You're Using Descript WRONG (If you aren't using TEMPLATES!)

This is a template. This is a template. That thing right there, the YouTube like thing. That's a template. Guess what this is? That's a template. Templates are the secret to getting the most out of descript. The YouTube like and subscribe that you just saw, for example, is a template. It looks simple, it's just two moving pieces on your screen. But inside of my project, it consists of 10 different layers, which means if I had to make that every single time I use it, that would be a huge waste of time. Plus there's the chance that I don't recreate it perfectly every single time. So templates give us speed and consistency. Oh, that's another template. In this video, you're going to learn three ways to make templates, plus one bonus method. That's not a true template, but it's super useful to know. Let's see how it works. I'm now inside of a new project. This is a brand new project. And to apply a template, you go to these four squares icon at the top. Click on it, and then you can see all the different templates that I've made in the past. And what I'm going to show you is that YouTube like and subscribe one. So you select it and then you select it again and it applies it. And if I show my timeline, you can see that this is 10 different layers, including the little popping sound. So let me go ahead and play it and you can see how this looks in practice. And so, rather than applying all these 10 different layers with their own animations each and going and finding the stock sound, applying it, matching up the timing, I simply clicked it once inside of the template and it's now applied. So you can see how if you have a lot of different brand things, like you have a title screen, an intro and outro, all of those can be templatized and you can save yourself hours. So let's talk about how to make templates. There's three ways. The first and simplest way is inside of your project, like I am right now. I can go to the scene thumbnail. And right now there's only one scene thumbnail. It's this one right here that says number one. And I can click on it. Let me resize this, make it a little bigger. So let's say I have a scene like this one that is already set up and I want to make this into a template. I want this to become a reusable property. I can come over to the scene thumbnail, I can right click on it. This properties Menu pops up, and I can hit Save to Template. And then these are all the different folders of templates that I have. I can hit Create new template, or I can save it to an existing one. I already have this one called YouTube, like, so I'll save it in there, and then I can click Add to Template, and I get this little toast that says saving template. And what it does is it pops it up inside of the templates. This is a new window. It looks just like a project, but this is what pops up. It's a template view. And you can see it's a template because of these squares right here. The first one I was working on doesn't have those. It's called templates, but it doesn't have those template icons, which is the same one that you got right there. And that's what's kind of confusing about templates in descript is it looks the exact same as a project. So anyways, I saved this inside of the folder called YouTube, like Subscribe with pop. And then to be able to use this in other projects, I would have to publish changes. And you can see here, there's the untitled scene. That's the one that I just made, and then the first one that I made. And each of these, there's two of them correspond to the scenes inside of this folder called YouTube, like Subscribe with pop. So I could call this one YouTube like number two or something like that. And then I can hit share publicly, Share with drive or private, which means only I have access. Share with Drive means that any editors additional seats in my drive would have access to it. And share publicly means that it'll generate a web link that I could put on my website. I could share it with anyone, whether or not they're inside of my drive, which, by the way, on descriptmastery.com templates, I have a bunch of downloadable templates available for free. So go check that out, and you can download some templates. So when you got everything labeled and you're. You're done making your template however you want it, you hit publish changes. And now it is published. And if I click back over to my project, here's my project again, it looks the same as the template view. So this is why this is confusing. The only difference is the template squares at the top right, top left. And now I can see my YouTube like number two is in my template menu, and I can apply it with the click of a button. And there we go. Okay, so that was the first way to make a template, which Is again right clicking on a scene thumbnail and clicking save to template. The second way to apply a template isn't actually creating it yourself, but it is using descript's built in templates. I'm going to show you that. So I created a new scene. It's just a blank scene. My scene number three right here. I'm going to come back up to the templates icon. At the top, there's four little squares. Click on it and we can see I have my drive and this is the templates that are shared with my entire drive. So if I had multiple editors in here, they would be able to access that private means only I can see it. If I have editors, they will not have access to this. And then my gallery and gallery is the pre made Descript templates. And you can see these are different types of folders. You have titles. So if I click on it, I have all these different types of titles. And you can see how they label it. Fading titles, sliding titles, cinema titles. So very descriptive naming conventions is highly recommended. And then you got annotations. If you watch my videos, you know that I use this one a lot. The arrow, I use that probably 10 times per video. And you got different ones for different aspect ratios. These are vertical, you have ones for multi camera. So a lot of options built in from description. And when you're making your own, which is going to be our third form of making templates, you can take descripts as your foundation and modify them to your own colors, your own branding, that type of thing. So let's go back and I'm going to apply this title, it's called Cinema titles. And I click on it and let me play this for you. Your title here. Just like that, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5 layers with different animations on the layers. And then what you would do obviously to use this title is just say, this is my title. You can just replace the words with whatever you want them to say. Okay. So that was the second method of using templates. The third way to create templates is to create a template completely from scratch. The way we do that is we go back to our drive view and here's our drive view. We go to templates over here on the left side. We are now inside of the templates view. And these are all the templates that I've made. So I have quite a few there that you can see. And then you click new template and now I am inside of the template again. It looks exactly like a project which is what is confusing about this is this is in fact making a template. And the only way I can tell that is by this little template icon in the top left. And so you can title it. And I'll call this test template. And the way I think of this is this title is like your folder name. It's not really like a project. Think of this as like a folder, because with templates, your scenes become each individual template. So I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to make three templates by making three scenes. So I'll click in here into scene number one, my first scene, and I'm going to add a title. So I go to my title button and I click Title, and there it is, all the normal defaults. Roboto. I'm just going to change this to Arial. I'll make it 250, I'll center it. And that is going to be my title number one. So that is my first template, my show, my timeline. I'm going to create a second title or a second scene. And again, the each scene is an individual template, even though it's inside of the same project. That's what's confusing about this. So this is my second scene and I'm going to add subtitle. And there it is. I'm going to change the font, make it like 150, and I'll call this titledOS. And then I'm going to make a third one again with a scene, a blank scene. This time I'm going to use the text option. And I'm just going to leave everything the same. On that one, you're just going to say text in small writing. Okay, so now I have three different scenes. And notice they're five seconds long. That is the default. When you add a layer, a title layer, it defaults to five seconds. And it doesn't matter. For the sake of your template, if this is one second or if this is one hour, when you apply it, it's going to expand or shrink to fill the scene that you apply it to. So if the scene you're applying it to is 30 minutes long, this title is going to be 30 minutes long. Okay, so now, now that we have that made, let's go ahead and save this. So we go to our publish template button in the top. We have. And now, now notice there's 1, 2 and 3 corresponding with our 1, 2 and 3 scenes. And so I'll just. I recommend being very descriptive in how you name these, but I'm just going to call these Title 1. Title 2 and text and once again you can save it to private, meaning only you have it. You can share it with your drive, meaning all your editors have it, or you can share it publicly, which will generate a link that you can then share with the entire Internet. Once again, descriptmastery.com templates and you can find free templates to download ones that I have made and you hit Publish template and as soon as it says all changes synced we can go back to our project. I'll go back to projects and I'm going to scroll to the end of my project. I'm going to make a new blank scene. I'm going to go to my templates and I saved it in private, so I'll go there and there it is. Remember the what I told you was like you could think of it as the folder. So my folder name was Test template and I click on it and there are my three templates and I'll click title number one and now it's applied. That is the third way to make templates in descript. Now the fourth way, the bonus way, I told you, it's not truly a template, but it kind of acts like a template inside of a project. And that is let's say I want to use scene number four, this title in other scenes in my project. I can right click on that thumbnail, that scene thumbnail number four and I hit copy layout, I go into scene number five and I click paste layout and there it is. And this is especially useful if you have something like multicam layout or zooms, things like that. Then this is a really fast way to apply it in different scenes in your project. If you go to descriptmastery.com templates I have free downloadable templates available for you as well as I can make custom templates by request. I have made hundreds of templates for clients, so whatever you need, just ask. Lastly, if you want to go deeper on how to make templates for yourself, I I have a templates masterclass on udemy.com, which you can also get for free as part of my bigger Descript course. I'll leave links to both of those in the description.