A step-by-step guide to publishing from Descript to YouTube without losing your video. First render it on Descript's web link, then use the web-share flow to sign into Google. Publish as private first to review before going public, and watch for occasional Descript outages.
Back with another descript tutorial today. Why publishing to YouTube isn't working for you and what to do to make it work. First thing to point out is that sometimes the system is down, the system that allows you to publish. And you can find that on status. Descript.com and you can see all the different things here, the different services and their uptime. And you can see, here's the publishing one. And on December 15, there was an outage. I actually remember that I was on at that time. And you couldn't publish to YouTube. So that's something that can happen not often. 99.99% of the time that's not the case. But this is something to check. And this goes for other services as well. If you're having a problem with your account, if you're having a problem with transcription, then you can check this page. So assuming that all systems are functional, the service is operating as it should be, then I'm going to show you how to publish it and where most people get it wrong. So here's my video. This is what I want to put on YouTube and what I need to do is go to Publish. Most people just go straight to YouTube and that works sometimes, but it's a little spotty. It's like you have a probably 60% success rate if you just try to go directly to YouTube. So I recommend that you do before that is you publish to the web link. So go ahead and go to Publish and then hit the publish button. It'll say published and then you don't get a lot of feedback in descript. Like it just, it just tells you publish, it doesn't tell you the status. And so the way to see the status is to open up the share page by clicking on that button and it opens it up in your browser. And there's our video. It's only 12 seconds long, so it's already rendered. If it wasn't, it would say right here, rendering, processing almost ready. And then once there's no signs and you can play it, then you know that you're all set. So that video has been uploaded and completely rendered by descript. And if you don't want anyone to see it, you can just say project access required. You can make it private and secure. And if you're on creator or pro plan with descript, you don't have to worry about storage limits for the most part. Once you've done that, then the processing to upload it to YouTube will happen really quickly. And how you can set your thumbnail Right here. You can upload a picture or you can choose the exact frame that you want to draw your thumbnail from in this video. You can set your title, you can set description, including your markers, which become your chapters in YouTube. And you can have, you can even have AI do that inside of descript again, I've done other videos about that. You can set the category, you can set the tags, and you can set whether it's private, public or unlisted. Recommend publish to private so you have a chance to review it before it goes live. We've done all that and now we go to sign in and it'll open once again in your browser. And then find the channel. If you have several channels, find the one that you want to publish. To click on it, hit continue, give it all the information. And by the way, this stuff does not get saved. You'll have to do this every single time that you publish to YouTube. So every single video, you'll have to sign in to your Google account, choose the channel and then hit continue. And then it brings you back to descript. And now here's the important next step is hit publish. And you can see this little toast that says your video is being published. And look at that. Only took a few seconds and it'll it when it works, it'll be quick because you've already done all the rendering in descript. So if it takes more than about a minute or so even for a long video, if it's completely done rendering on descript side, it should be really quick to publish. And the problem with all this is descript doesn't give you any status aside from this right here. And a lot of times it fails between receiving this one and the publish successfully one, you don't get any like percentages or loading bars or anything like that. So yes, the visual feedback is missing. But if you've done everything as I outlined you, published first to the web link, then you should have this working correctly on your side. Hopefully that helps. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions. And thanks for watching.
