Ross Zeiger explains why a Descript layout stopped working as expected. When you apply a layout, it adds placeholder layers meant to be replaced with media. The mistake was setting a layer to Placeholder instead of Keep Content, which made the layout show a generic placeholder instead of the intended video.
Had a question come up on the Descript community group coaching call this morning. And the student asked, he made a layout and it worked once. And then after that it was broken and it wasn't truly broken. Let me show you what was going on. If I apply a layout like this one right here, and I click on that, it applies what's called a placeholder layer. And that is what my student thought was broken. He's like, that's not what I told it to put in there. And actually it was, he just didn't realize it. So let's break it down. First of all, this placeholder layer, if you haven't seen it before, it is just like the name implies. It's a placeholder for other types of media. So when you see this, you can click on it and you can say add media, and then you can replace that exact size, the rounded corners, the positioning, every attribute. About that placeholder, you can drop in a photo or another piece of media. It could be a video, whatever you want over it. So like, for example, I could, again, I clicked on add media. I could go to stock media and then I could choose a video and it replaces that placeholder in place in the exact attributes with the same rounded corners. Everything about it is the same, except for that it now displays that image. So the confusion where this went wrong for this student was if I click on a scene, I right-click and I say save scene as new layout. It opens up this set of options on the right side. We can give it a name so I could say river video over Shoulder, something like that to describe this layout that I'm saving. You can categorize it and you can choose what layout pack to save it to. I'm not gonna go into all that right now. What I am gonna go into is the layers. So every single layer that is in this scene, you need to choose over here on the right side if it's gonna be a placeholder, if it's gonna be identical to the content that is displaying. Or if you're gonna leave it out. So if I choose placeholder, rather than it demonstrating this video of the river, it's going to be that placeholder element. If I choose keep content, then it's gonna be exactly this content, which is what my students should have chosen. And then lastly, you can say leave out, and this layer will not appear in the finished layout. At all. If you want to be a part of my community and join these 3 times per week group coaching calls, click the link down below for more information.
