The Shockingly Fast Way to Edit Video in 2025 (Descript Tutorial)

If you've been wanting to make videos, but you feel overwhelmed by all the different fancy tools out there, Descript is for you. Descript makes creating videos easy and fast. In the next 22 minutes, you're going to learn how to start, edit and publish your very first video. When you first open descript, this is the view that you'll get. This is called your Drive view. And this is where all of your projects are going to live, as well as up here in the top right, this button that says new project. This is where we're going to start a brand new project. So click on that button, click on Video project, and it's going to open up a brand new project. From here you can name your project. So I'll call this Practice project. And then there's this big upload file button. So you can drag and drop files into here. You can click on it to browse through your computer like this. You can hit this record button to record straight into descript. But I'm going to show you how to just bring in files that you already have. So I'm going to take these two video files, I'm going to select them both, I'm going to drag them into descript. You'll see everything turns blue and it says drop anywhere to transcribe. So as soon as I release, it's going to start. It's going to put those two projects or two files into here and it's going to ask me to label who the speakers are in here and it's me. So I'll just select my own voice or my own name. And if you don't have an AI speaker trained, which is something we'll talk about later, then just type in your name. So say Ross and Ross and it's in English. Do not click two files into a multi track sequence. Unless this was a podcast where you had two separate audio tracks for two separate people. And always ask before detecting speakers. That's fine. And I'll hit done. And it's already starting to transcribe that first video. You can see it's got that slash and then these dots. That's going to be my first video. It's already 50 done transcribing and my second one is at 0%. And these slashes are called scenes. And you can see here on the left, there's scene one and scene two. And scenes are how we divide up our project. You can think of them as slides in a PowerPoint. So if you make a change to scene one, then it's not going, going to apply to scene two. It'll make more sense as we go. And you can see that these files are uploading. So down here in the bottom right, it says uploading. And then the name of the file and how many gigabytes out of the total size of that file is. Is done. So it's 80, 83% done uploading. And we don't have to wait for that to finish to go ahead and start. You can see if I click somewhere, it'll already show a preview of my video and I can just jump right in and start editing even before that's done. Although I don't have the transcript yet, so that will make it a little bit trickier. But I do have the transcript for the first video out of my two. So what I'm going to do, the way that I'm going to start editing is I'm going to do audio cleanup first. So I'm going to just listen to this. I'm going to see how the audio quality is, if it's too loud or too quiet, or if there's a bunch of background noise. I'm listening for all of that. And I'm going to show you in a second how we're going to fix that up outside of the Golden Gate Park. And I'm waiting for. Okay, so in this case, that's me talking outside. And I hear cars going by, I hear traffic. So what I'm going to do is come up to the top right here, to this thing that it says Underlord. And Underlord is all of your AI features. You can think of it as your AI Assistant. And under Underlord, you can see this section that says Sound Good and this thing that says Studio Sound. So Studio Sound is magic. As soon as I click on it, it starts applying. And you can see right here, under Audio Effects, it says Studio Sound. And it's now toggled on. And what this is going to do, it's going to take a couple seconds to apply here, but this is going to cancel out all of my background noise and isolate my voice so it sounds like I'm in a studio. And it does a really good job most of the time. If it doesn't do a good job, I'm going to show you how to fix it once it's done applying. And with Descript, everything is always saving to the cloud, so you never have to worry about hitting save. Or I could close out of this and things are going to continue processing in the background. So I'm just going to go on to my next step, which would be to do a rough cut. So I'm just going to look over my transcript here and cut out anything that I don't need. So right off the bat I see these dots right here. That tells me that there's no speaking there yet. So that was me just giving it a second before I start speaking and then I start with the word. All right, so let me just, let me just play that. All right, I'm here at. So I'm just going to get rid of that. I'm going to get rid of that part before I start speaking and I'm going to get rid of the word. All right, there we go. Just highlighting it as if it's a word document and pressing delete on my keyboard. And it's gone. And it's gone from my video as well. So here's what it looks like. Now I'm here at Funston and Fulton just outside of. There we go. And Studio sound has also finished applying. So you can hear how it sounds with the studio park. And I'm waiting for. And here's what it is. Waymo. The Waymos are these self driving taxis that they have here in San Francisco. So you can see it takes out all that background noise, but it's a little bit intense. It makes my voice sound a little bit robotic and flat. And so what I'm going to do with Studio Sound, there's only one setting that you can do and it's this right here. If you click on that dial, that little dial icon, there's this intensity 100%. All you can do is dial it down between 0 and 100%. So I find that about 70% usually works pretty well. So let's hear how that sounds. Waymo. The Waymos are these self driving taxis. Still sounds a little bit intense for my taste. So I'm going to lower this to like 55% that they have here in San Francisco. And this one is going to take me into the center. So there we go. I'm going to go ahead and stick with that. By the way, with editing. Editing is this cycle of making a change, listening back to it. If you like the change, keep it. If you don't like the change, keep changing it until you do. And that's it. You can't really know. Like I have a lot of experience so I know to try 70%. But if you're just kind of figuring things out for the first time, just throw in a number, see how it sounds. If you don't like it, keep Adjusting until it works. Now, we got Studio Sound applied, and the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come back to Underlord. But before I do that, I want to point one more thing out. Notice on my transcript that there's some parts that are underlined in blue. Blue underlines indicate filler words. So these are. These could be ums. They could be words like kind of sort of like well, is right there. Repeated words like I said your your two times in a row. So descript identifies all of those as filler words. There's an and so the next one I'm going to show you if you come up to underlord is right here. It's called Remove Filler words third from the top. Click on that and you can see it now highlighted all of those filler words in yellow, and it found 18 in total. And if I click on this thing that says all filler words, here's what it found 12 times where I repeated myself three likes, one, so one, one. Well, and the longer your video, the more off the cuff your video is. I've seen videos that are two hours long that have 1800 filler words. So this can be a lifesaver for editing it, especially the longer and the more filler words you use. So one of my best practices here, though, is I'm going to get rid of the repeated words. I'm going to get rid of likes. I'm going to get rid of so's the only thing I'm going to get rid of is, and I only have one of them, so it's only going to get rid of that one. I just find that some of those other words are a little bit too much. So once I narrowed down my list, there's just that one instance of it. And what I'm going to do, delete. If I click delete and then remove all, it would delete all the instances of the filler words. But if I click ignore, it's going to still remove it from my video, but it's going to leave it on my transcript. And I'll show you how to do that and why. So I'll hit remove all and notice that it's still on my transcript so that I can maintain awareness that something was gotten rid of. But there's this back button where I can restore it and it brings back that word or and I just removed it again. Or I can hit delete to get rid of get it off of my transcript. Now, the reason I always Recommend Doing ignore vs delete is because if that cut is too drastic, if your words are getting choppy, then you can bring it back. And that is a filler word that you might not want to get rid of because it just, it just doesn't make sense to get rid of it. That's why I recommend do ignore but versus delete. Now, when you make a cut, there's these vertical gray lines before the word. There's two vertical dashes there on both sides of it. And that just represents on your transcript that a cut was made there. The next thing I would do is probably just a full rough cut. I would just play through this whole video. I would just find all the parts that are definitely going to get cut out. So, like, right off the bat, I see these dots. As I mentioned before, those dots are places where no speaking was detected. So let me just play that. So, yeah, that was just no speaking right there. So I'm just going to highlight it, hit delete, and it's gone. Same thing right here. It's a bunch of dots. And there's a tool for that as well. If you come to underlord. And then this thing that says shorten word gaps, this looks very similar in the format to how the, the filler word removal tool was. And what this is looking for instead of filler words is parts where you're not speaking. So by default, it's looking for three seconds or more of silence. But you can type in. You can click in there and type any number you want. So I could type in a one, for example, and it's going to find 71 instances where there's one second or more of no speaking. And I can see on the right side here all of those instances. And if I click on one first ride, it'll play it in context. So it'll play a second before, it'll play that silence, and then it'll play a second after. And in this video, I was showing the inside of a robotic taxi. So there's a lot of moments where I'm not speaking. I'm just showing the screen or I'm showing the streets going by. And so I'm actually not going to use the filler word removal tool on this particular video, but you can see how that would be useful. And you can click shorten to shorten just that one instance, or you can click shorten all to just blanket all 71. Just remove all of those word gaps. And this one here, by the way, is what you're going to shorten it to. So let me make that A little bigger. It's going to shorten it to one second in this case. But I could type in half a second, I could type in zero to just completely get rid of that gap and that'll do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Otherwise, once you've gotten through those tools, the next thing you can do is just play through this and do a rough cut. If there's a whole part that you don't need, like, let's say this whole paragraph here doesn't add to my narrative, I can just highlight that like so and click delete and it's gone. And with descript, this is very important. This relieves a lot of anxiety for my clients. You can always undo things. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is completely deleted. So I can hit undo on my computer. I can right click. Actually, I'll need to come up to the menu, edit, undo. And it restored my previous movement. And I can do that infinitely. I can keep coming back here and keep undoing all of my previous edits, or I can do the opposite and go, file, redo, file, redo, file, redo. And I'm back to where I was. Additionally, if I come up to this top and go to file, there's this thing called version history. And if you've ever edited a Google document before, or even Word, things like that, there's a version history where it's saving how your project look at a certain moment in time. So here it is, October 16th at 8:51am that's when I started this recording 10 minutes ago. And if I click View, it shows me how that project looked at that moment in time. And if I click Restore, it'll revert my project back to that. And then if I want to just go back to my latest version, I just click this orange bar at the top, return to latest version, and now I'm back where I was. So in multiple ways, you. You can always undo mistakes. So never fear messing something up irrevocably. Irrevocably. So next that's. We've. We've gotten a solid amount of editing done. We've done a lot of the. The base work. I haven't even shown you the timeline yet. If you come down to the bottom left corner, click this button that says show Timeline. This is how most traditional video editors work is off of this timeline where you see the audio file represented with these sound waves. And if you click on it, then you've now selected your script layer. Your script layer is the layer that gets transcribed. It's you can see the words down here, like the word you corresponds with these sound waves as well as if I move my cursor down here, this blue line is called my playhead. And you can see it also corresponds with the the blue line here in my transcript. So starting from the word you, if I click this play, you don't have to worry about some crazy human driver. It plays from that point. And if I select like this word, this sentence that says you don't have to worry about some crazy human driver. It also selects it down here in the timeline. And if I delete it, you can see it's gone in both places. I'm going to go ahead and undo that, go to my settings, edit, undo, and it's back. Okay. The other thing you can do with editing from the timeline down here is you can grab a word like the word you, and right here before it, you see there's no sound waves. Visually, I can tell that there's just no speaking right there. So I can grab the word, you click it and drag it to the left. And that's going to get rid of that part of the video, that silent part where there's no speaking. I can also get rid of words that way. Like, I could click on the word to and drag it over the words before it, and it gets rid of that from the video, but I'm going to undo that. And the other thing you can do is click on this boundary. So this point right here, this gray line all the way to the next cut is called a clip. And if I put my mouse right on the boundary of that clip, it turns into that bracket open to the right. And if I click and drag to the right, it's going to get rid of words to the right. If I drag it back to the left, it's going to restore those words. So it's never actually gone. It's always there in the background, and you can always bring it back. And same with that gap that I got rid of. If I put my mouse here on this, on the other side of the boundary. So notice if it's on the the right side of the boundary, it's open to the right. And if I put on the left side of the boundary, it's open to the left. So if I click and now drag to the right, it's going to restore some of that silent part of the video. And if I drag to the left, it's going to start deleting that part of the video. So there's a lot of different ways that you can you can edit using either the timeline or the transcript. The transcript, you can do 80% of what you need to do. And that's more familiar for most people if you're coming from a background using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, things like that. Now you know how to clean up your transcript, get rid of parts that you don't want, get rid of filler words, all that kind of stuff. Oh, and I have a little glitch right here where it's not showing my sound waves. So this sometimes happens, and this is an important lesson. Just simply refresh the page. There we go. I've restarted it. So just like any software you know, descript is prone to errors, and sometimes a simple refresh will do wonders. Or close your browser and reopen it and things should be working properly again. Okay. And to go a little deeper on some of the audio settings that you can do if you click on your script layer. So you'll select your script layer and then come over here to this thing that says layer on the right side. This is where you can change your audio levels. So right now it says negative 2 decibels. Descript will automatically auto level your audio based on maybe it's way too loud and then it's going to lower it to a negative number, or maybe it's way too quiet and it's going to boost it to a positive number. But generally it's going to be somewhere around zero. So if it's too quiet for you in playback, you can bump it up by just typing in a number like I put in +5. And if you notice, my sound waves got a lot bigger and it's now going to be a lot louder. I wonder how there must be. And that's a little bit too loud. It's getting a little bit blown out. So I'm going to lower that to like negative two. As I said before, it's all a matter of making a change. Listening to it. If you like it, keep it. If you don't, keep changing it. That's something I teach over and over in my course and to the students I work with below that you have your audio effects, so you have your studio sound that we turned on previously. Opacity, this is going to be for the visual component. So right now it's at 100%. You can see it at 100. Opacity. If you dial it down all the way to zero, zero is going to be not showing at all. And then everything in between is going to be some. Some level of opacity. In between size and position. So this is the height and width. W and H is your height and width in pixels of your video. This is a 1080p video. So it's at a height of 1080 and a width of 1920. And then X and Y, this is the position. So if I click in here and move it around, the X and Y coordinates change and I can change it here as well by typing in numbers and clicking on this video as well. You can see these little white dots up here as well as this, this purple boundary, purple border. I can select that, grab the edges and make it smaller. Click and drag to make it smaller. Or I can click these white dots, make it smaller, make it bigger. And as I do that, these numbers change correspondingly. And then beyond that you can add a border, you can add a shadow, all these different things to your video. There's also animations, which is beyond the scope of this beginner tutorial, but it's something I work with a lot of clients with. I do one on one tutoring by the way. So if you want to go deeper into the features of descript and have time with me one on one, check the link in the description and you can book some time with me. After you've gone through your whole video, you've made all the cuts you want, you've edited things change. The volume then is to publish this, to share this with the Internet. So click on this publish button in the top right corner. It's this black publish button and there's two terms to know here, export and publish. Export is going to put this video onto your computer's hard drive and you can publish it as a video, as an audio only. You can publish it as a GIF timeline, which would put it into another editing software, transcript only, which could be like a Word document or subtitles, which is a synced subtitle file that you can put onto YouTube or video platforms. Publish this web link. One is going to generate a URL that you could share with people so they could watch your video from anywhere in the world. YouTube obviously is going to publish directly to YouTube and so on. I always recommend start by publishing to the web link. Descript works extremely fast when you start by publishing to the web link. So just click on that publish button and if you, if you don't want to share it with anyone else, just make sure to set that to project access required. That's going to be your most restrictive access level and to make sure that no one sees it. And then once it's published, then you can download it right here. This is the fastest way to download the project to your computer's hard drive. Once it's been published to the web link, it does all the processing on descript servers, and then you can just hit download and it's going to save that project really, really fast. Now that you're an expert with descript, you've made your first project. I recommend check out my Playlist on Gear, where I show you how to choose the right camera, microphone, lighting, all that kind of stuff as you're getting started creating videos, you can find that playlist right here.