated if you can't navigate the timeline quickly and easily. Okay. Next is the transcript itself. So. Again, this words, these words go with what I actually said in this video. That is our transcript. And to navigate around in here, you can scroll up and down with your mouse. So if you have an actual mouse with a scroll wheel, then you use that scroll wheel to go up or down, whether up scrolling up goes up in your video or down depends on your computer settings. Some people have it inverse, some people don't. Um, for me, if I scroll down, the video goes up, AKA closer to the beginning. And you can see over here, this little gray bar. Once again, you can click there as well and scroll it up and down just like you do on a webpage. And next to that, there's a little number. That little 2M tells me that is about 2 minutes into my video. So if I scroll all the way down to the bottom, That is 12 minutes into my video, AKA close to the very end, the very bottom. So you're going to hear me use those terms interchangeably at the end, at the bottom, the finish of my video, you know, different ways to say it. Um, okay. So now let's actually edit. If I scroll all the way to the beginning of my video. So there I am at the 0:00 second mark of my video. Down here on the timeline, I can see that there's nothing going on yet. And what I mean by that is, let me actually just scroll forward a couple seconds. So right here, you can see some squiggly lines coming in and some words. Those words again are the transcription of my video. So you can see up here, it says testing, testing, testing. And then down here it says testing, testing, testing. And those squiggly lines correspond with my speaking. Those are called sound waves. So it's a visual representation of my voice speaking those words. Now, notice that there is about 30 seconds of silence. If I look at where my playhead is, it says 27.3. So until that very first word, my camera was running. For 27 seconds with nothing going on. So what do I do? Well, I'm gonna scroll out and then I'm gonna scroll to the beginning of my video. And you can see there's no sound waves, there's no transcription. So that's all just empty space while I was kind of getting my camera going and kind of setting up my environment. Scrolling all the way to the beginning and Right there is where the video actually begins. If I put my mouse over the end, and if you zoom in on that, you can see that my mouse turns into a bracket and the open part of the bracket is facing to the right. This is going to be really, really critical. When you hear me talk about the bracket, this is what I'm talking about. So you click right there and when you drag while the bracket is activated, again, it only happens when you're on the— boundary of that clip, then it's actually trimming out the silence. And you can see my clip or my whole video that went from 12 minutes and 40 seconds, I just trimmed out 5 seconds. It's now 12 minutes and 35 seconds. So since I have so much to trim, this is an example of where it would be useful to zoom out. So I'm going to zoom out. So I can see more until I can see in one view where my speaking actually begins. So now that I have this view set, I'm going to click on the bracket and I'm going to drag all the way until it kind of snaps into place. I don't know if you can see that through the recording, but it kind of snaps into place right where that word first starts. And now I'll go ahead and play this for you. And to play the video, we click on this little button right here, or you can press the spacebar. Testing, testing, warmup. This year it seems like— there we go. And you can hit spacebar again to pause it. All right, so now we have the video starting right on my first word. That's what we want. Um, a little mistake that a lot of people make is they'll have a pause Before they start. There's a joke that a lot of, uh, younger people make that they call the millennial pause, making fun of my generation as like old people. Um, because we sometimes, if we're inexperienced at making videos, put a half a second or so before the speaking actually starts. But the standard on the internet is you want it to start right when the video starts. So— Testing, testing, warmup. This year it seems— there we go. And I do the testing, testing, testing thing. Um, that's a, a mic thing because a lot of these digital mics, they have an adjustment period. They are automatically adjusting to the environment. So if you just start talking, sometimes it's really loud at first and then the mic gain adjusts down. So I always do this. I say testing, testing, and then I get into my actual meat of the content. Okay. So now I could take the bracket again and edit out that testing, testing part, but I'm going to show you another fundamental way to edit in Descript, which is to come up to the transcript. So there are those words, testing, testing, testing, warmup. And I just highlighted it. So you can see it's highlighted up on the transcript and down below on the timeline, it's highlighted in purple. So what I can do with it highlighted is simply press delete and it's gone. It's gone from my video completely. So now let's play it. This year, it seems like every couple of weeks there's a— So pretty cool. It just took that out of my video. That is the core functionality of Descript. That is the thing that put Descript on the map and made it different from legacy video editors where you had to do all the editing from the sound waves, believe it or not. It was incredibly, incredibly tedious. So you can do a lot of the editing that you need to do from the transcript, just like that. You could go through your whole video right now and just find all the parts that you want to cut out. And Descript does a couple of things to make this easy for you, like right here. You see the part where I said, you know, is underlined in that blue dotted line right there. That's letting me know that that is what it calls a filler word. So me saying, you know, doesn't add anything to the content of this video. It's a, it's a filler word. It's a crutch similar to words like, um, there's an um right there highlighted in blue. So what I can do is I could go through this whole thing. I could find my filler words. Press delete, and now it's gone. Now, a couple notes on style here. Deleting it from my transcript, it looks good, and it's probably going to sound good with me not saying those words. However, you got to be careful because you could create what's called a jump cut. And if my face is like centered, let's say, before that cut was made, and then I cut out a couple seconds of video, and after that cut, My face is all the way over here. That's gonna look really jarring, and that's what we call a jump cut. So, um, don't assume that it's gonna automatically look great or sound great even. But in editing, there is a process that I call the editing cycle, which is to make a change, back up a second. So I just click backwards in my timeline. Hit play, and I'll probably be back. You're evaluating how that change you just made looked, and if you like it, keep it. And that change actually looked and sounded pretty good, so I will keep that. But if it didn't, if it was jarring, if it looked worse than before, then your best friend in Descript is up here in the top left corner, the undo button. If you click that, It just said that black thing that says undo delete. And you can see my um is back in the transcript and back in the timeline. So very, very critical. Know that you can always click undo to undo your last thing. Additionally, if you are a keyboard person, you can press Command+Z or on, uh, on, that's on Mac. On Windows, it's Control+Z. And that'll undo your last thing. In Descript, by the way, everything is saving as you go. So you never have to click a save button. And as long as you're connected to the internet, as long as you see a check mark up here, that means that your work is saved to Descript's cloud. Everything is backing up with every single click that you make. So you never have to worry about losing work. And you can always undo, you can revert your project back to how it looked at previous points in time. So if you come up to this hamburger menu in the top left corner, you go to File, Version History. Over here on the right side, you can see I started this project 12 minutes ago at 2:04 PM. And if I click View, I can see what this project looked like At that moment in time. And then I can click restore and it resets the video back to how it looked before. Let's say I started making a bunch of mistakes, if that's the case. Otherwise, I can click to return to latest version. And now I'm looking at the latest and greatest version of my project. Okay. Let's go back to the very beginning. And I'm just going to continue to work through this as if I am preparing this for YouTube. So one thing that I actually did for this video, again, this video is doing very well right now. It's probably gonna have 100,000 views by the end of this month, brand new month as I record this, but probably 100,000 views. And so one thing I can do is click on it and you see I have this ugly background. So let's fix that. You don't need to have a nice background. I have this white backdrop sheet behind me that I bought this frame on Amazon for, for $20 or something like that. And what you can do is go to effects, add effect, green screen. And in just a second, it's gonna actually remove my background using AI. So there we go. So now I am just on a solid black background like that. And you can see, I can click on my image and drag myself around, reposition myself. I'll talk more about that in a second. But what I'm going to do first is put a nicer looking background behind me. So if you're not aware, with your Descript subscription, you get access to a giant library of stock media. Stock media is the sometimes generic looking videos and images and sound effects that are prepared for you that you can use to supplement your content. So let me pull in one of those right now. If I come to the media tab on the right side, I click on that. You can see here, there is a video section, Giphy GIFs, images, et cetera. There's also at the top a search bar. So I'm going to click, uh, library. Let's just type that in. And I'm going to come down to images. I'm going to click on show all, and you can see, I have all these nice images of libraries. And I'm just going to see if any of these would be suitable as a background. I'm going to instead type in office and I'm going to click on the second one here. So I click on that. And it automatically adds it to my video. But now there's a couple problems. One, we have black bars on both sides of that image that just got added to our video. So what do we do? If you click on the borders, the, the outside edges of this image, you can see that it's highlighted in purple. And if I click and drag, it automatically Moves the image, makes it bigger proportionally to fill the space. And then I can do the same thing on the left side. And you always want to get rid of those black borders if, if an image doesn't quite fit. And it snaps into the end to fill the entire space when you get close. And so there we go. That's a nice clean fit. It's filling my whole space. But the problem is now we don't see me. It's covering me up. So. This is an extremely important concept in video, which is the concept of layers. If we return to my timeline, you can see that that image is a layer. So our bottom layer here, the one with the words, that's called our script layer. In Descript, there's always a script layer. At least there should be a script layer. If you're speaking, if it's a talking head video, then your speaking layer should be on the bottom. And it should be transcribed just like mine is, and it'll be down here. Anything on top of that is a supporting layer. And so right now I have one supporting layer, which is this image that I added. And when I added it, the default behavior was for it to go on top of everything, which in some cases might be fine, but in this case, I want it behind me. So what do we do? If I click on the image, I right-click and find this layer order button. There's a thing that says bring to front. So you gotta imagine you can have unlimited amount of layers. You could have 10 layers. And if you say bring to front, this'll put the currently selected layer in front of everything. Bring forward will bring it forward one layer at a time. Send backward will put it backwards. one layer at a time, and send to back will put it behind everything. So that's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna click send to back and boom, look at that. Now my video is on top of that background and it looks pretty good. So I'm gonna hit play. Here, it seems like every couple weeks there's a new AI agent. That's fine. Okay, next let's talk about some of the AI tools that can help you Now that you know how to do the manual editing, so you go through the transcript, you do some editing there. Let's talk about some of the AI tools. So if you come over to the right side and you click on this button that says AI tools, you have here all sorts of what I call narrow purpose tools. Narrow purpose, meaning they have one specific function to help you in the editing process. And these are broken down in different categories. So you have a sound good category with things like Studio Sound, which I'm going to show you in a minute. Remove filler words, that'll help you identify all the filler words in your video and take them out with a single click. Generate audio, that is to use AI to make original music for your videos. And then there's a look good section, repurpose, we'll talk about those later. So first of all, the, one of the best features in all of Descript is this one right here called Studio Sound. Click on that. And as soon as I clicked on it, you can see down here, this little thing that's highlighted in blue that says Studio Sound, and there's a little spinning thing next to it. That was it applying it. And it's already done. It only takes a second, even for a 12-minute video. And what Studio Sound does. Is it edits your audio for you. So if you have an air conditioner hum in the background, if you have cars honking, your dogs walking around, it'll take out those background noises to focus on the human voice that it hears. That's a key thing to mention because if you have music, it'll cancel out the music. If you have, you want to get the ambient sounds like birds chirping or things like that, you wouldn't want to use this. But for most people in a home studio where the only thing you want the viewer to hear is your voice, Studio sound's amazing. Now, the only thing you can do with studio sound besides turning it off with that little toggle there is come over to the right side and click on these dials and change the intensity. So it defaults to 100% intensity. And the reason you might want to lower it is sometimes 100% makes you sound robotic. It makes your voice sound flat. And if that's the case, Experiment with lowering it. And a lot of people find really good results at around 70, but it'll depend on your mic, your environment, things like that. Okay. Um, so let me play it and I'm going to listen to the audio and I'm going to toggle on and off Studio Sound while it plays. You're not going to notice a huge difference because I have a good mic. I have a decent room. But the worse that your original audio is, The better Studio Sound is going to be for you. A little bit of work for me, but then it would require a lot more setup and maintenance and stuff to keep it running. And then I found Paperclip and Paperclip was awesome, but I never got Paperclip to do anything really useful for me. And it was really cool, the interface. So I don't know if you could hear that when it, when Studio Sound was off, there was a hum, like it was probably the air purifier in my room running. And then as soon as I toggle it on, it quiets it out and it sounds really, really professional. Okay. So that was the studio sound tool. Again, I, I consider it almost mandatory for almost everyone. Next is the filler word tool. Now that you know how to manually identify them and remove them, let's talk about the automatic way, have AI help you. And that is by clicking on it. And then this thing pops up that says all filler words, and it found 48 in my video. I'm going to click find all filler words once again. And what this does is it shows you, if I click on it, what it found. So it's looking for repeated words. So times that I just repeated myself in it, this little number right here, the 14, 14 tells me that it found 14 instances of that. 10 likes, 10 you knows, 9 ums, et cetera. And then things with no numbers, it didn't find any of those, but it was looking for. So the way I like to use this tool is rather than just blanket deleting 48 filler words is I unselect all and I only select ums and uhs. And this just gives me a lot cleaner result. And so now it found 11. And then you can have it delete, delete and replace it with a gap of silence. I, there's rare cases where you need to do that, but generally not. Ignore is really nice because what it'll do is instead of removing it from the transcript, it'll leave it on the transcript with a strikethrough on it so that you know you got rid of it. And that's actually what I recommend doing. So go ahead and click on ignore. And then there's this thing that says avoid harsh cuts. If you don't toggle that on, it's gonna just cut all the ums and uhs it finds. If you do toggle it on, you can see it's processing again. It's thinking about something. It's looking for times where the um or uh that I'm looking for has enough space between it and the next word to cut out cleanly without sounding bad. 'Cause sometimes the uh is really close to the next word and by cutting it, You would be clipping the word around it. So we don't want that. So I like to toggle that on over here on the right side. You can see, but, um, you can see the 10 that it found and it shows it in context where it appears in the transcript. So if I, and if I click on it more, um, and I'll probably be back, it automatically plays that filler word. In context with a second before it and a second after it. And if I don't want to remove that particular filler word, I can click skip and I could review all of them. But that's just if you want to. Most people don't review and you can just click remove all. And now all those filler words are gone from my video. And if you noticed, my video went from over 12 minutes to now we're below 12 minutes, so we've already cut out quite a bit from this video. Okay, let's go back to AI tools. Next, I'm going to show you shorten word gaps. If you click on that one, this one is a bit similar to the filler words in how it works. So I'm going to click on find all word gaps. And what it's looking for is gaps more than 3 seconds. So anytime there's 3 seconds where I'm not speaking, it's identified that, and there's 12 of those. And I'm actually gonna drop that to 1 second. And by shortening that, it now found 26 instances of that. And then I can choose to shorten it. So it'll take those long gaps and I can shorten it to a time of my specification. I'm gonna say half a second. And then once again, over on the right side, it's a similar setup to the filler word. I can go through these one at a time. I can selectively skip some or choose to, to remove them one at a time. I'm just going to hit shorten all. And 26 word gaps just got removed. And look at that. My video is down to 9 minutes and 19 seconds. So some of my word gaps were probably really long. They were probably 30 or 45 seconds. And so I just cut out quite a bit of my video. Okay. Let's go back to AI Tools. This time to remove retakes. And this time I'm going to hit submit one more time. Underlord is thinking it'll take just a second. And it identified 2 retakes. So the retakes, what that means is if you set a line 2 times in a row. So for example, let's say you're reading off of a teleprompter, you're reading a script, and you messed up a line. What I recommend you do is don't stop the recording, just leave it going and just say the line again. If you have a teleprompter, scroll back, read the line again with the intonation and pronunciation that you wanted. And when you do that, that is considered a retake or Sometimes from the perspective of the AI, it's a repeated word. So you can see here, something is stricken out that says, so from what I've, and then I repeated myself. So from what I've tested, and it's correctly identified that that first one was my bad take. So if I want to remove it, I can click on this little green check mark to accept that edit and has now been removed from my video. If I don't want to remove it, I can click that red X to discard it. Or I can click on the whole box. I can click on the words themselves to see it in my transcript over here. And I can click somewhere and play it. And 10 years from now, it's going to be on. And I like that edit. I'm going to hit accept. And now it's gone. And again, depending on the length of your video and the amount of retakes you have, you might have significantly more or you might have none. It just depends on. Your video and how articulate you are in getting things out how you wanted them to the first time. Okay. Another really useful feature is add chapters. If you click on that one, now we have an option. It asks for a number and the default is auto. So what this is going to do is it's going to look through my entire video and it's going to find distinct chapters or sections of my video. So I like to leave it on auto and I'll hit submit. Underlord is thinking. And these names right here, these, these little slightly darker, larger names are the chapter titles that it's assigned. And so trying early AI agents is one. GrokBot pricing and first impressions is the second one. And you can see the, the gray text is the transcript for that portion, that chapter. Of my video. But what does that really mean? If we come through my transcript here, I had to click add to script to actually add it. And now you can see this bold text on my transcript, as well as down on the timeline, you see that little purple flag. And if I hover over it, it says agent hype and early tests. So those are visual cues for me in different places in my video. Additionally, now that I've added them, if I click on this button right here, this opens up a quick preview of all the chapters and they have timestamps next to them. So there's one starting at 0:00. That's the one right behind the window that says Agent Hype and Early Tests. If I come back to it, there's one in the middle called Fitness and Meal Planning at 4:56. So if I click on it. It scrolls me to that moment in my video. And so it can be really useful if you have a really long video and you're trying to get to a certain point to focus in on your editing at that point, then you can do that. But most importantly of all, in my opinion, is those become chapters in YouTube. So this will automatically, if we export this to YouTube, become the scrollable chapters like I have on the video you're watching. Right now, your viewer can quickly scroll to the key points and focus their, their attention, or, you know, whatever they came to that video for, they can focus in on those parts of the video. So it's a really, really good technique to use to make your videos more accessible for people. Okay. I'm going to click done. And we're back in the AI tools. And now there is a look good section. So right here is a thing called smooth jump cuts. If you remember what I told you about jump cuts, those are the harsh edits where you make a cut and your video changes a lot and it's jarring for the viewer. What this is going to do, if you click on it, is actually cover those up with AI. So it's going to animate your video to make it look like there's no cut happening at all. And when you click on it, Then you see you have a method where you can choose find first. It's just going to find the first instance of a jump cut that needs to happen or a jump cut that needs to be fixed. Or you can say smooth all where it's going to find every jump cut in your video. Because it takes a lot of AI credits, I'm just going to show you for the sake of demonstration, the find first one. And you can choose to have it do your audio and video or audio only. I'm gonna do audio and video and I'm gonna hit submit. Okay, so it found 42 cuts and those cuts were the ones that were made by AI. Um, but if I click on one, it takes me to that part of the video. So I'm gonna back up a couple of seconds before it. I'm gonna hit play. A week and a half. That wasn't a very drastic jump cut. I'm gonna see if we can do better. The day I signed. Okay, that was a big jump cut. Did you see that? So it goes from me looking at the camera to me looking down with my hands up. So that would be a good jump cut to fix. Now I wanna mention about this feature before I show it. It's brand new. Sometimes it works great, sometimes it makes it worse. So I'm going into this, I haven't tested this before, uh, on this particular jump cut. So let's see how this does. I'm gonna hit that little bandaid button there. And it gives me this little notification. I'm gonna say I consent. And now if I look at the transcript, it popped out that video and not only the word where the cut happened, it actually pulled in a word before and a little bit of a, a fraction after the video as well. And that's just to make the AI is just doing that to just keep things smooth when it generates the video. 'Cause it, what it's doing is generating Net new video where there was just an abrupt cut. Now it's kind of animating between how the video looked before that cut and how it looked after that cut. By the way, if you're enjoying this, if you enjoy my teaching style and you want to go deeper into Descript, I have a robust program called Descript Made Easy with 200 lessons on every single feature in Descript. And how to make really, really, really good videos that do really well on YouTube and will grow your business, will promote your course, your book, whatever you want. And it's got an at-your-own-pace DIY component to it with the lessons. And then the main value is we meet 3 times per week on Tuesdays, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings in North America time. And it's open Q&A. So people come and they bring things that they're stuck on. They bring questions about YouTube. They get, we get feedback on YouTube thumbnails, titles, things like that. And we learn from each other. We grow 10 times faster by sharing what's working, what's not working, and experiments we're doing. And most importantly, we have a lot of fun. So if that's of interest, I'm going to leave a link for you in the description of this video. Okay, so, uh, it just finished generating the video, so I'm gonna go ahead and play that and pay attention. I'll make this a little bigger for you. By the way, you can grab this bar in the middle and that makes the video a little bigger. And if you close out of this window on the side, that'll give you a little more real estate. And same thing on the bottom, you can drag that down and just by repositioning it like that, You can open up a lot more space for yourself. So I'm going to drag that down and I'm going to hit play. Was not cheap. The day I signed up, you had to be on. Okay. So that was a bit better. It was at least not so jarring. It wasn't so sudden. It filled in a couple of frames of the video to make it look a little more smooth. So that is a really, really valuable tool in your tool belt. Now there's all sorts of other stuff here for the sake of keeping this tutorial concise. I'm focusing on the most important stuff, but there's an eye contact feature that'll use AI to make it look like your eyes are looking at the camera. There's a thing that'll automatically center you up. Green screen, I've already shown you that removes the background. You don't have to have an actual physical green screen. It'll just use AI to take out your background. Skin smoothing, so you can have it smooth out wrinkles and imperfections and things like that. Again, using AI. And you can generate visuals. So if you've ever used Nano Banana or GPT Image, these AI tools that'll actually create AI images to your specifications, you just give it a prompt and it'll generate an image. You can do that here inside of Descript. Um, blur speaker background, that'll just like it sounds like, it'll take your background and it'll make it blurry. So it looks like it's shot with a really professional camera. This stuff, repurpose, is all about taking your long video. So my video is now down to 9 minutes and 15 seconds. And the create clips, for example, will pull clips out of it. So I can specify, make 5 clips from this. And it'll do that. Um, and then there's a bunch of publishing stuff, so you can have it make a YouTube description for you. You can have it make YouTube thumbnail for you, all sorts of useful AI stuff. And then the very bottom one is related to writing. So brainstorming, writing a script, um, rewriting an existing script if you have it, it can do that type of stuff. If you want to see that stuff hands-on, then I'm going to leave a link in the top right corner of this YouTube video where you can find my playlist where I show you a lot of the AI features. But let's get back into the core stuff here in Descript. If I click on a video, I've already shown you how to expand it using the purple outer edge of it. But let's say I want to make this bigger. which actually I should, 'cause there's a lot of white space above my head. I can grab the purple boundary once again on the top, and if I simply drag up, notice that makes me fill more of the area. So that's resizing what is showing inside of this frame, but now it's created a new problem. I'm slightly off center. So to fix that, I need to reposition myself. And if to do that, I double-click and notice it puts in a grid line over my video and I can slide myself and I can use those, that white line as a reference to put myself in the very center. And that looks better. So I'm going to hit done and that locks it in. Additionally, there is this number above my head when the image is selected that says 100%. Right now the video is at 100% zoom, but I could type in 105 and press enter. And that zooms me in just a little bit and I hit done and that locks it in. I can also do transform. So there's things in here like fill scene. So if you remember those black bars I had, if I had clicked fill scene, that would've also resized my image to fill the whole thing. Or I can do bottom left, for example, and you see it puts me into the bottom left, but I'm gonna go back to transform position. And once again, fill scene. And then I can go to transform flip. For example, if I click on this one, that mirrors me horizontally. I could also do vertically, which I don't want. Um, And I could rotate myself 90 degrees at a time with that rotation one. So again, I'm just going to re-get myself a little bit bigger there. I don't want my head to be chopped off, but you, you always want a little bit of a, about a fist length above your head to the top of the video. Okay. And I'm just going to make myself smaller, put myself off to the side. And the reason I did that is to click on the layer behind me. So if I click on once again, this, this picture of an office and I shrink that, notice there is a black background behind me. Now, if I want to change that again, the background has to be visible, but if you have a visible background and you want to change it, then right below the editor, there's this thing that says background. You click on that. And there's a couple default colors like white. If I click on that or red, and those were set for my account, yours will be different, but I can click on this color wheel and now I can choose any color of the rainbow. I can go to green. I can choose different things down here. There's also a little eyedropper where you could choose a specific color. So if I choose like a, a brown from the background and match it, I can do that. And I can also do gradient. And the gradients are where it shifts from, in this case, like a blue to like a greenish orange. So you have all sorts of flexibility with colors. And these colors, this system of like the solid and the gradients that you can choose, I'm going to click the X, close out of that. That also applies to text layers. And shapes. So for example, if I go to element and I click on a circle, by clicking on it, it adds it. And the circle is white by default. But what I can do now with it selected is click on the menu that pops up over it, click on fill, click on that little color wheel, go to gradient. And choose a color and X out of that. And now I have a color that I can move around my screen. I can click it and I can drag it around and reposition it. I can click on the white dots in the corners and resize it like that. So with most objects or many objects in Descript, you can recolor them, resize them. Et cetera. And also in the elements tab here above our shapes, and by the way, you can see you also have triangles, squares, stars, et cetera. Up above that is text. So I can click on title and it drops in a blank piece of text and I can move it around. Once again, I can click in there, double-click in there and say, this is my text like that. And in the menu above this one, you can type in a font size. So I'm going to say like 150. Nope, still too big. There's 100. And you can change the font. You can change how bold it is, the size, once again, the color. And I'm just going to drag this so it's more centered over my image like that. And there's even, there's dynamic text like captions, there's waveforms, there's all sorts of stuff that I don't have time to go into all of it in this video. But again, check out my Descript Made Easy course. I would love to have you join us and teach you everything there is to know about this software. A couple more things I want to finish on before I actually export this bad boy. So up here at the top. This little thing that this little pink section is my AI credits and my media minutes. That won't be there by default. You have to go into your settings. So hamburger menu, settings, scroll down on here. And this, this last one that says always show usage info, toggle that on. And you'll be able to see this pink thing up here. And what that is, is my AI credits. So I'm almost out of AI credits for the month. I only have 68 left. And many, many, many features in Descript use AI credits. So all the stuff in the AI tools that I've shown you today use AI credits. So if I click on this pink thing, you can see here that video regenerate, the last thing I did a few minutes ago, used 3 credits. So you can see a log of your usage here. And I started the month with 800 credits. I'm on the Creator plan. That's like the middle tier. It's below the Business plan, but it's above the lowest paid plan. So, and by the way, we can talk about which plan is right for you. I talk about that in my course as well. But 800 is what most people are on, the Creator plan. It's the most common plan. And so I use a lot of AI, so I do blow through this quite quickly. Um, I also have accounts that are on the business plan and those last, you have about double as many credits. So I'm going to close out of that. And in addition to the AI tools, remember I called these narrow purpose tools. They have one functionality, one thing that they do for your video. That's as opposed to the general purpose tool, which is the one in the bottom right corner here called Underlord. Click on that and it opens up a prompt box. And this is quite literally Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or your AI tool of choice. So if you click on this thing that says auto, there it is. You can see I have Claude, GPT-5.5, Gemini. Or if you hover over more models, you even have Grok, et cetera. So all of the major frontier American models are here ready to be used. And with each one, if you hover over on the right side, there's a little coin stack. And if it's just a single coin in that icon, you can see a little thing pops up over it that says low cost. That means it's a low cost AI model. AI credit-wise. It doesn't cost you anything extra. It burns down your monthly allocation. But if you use the latest and greatest, like at the time of recording, Fable 5, then if I hover over that, it's a high-cost model. So, um, all those things can be set. Now you can also generate videos inside of Descript. You can generate music, you can generate images. There's all sorts of stuff that you can create using AI. And if you go into your settings, if you go into your settings, click on settings and click on AI models, you can choose your default models right here. So for Underlord, if you have a favorite model that you like to use, like if you're, for me, I like Claude Opus. So that is actually the one that I usually have set. I'll have Claude Opus 5 as my Underlord default. And then for the transcription service, it uses other tools, third-party tools to transcribe your video into text. And so you can choose ElevenLabs, Rev AI. Now, why would you choose different ones? Well, they have different pros and cons. So if you hover over the little i next to it, it tells you what it's good at. And what it's not so good at. So in the case of ElevenLabs Scribe V2, it says more accurate transcripts overall, better at proper names and technical terms, better with accents and unclear speech. RevAI V2 supports UK spelling. So if you're from the UK and you want UK spelling in your transcript, make sure you're using that. And then, um, V3, very good overall, but slower to transcribe. So there's always trade-offs. But you can make informed decisions from the available models. Now, as you know, if you followed the AI space for any amount of time, this stuff is changing extraordinarily fast. And what is good at the time I record this on September 1st, 2026 is going to be different on September 2nd, 2026, and completely different on January 1st, 2027. So. You know, uh, base all of this off of what you're actually seeing in the tool on the day you're actually trying this. Okay, so next, when it comes to image generation, you have different models. Again, this is what we have as of today. I like Nano Banana Pro. Video, you got different choices, AI speech, etc. If we go back to the General tab, I'm just going to go over a couple other settings that might be important for you. One is the default project. So if you're only making audio, then you can make your default project audio, but I typically make video. So I use video. That's going to be when you click on new project, what do you want it to be? AI speaker. That's a little bit beyond the scope of what I have time to go into today, but you can actually take parts of your video. And let's say you said September 1st, 2026. But you meant to say September 5th, 2026. You can actually edit your video so that it says the correct date. However, to do that, you need to train it on your voice. And so that's what that means by AI speaker. Appearance, this is if it's going to be light mode or dark mode like that. I leave it on system, which is, means that at sunset, my system switches to dark mode. And at sunrise it switches to light mode. And then Descript goes with my system. Default transcription language, you can leave it on auto if you want it to just decide for you. Otherwise you can manually tell it, I want UK English only, or I want Catalan, et cetera. Then you can do that. Um, I won't go into the rest of those now. I'm going to close out of this. From here, what do you do? Well, you can. Tell Underlord to help you with your video. You can— this is an AI agent. It can see your video, it can do things on your video for you. Anything, almost anything that you as a human editor can do, Underlord can do for you, and a lot of times faster and better. So you can describe to it in plain English, go through my entire video and make this look like somebody else's video or make it look like a video that we've done in the past. And you can actually save templates. I'm going to leave a link in the top right corner right now about how to make templates, AI templates. That's also a service I provide. But you can get to the point where an Underlord template edits your entire video for you. Almost, I'd say 80 to 90%. It's not quite 100% at my quality standard, but You can have it do a significant amount and you just tell it in plain English. So do this to my video and Underlord will do that. Okay. So from here, you would just go through your whole video using the techniques I've shown you today. Cut out the stuff you don't want in your video, add in the images, add in the text, add in the shapes that you want to highlight. And once you're all done, your video is looking and sounding Great. Then what you need to do is come up to the export button in the top right corner. You always have to come up here to do something with this video. So I click on that and you can see I have different options here. The first one is video where I'm going to actually send the video somewhere, but you can also do audio only. So if this is a podcast and you just want the audio, you can do that. Timeline would be as if you're going to take this into another tool. So some people do what's called a rough cut. They just remove stuff in Descript because it's so easy with the transcript and the AI. And then they put it into a more professional tool like Pro Tools, Final Cut, Premiere, et cetera. Um, or you can just export the transcript. So only the word part of it, like let's say you're going to put this on a blog, then you can do that. Or you can do the subtitles only. This isn't as useful as it once was because pretty much all the platforms do automatic subtitling now. But a couple of years ago, before that was the case, this was super, super useful. So let's return to the video tab. Now, if we come down to destination, this is where the video is going to actually get sent. The default is Descript web link. This is extremely useful. This is a share page that Descript will make that you can send to your friends or clients or whatever it might be. And you can actually see the video at that link. So I'm going to go ahead and demonstrate that for you. Below that is the resolution. 4K. I shot this in 4K. So it says max right there. That's going to be the highest I can export it to. For the sake of it being fast, I'm going to drop this down to 720. So 4K is going to be the highest, 480p is going to be the lowest. And I'm just going to go a little bit above the lowest quality. And you can choose if this is a public video, if it's only people with the link, or if you have to explicitly invite somebody with their Descript account, that would be project access required. But I'm going to click publish and it's going to process for just a second. And then it's going to present me with a link. That I can open up to see this video online. So this link right here, I could share with somebody and they can open it up. So I can click on this little globe right here. And that actually opens up a page where I can see this video. I could, so this is what your client, your boss, your editors that you're working with, they can see. And it's currently rendering, so I won't be able to play it, but this is it. This is the entire video. Where somebody could actually play it. Let's go back to Descript and let's go back to export and back to destination. Local export is just going to download it directly to your hard drive. So you would just click on that. Current composition would be just this video. Again, you set the resolution and then you hit export, and that's going to download it to your computer as a .mp4 file. Always a .mp4 file, which is great. It's a widely compatible file that works on all the social medias, works on course platforms, everywhere that you need it. It works great. Next destination, you can go straight to YouTube. So here you can set a title that can be different than the title inside of Descript. This can be YouTube title here. And then you can set a description. Now here's what's really cool about those chapters I showed you earlier. Remember those chapters we made? Those automatically go into the YouTube description that's going to get published. And when it's on YouTube, when it's in the description, those automatically become clickable for the viewer. So that's what I was talking about with that. And you can put in your title here by just typing in, put in your title here, like I'm doing. Now, like that, but you don't have to. And in fact, I don't, I just post, post this, uh, as it is leaving very important here, access on private so that nobody sees it yet. And then I click sign into YouTube. That'll open up a thing to connect your Google account to Descript. You'll sign into YouTube and then you'll post it to your YouTube channel. And then inside of YouTube Studio. Is where I actually put in the final thumbnail, the final title, the final description that I want. And I actually play the video on YouTube first. This is very important. Play the video on YouTube first so that you can see that everything looks how you expect it to. 99% of the time it does, but sometimes you realize that you made a typo in the text or something went wrong. In that case, you can still go back to Descript. Make the changes, do the export again. And this is super, super fast. This is a really, really good way to do it. And then once everything is checked out, you're like, I love this video. I'm going to publish it. Then you just change it inside of YouTube Studio to public and the whole world can enjoy your masterpiece. Moving on, you can actually send a video to Google Drive. So if you got stuff that's Private, it's just for your business. It's just for clients, whatever. You can send it to Google Drive. And below that are all these different podcasting platforms like Buzzsprout, Captivate, et cetera. And below all that is marketing stuff. So you can send stuff to Restream. You can send stuff to HubSpot, Headliner, eWebinar, all these different fantastic places. So that's it. You have now taken a video from start to finish, and I know we covered a lot, but at the same time, we barely scratched the surface. Like, this is the 80% that you need to make your first video, but like anything, it's a learning process. There's layers to this. There are— I mean, you, you can see how many buttons there are that we didn't press for everything that I showed you. There are 10 more buttons and things that you can do to polish up your videos, make them look better. Editing videos is like learning to drive a car. Like at first you're hyper-focused on the mechanics, the tactical techniques of where was that button that I needed to press to split a clip or to delete this thing, but then it becomes muscle memory. And just like you're, you know, you learn to hit the clutch and shift the gear really quickly and you're not even thinking about it, you arrive at your destination without even realizing, like, I don't even remember driving. That's how it is with editing videos. You're cutting things, you're adding things, you're dropping things in and retiming them and resizing them and making them louder. You're doing all that on muscle memory, but it takes time. Like anything, it takes time, it takes practice. And so take your time. Don't get frustrated. Remember that undo button. That's your best friend. And most importantly, join me in the Descript Made Easy course. If you really want to get really, really good at the art of video.