Descript Q&A: Credits, AI tools, Rooms, and editing (Full Transcript)

[00:00:28] Speaker 1: ♪ Hello. Greetings. Hello, greetings. Happy St. Patrick's Day. Oh, that's right. I am wearing green, I am ready. As I always do. It's green adjacent. It's green adjacent, we'll take that. But yes, welcome. We'll get started in a few minutes. I think there was issue with the page getting set up. So it looks like, yes, we are live here and then we have that other page. So we'll wait for some folks to trickle in. How are you doing today?

[00:01:06] Speaker 2: I'm doing great, how are you?

[00:01:08] Speaker 1: I'm doing swell. Just enjoying the nice Tuesday, halfway through March, that's crazy. Where did it go? Where did it go? It happened. It came and went. So it did happen. And there's more to happen in March. If you're just joining, welcome. This is the Descript Support Q&A. We're waiting for some folks to trickle in as we have another page that this was set up on. So welcome, come on in, enjoy. This is the, as I mentioned, the Descript Support Q&A. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome. Thank you for being here. Glad to have you here. And if you are returning, welcome back. We are here every Tuesday at 11 a.m. Pacific with members of the support team, including me, Trevor. And me, Salvatore. And we also have Alex hanging out in chat, answering some questions, passing along some links that are going along with what we are talking about and answering. So just a quick overview of this session. As we mentioned, remember the support in the chat to help us. Well, this is for anybody and everybody, regardless of where you are on your Descript journey. If this is your first day, first week, first month, or if you've never even opened up Descript, this is the time to ask questions for us and we will answer them live. Some other resources that you may or may not have gone to is our Help Center, which has some walkthroughs, tutorials, some troubleshooting guides, and just some other overviews of all sorts of features. It's the best resource, I think, that pretty much has everything that Descript has in the app. If it's in the app, there's a page on it in the Help Center. If you're watching us on YouTube, which you most likely are, there are other video tutorials, feature reviews, announcements, and other past webinars. All webinars that we record will be on the live page on our YouTube channel, including this one right here. You can also join our growing community of Descriptians. Is that what our users are called, Descriptians?

[00:03:28] Speaker 2: I think that's the unofficial name, yes.

[00:03:30] Speaker 1: All right, I'll ride with that. We have a growing community on Discord, Reddit, as well as Facebook, if you join the official page on Facebook. And then we have some other live events. We will pass along a link that has a list of all of our upcoming webinars and other live events. And if you have a specific question, a specific bug you're encountering, or anything that we're not covering live here today, you can contact us directly within the app by pressing the question mark at the top right, and then contact us. Might be contact support now, but that's the best way to get in touch with us directly. And now, if you have questions, you may ask us. We are happy to answer any and all questions. I like to say there's no bad questions because... Someone else, so ask away.

[00:04:28] Speaker 2: Ask away, use the chat box, we're here.

[00:04:31] Speaker 1: Yes, the chat box, basically just on YouTube, just ask a chat there, we will answer it from here. We'll throw it up on the screen, we'll share a screen in Descript, assuming it's a Descript question, and cover it from there. What's your favorite color? What's my favorite color?

[00:04:51] Speaker 2: Yeah.

[00:04:51] Speaker 1: Was that a question?

[00:04:52] Speaker 2: That was a question.

[00:04:53] Speaker 1: From you? From me. From you, okay, yeah. Yeah, I mean, my favorite is, I don't know, I like purple. I do like green, I like blue. I think what I've been trying to do more is wear a lot more like pastel tints, I don't know, what to call it, a tint. I don't just, I like to wear pastel stuff. This isn't really pastel, but I kind of like the Kelly green, I have a lot.

[00:05:21] Speaker 2: I think it suits you. Kelly green stuff. And I did forget to wear green today, I'm so sorry, Alex.

[00:05:28] Speaker 1: You don't have to wear green, only if you choose to wear green. I chose to, I just didn't. Follow through, I think. I'm gonna wear green this morning, but just didn't put the green shirt on.

[00:05:42] Speaker 2: Execution just failed.

[00:05:45] Speaker 1: We got a question right away from Diane Collins. What plan should I be on so I don't lose my credits every month like I am now? I'm sorry you're losing your credits there. It's sort of a complicated question in the sense that you might be on the right plan, but the way that your workflow is, you're just using up more credits than you need to. And do you mind referencing whether this is AI credits, media minutes, or both? But the business plus plan, like business plan will have the most credits on your plan, then has the other most. And then hobbyist is only if you need a little. Hobbyist at least has 400 AI credits, creator has 800, and business has, what is it, 1,600 right now? For AI credits? 15, yeah. Yeah, for AI credits. If you're finding that you're using consistently, you can do top-ups, or you can see if maybe your workflow can be slightly altered to use less credits. Because if you're just on the creator plan like a lot of users are, you shouldn't be running into credit limits. Or if you are, then I would jump up to the next plan. Exactly.

[00:07:08] Speaker 2: Also, it depends on your usage. If you're making a lot of generative video, if you're chatting with Underlord a lot, that definitely plays a part in how many credits you go through each month. Not sure what I'm losing. Ah, that's a great question. I could show you where to check your usage. So this is helpful to get an overview of how you're using your AI credits in Media Minutes. From your drive view, if you click on your profile icon, you can go to the Settings tab right here. And then you're gonna scroll down all the way to Usage. And from here, looks like this just reset. So we don't have anything, but it's typically gonna show you where your AI credits are spent. Oh yeah, reset. And I don't use this drive except on here. Same here. Yeah, so this is helpful to get a view of what's being used.

[00:07:58] Speaker 1: Gotcha. So it sounds like for the monthly charge of 35, that is the creator plan. And then some months you're not using at all. For any months you're not using, we have an option to either pause the subscription or for the monthly plan, you can cancel any between months. That's what it's pretty flexible for. But if you're using it up on the months that you have, that's something that if you're interested, you could always reach out to our support team directly. And we can take a look at some of your usage and see if there's any way that we would recommend not using it. Like Salvatore was mentioning, Underlord will use a significant amount as will generating images or video. And the combination of the two will definitely use the most because it's not only generating the image or video, which costs a significant amount of credits. Using Underlord also uses credits and then combining the two, you'll kind of use both of those and then any other action Underlord will take to move the image into your project or video into your project.

[00:09:10] Speaker 2: Agreed, agreed. Great question though.

[00:09:18] Speaker 1: Not seeing any other questions come in. So we could then demonstrate some basic features and some basic general workflows that we would use if you wanna try and do that.

[00:09:33] Speaker 2: Let's do it. And if anyone has any questions, please feel to interrupt us and drop them in at any point. So I'm gonna load up this podcast that we did not too long ago, finally a new updated version for our webinars. Finally. Finally, alas. But sort of just point out Underlord here. It's at the bottom right. And Underlord can do a lot of things. You could ask it to generate videos for you. You could have it do all kinds of things, add transitions and whatnot. But I did wanna point out as well, we have the AI tools panel here. And from here, this is a lot of the tools that Underlord uses comes from this section. So if you wanna have just a bit more control and see exactly what you're doing, you could certainly use this as well. So if I wanted to generate a video, I think we replaced it with generate media, which is really straightforward. And you could toggle between image and video. So like Trevor was mentioning, you could ask Underlord to create a video for me that's about an eagle chasing a truck, or you could just go to AI tools and do that as well. So this gives you a little bit more flexibility of the output and then where that's inserted in your project. Whereas Underlord will sort of do its best to understand the context and insert it for you, make edits for you. So that could end up costing more credits. So I just wanted to point that out really quick. And from here, this is just a quick semi quick 12 minute podcast that we had with members of our support team. And we did this in Rooms, which is our sort of a remote recording feature, which is really handy. You get high quality videos for each participant. And once you're done with the session, it gets transferred into a new project, which is what you're seeing here. So this is that raw recording. And to typically start, I like to clean up the script. We'll have a lot of filler words, a lot of stuttering, a lot of repeated takes, stuff like that. What I like to start with, if you go back to the AI tools, we have some recommendations here. I believe this is specific to Rooms files, but all of the actions are here if you scroll down. But just to sort of point out what is being recommended, we have automatic multicam, studio sound, edit for clarity and draft show notes. I'm going to start with edit for clarity, which basically just reads the whole script and cleans it up, removes filler words, digressions, blather, and any sort of tangents that we might've gone on. And to choose the intensity, I'm going to leave it at medium, which is a good middle ground of making enough edits, but keeping it still close to the source material. And then I'm going to go ahead and click submit. Let that run for a few minutes. Or seconds, that was quick, wow. Okay, so we have 92 edit suggestions already. Yeah, that was really fast, it was super fast. Way to go Xfinity, you're not failing me today. So we have all of these suggestions that you could review individually. If you hover it over them, you could approve or discard, approve, discard. You'll also see that they're ignored on the script, which is helpful because you can still see what's being edited, but if you want to restore it, you can just click on this restore button. But I feel pretty confident in this, so I'm just going to click done and approve all of the edits. And just right away, we went from 12 minutes and however many seconds to about 10 minutes and 52 seconds. So let's go ahead and just play it back, see what it sounds like.

[00:13:20] Speaker 3: I mean, it sounds like a mind virus to me. I've never seen a purple ocean. If I saw a purple ocean, I would immediately call the police. That'd be my first instinct. I also was thinking- Purple oceans, that's what we talked about.

[00:13:34] Speaker 1: Yeah, I generated a random topic and the topic was the ocean is purple. So we had a discussion kind of about that. It was pretty great.

[00:13:45] Speaker 2: It was an engaging conversation.

[00:13:48] Speaker 1: But feel free to, if you have any questions, do feel free to interrupt us at any time. If anything is striking up a question or if you want us to do anything again or show us how to do it again in a different way, we are happy to stop at any time.

[00:14:04] Speaker 2: All right, keep it rolling. Yeah, drop them in. So we have some edits already and to show in turn the manual way to do this, which is pretty neat and kind of what drew me to do script was instead of just playing back the video and listening, you can just read the script and make edits this way. So let's say I want to get rid of this entire part about not having a name for the podcast. So I'm just going to highlight it like a Word document and delete. So it skips over that entirely.

[00:14:34] Speaker 1: But we have three members of the support. Let's get rid of that, but. We have three members of the support team where we have used a random topic. There it is. Easy as that. Easy as that. Easy as what? Pressing a button, I guess. Pressing a button, exactly.

[00:14:55] Speaker 2: Just pressing a button. Okay, so this is looking pretty good. I think the next step here would be to improve the sound quality is what I usually reach for. And I think we have a specific tool just for this. It's called Studio Sound. And basically it takes your recordings and enhances the audio quality. And this is specifically for speech. So if you try to slap this on like a music track, it'll just mute the whole track or make it sound garbled. Sound terrible. Sounds terrible.

[00:15:30] Speaker 1: The way it works, the instruments will get blocked out and the singing will sound weird. Right. Actually, but I actually wonder, I have tried it a few times and it did produce some interesting results. Not all bad. They were pretty interesting. A little remix.

[00:15:46] Speaker 2: A little remix. What studio did you record in? So Studio Sound. I'm just gonna click on that button and let it do its thing. And let's go ahead and play it back.

[00:15:58] Speaker 1: We have three members of the support team where we have used a random topic generator.

[00:16:06] Speaker 2: So right away- Talk about it there. You do? Yeah. So let me get to one of the script tracks here. So right away, it sounds a little bit louder, a little bit fuller, and the background noise has been removed. So let's turn it off and compare. Yep. Of the support team where we have used- So you can hear the computer whirring in the background, some fan noise. And all I'm doing is clicking on the script and then going to properties to see the properties of what I'm looking at. I'm clicking into one of the layers, so Trevor, and then I'm going to apply Studio Sound again. So once you've applied Studio Sound once, you can turn it off and turn it on and it won't cost any more credits.

[00:16:57] Speaker 1: Members of the support team where we have used a random topic generator and the topic of- Yeah, I like that.

[00:17:05] Speaker 2: That sounds great.

[00:17:07] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:17:08] Speaker 2: I like it too. Nice and clean. All right, I'll keep trucking along here.

[00:17:15] Speaker 1: I'm noticing something fairly new. If you have used Descript before, you might notice something.

[00:17:26] Speaker 2: I haven't played with that, I keep seeing it.

[00:17:30] Speaker 1: Or just like some new filters, yeah. So typically before we had like the color adjustments you would have to add by going into effects and the visual effects and adding color adjustment and then manually adjusting it. But now we have these little presets here. So we can show these. That's nice. Neutral warm. I like that. That's very cool. Warm looks nice. Now this is- Noir. But I think you can still, if you click on that toggle on the top right, you're still able to adjust as needed from here. So it would, you can adjust it from the defaults that the preset, and then you can change the white balance and some other things. There's just a little bit of an update to color adjustments. If you are like us and film in a room. Minimal lighting. All right, we do have a question. Can I upload an existing logo reveal video with music and have Descript add one additional line of text with the identical motion of the original text in my video? That's a great question. So you have a logo reveal with music and you're just trying to add an additional line of text, not part of the original baked in video, and then have it just kind of be identical. The answer is yes, but you would still need to manually animate this. So I can see a situation. I brought us back on screen. I talk with my hand sometimes. So if you have like this motion where you're going like this and you wanna add, okay, now I'm confused. You wanna add text that also kind of goes with it. You would just need to like, while this animates like this, you would need to add the Descript text here and then you would need to animate this to match it. There's pretty easy ways to animate using something like smart transitions and scenes. Otherwise, if you have the original file for that logo reveal video, you can add it in there and then bring that into Descript if that was created in Descript, or you can see if Underlord would be able to generate something in there. I can't promise the results would be as good as if you manually try and do this. There's a few different options. Do you see any other way or any ideas for this one?

[00:20:07] Speaker 2: I thought it pretty much covers it. I think the safest way would be getting to the source, like project where that animation came from, just so everything is the same as far as like fonts go in the animation. But like Trevor said, if you load it into Descript and add a text element, you could sort of try and match it with our animations. If it's pretty simple, just like a slide, it could be done, I think.

[00:20:36] Speaker 1: Yeah, this would be a good point where if we had it, we could try and do it live, but we don't have the video. That's at some point, maybe we'll have a way to get projects in here. That'll be fun. We have another question here from Janelle Jo. Under generate media, I noticed if it creates an image, it will offer to turn it into a video. Can you upload an image and turn it into a video? If so, how? Great question. I guess on the topic of intro, do we wanna generate an intro video here? Let's do it. Let's generate a video. You know, we could try and do, I don't wanna overstep on your demo here, but if you have a picture of an ocean, do you think we could try and animate, generate a video by turning that purple? Like ask Underlord to, or ask the generate model to make this animated and turn it purple. Let's do that. If we find one online. So we'll show you the whole process of uploading the video and then turning it into a video. Found one.

[00:21:37] Speaker 2: Excellent. Let's do this. You are in for a treat, hopefully. We're gonna learn together. We're gonna learn together. So we're gonna generate a video using an image. So I'm gonna go to video. And I think it depends on the model. A lot of them do have sort of a reference image mode where you can upload an image. Right. I'm gonna sort of switch between these and see what we have. Kling. Kling is popular. So I think they do all have start frame, end frame. Yeah. Cool. I'm going to upload an image I got from Google. It's a AVIF file. Hold on. Let me do some quick conversion here. Okay.

[00:22:42] Speaker 1: We're about to witness some magic.

[00:22:50] Speaker 2: Convert to JPEG. Okay. All right. Sorry about that. Going back to computer. Then I'm gonna upload this JPEG. So there's my image. I uploaded it to start frame. And then let's just see. And then we'll see what happens. I uploaded it to start frame. And then let's just see. Animate this image so that the water is moving and also purple. All right. So let's go ahead and do it.

[00:23:20] Speaker 1: Will Xfinity deliver today? We'll find out.

[00:23:27] Speaker 2: But yes, I have seen this process a lot. We have users who are just generating images and then they'll have that option to animate it, which is really useful. So it's sort of just one seamless process. But in this case, I uploaded an image of mine. Well, not mine. I didn't take it. Google did. So this can take a couple of minutes depending on the model and the prompt, but hopefully it doesn't take too long. Okay. While that's waiting, where is everyone watching from? Where are you editing at this moment?

[00:24:18] Speaker 1: You know where we are. Kind of, I guess not. I'm in my void. It's not a void, but it looks like a void. Looks nice. Oh, there we are. Here we are.

[00:24:31] Speaker 2: Oh, okay. It looks transparent. It was. Yeah, it was a PNG that I grabbed.

[00:24:37] Speaker 1: Oh, okay. So it's going to look a bit weird, but actually that's fine because now you can animate it. You can add it to the bottom.

[00:24:48] Speaker 2: Let's play it.

[00:24:49] Speaker 1: Ew. Whoa. That's so gross. That's kind of cool though. It kind of looks like something you would find. You would just find it like a Willy Wonka factory.

[00:25:01] Speaker 3: Oh no, yeah, the water's purple.

[00:25:04] Speaker 1: Jump in. It's candy. Jump in. It's candy. Salty and sweet. Alex mentions coming in from Chicago where winter just never ends. Where I am, I'm in Los Angeles. It is summer because it's 90 degrees a bunch of days this week. So I would jump into the ocean even if it was purple.

[00:25:24] Speaker 2: Yep. How about you?

[00:25:26] Speaker 1: What's the weather where you are?

[00:25:28] Speaker 2: I think it's around the same, around 90s. It's supposed to hit 100, 105. Oh, you're jumping in the purple ocean with me. Happily. Let's go. So that's cool. So that's my first time trying that feature. And with anything that you generate in Descript, it's going to live in your project files tab. So if you click on project, you'll have this AI assets folder that's created once you generate an image or video and you'll see it live there. You can download these to your computer if you want. Download.

[00:26:02] Speaker 1: Do you want to try adding it to the script and see?

[00:26:06] Speaker 2: Yeah.

[00:26:07] Speaker 1: I don't know if it will be transparent. See, added a new layer. Start on top there.

[00:26:15] Speaker 2: Ooh.

[00:26:16] Speaker 1: No, it's not transparent.

[00:26:18] Speaker 2: But you know what I thought?

[00:26:19] Speaker 1: Yeah, we chose the wrong, JPEG is probably a better version to use than the PNG. Well, you could crop it out, which doesn't work.

[00:26:28] Speaker 2: I'm going to mess around with our chroma key feature. Interesting. So chroma key just takes a color in your image or video and it tries to make it transparent. And this is kind of a weird one, but I just want to sort of play around with it.

[00:26:47] Speaker 1: Hey, not bad. That's not bad. Close enough. Something else coming in from Philadelphia. Philadelphia. Go birds. Okay, we do have another question. Do you have a list of Descript experts I can engage to create some video scripts for me? It's a great question. We don't have an explicit list, but we do have a great place to find experts or people you can either hire or collaborate with or just talk to and engage with. Our community on Discord is a great place to go. There is a specific channel just for hiring. You can also post on the Reddit. A lot of people are great there and use Descript pretty daily. So if you make a post there and ask if anyone is looking for, would be willing to help, or is like for, if they are for hire, if they are for hire. Is that how it works? If you are saying I am hireable, are you for hire? Or is the person hiring for hire? What's the, who is for hire in this?

[00:27:59] Speaker 2: Who is for hire?

[00:28:02] Speaker 1: Now it's losing all meaning to me. In any case, the Discord is a great place specifically for your question. If you haven't joined yet, the for hire channel there is a great place. People post looking for jobs, looking for editors, or just letting people know that they are available to be hired. Alex just sent the link to the Discord and how to join from there. Otherwise, if you just need some help tinkering your own script or making it work with Descript, you can always reach out to the support team. Just a note on the, okay, yeah, if you wanna hire someone, I would recommend going to Discord. There's a great community of people there. Or if anyone in the chat is a Descript expert, they're willing to help out for that. As far as support helping, we are willing to pretty much help with anything. We just typically do not edit your project for you just for security reasons and protection reasons. And also, it is your project. So we don't want to take any liberties that you would not want there as well. But if you hire someone, they can kind of go through the process of giving them full access. They can, they're the experts in the actual editing process and creative choices and all. So, yeah, I think that's pretty well said. But I like this purple ocean that you created now, under you. It's very cool, right?

[00:29:24] Speaker 2: To sort of add to that, you can use Underlord as well. I think I sometimes forget that Underlord is in LLM. So you can choose an AI model here. We have some popular ones like Claude, IQ, Sonnet, GPT, of course, Gemini. And you could just throw your script in there and let me expand on this and just use it as a brain buddy, which is helpful. So that's something to play around with as well.

[00:29:54] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's, I mean, honestly, a really great starting point. Like if you have, even if you have a list of bullet points, like I have, here's some unorganized thoughts, turn it into a script. Underlord will turn it into a script for you. It might still need some editing from there, but we'll show you right now. Like write me two minute script about purple oceans.

[00:30:16] Speaker 2: Some of the wonders.

[00:30:18] Speaker 1: Yeah, the wonders.

[00:30:21] Speaker 2: I don't know, we'll find out.

[00:30:24] Speaker 1: The more vague you are, the more creative liberties Underlord will take, which it will sound a little more, it'll just be very generic, like the bare bones minimum. But if you have specific bullet points, then it can really sound, it can still sort of sound like your voice.

[00:30:44] Speaker 2: Oh, wow, okay. It actually inserted it into my script already, which is kind of cool to know what I want. But just to sort of see what it made, the world's oceans hold countless mysteries and quite enchanting. This is pretty good to start with if I just wanted like a rough idea or just something fun to make. Of purple oceans.

[00:31:07] Speaker 1: Bioluminescent, wow. That's a buzzword, Underlord. That's very good. They serve as food for countless species. All right.

[00:31:19] Speaker 2: This is like me, this is like me during my English essays.

[00:31:24] Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know what liberties is it taking here.

[00:31:30] Speaker 2: Which is a great point to lead you to the revert button. If you don't like something that Underlord did, you can just click revert and it'll undo.

[00:31:38] Speaker 1: It's gone, get that out of here. Our discussion is better anyway.

[00:31:41] Speaker 2: Exactly. So that's definitely there as a tool if you'd like, but let's go ahead and just continue on, I guess.

[00:31:52] Speaker 1: We do have a question coming in.

[00:31:54] Speaker 2: Yeah, perfect.

[00:31:55] Speaker 1: When adding in uploaded picture into the video script, how can I auto make as background instead of using full scene as the full picture doesn't include in the frame, the head or body is cut out? So it sounds like you're trying to add an image into your video if it's either a multi person or just one person. Maybe we could just demo with like one person how that would look. Sure, yeah.

[00:32:22] Speaker 2: We can go from there. So if you wanna set this up automatically, I would do it within an existing project. There we go. So I'm just gonna use Gabe as an example. And typically if you're gonna change the background, you're gonna wanna use green screen, which is our background removal tool. So I'm just gonna go ahead and run that really quick and remove green screen or turn on green screen. So background is removed. Now I'm gonna add a image as the background. I'm gonna go to project and then find that purple animation for example. So I'm gonna set this up how I want it to look all the time pretty consistently. Position, fill scene editor and layer order. So I'm just right clicking on the image on the scene editor here to get these menu items. So I'm gonna send this to the back. That way it's behind the speaker. And once this looks good and all set up, I'm going to save this as a layout. So this whole scene right here has Gabe's background removed and we have the background. So I'm just gonna right click on the scene thumbnail here where I did all these changes and I'm gonna save this as a layout background. This way you don't have to recreate this each time. And as long as you have the same elements in a project like a script track, you could just apply this. And I'll show you really quick here. Okay, so I'm gonna create a new scene just by clicking forward slash on my keyboard. I'm gonna split this up so we have a blank screen again. And then I'm gonna apply that layout now to the background layout. And then I'm gonna create a new scene just by clicking forward slash on my keyboard. Okay.

[00:34:38] Speaker 1: It looks like it might be hidden here. Oh, did it apply to the previous scene?

[00:34:46] Speaker 2: You know what? I think it's because it's a video file. Oh, is it a video?

[00:34:52] Speaker 1: Yeah, it needs to be. Yeah, it needs to be a video. So the video file, it'll only be as long as the video is. If it's an image file, it'll be across the entire scene.

[00:35:02] Speaker 2: Yeah, so my video clip is only five seconds long. So it did do it. Yep, we can definitely loop it. So I'm just clicking on this element and then under properties, we're going to change the play type to loop. And let us know if, oh, sorry, keep going. Oh, no, no, I was just gonna say that that's a similar concept to an image.

[00:35:27] Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a great, pretty common workflow if you have backgrounds that you wanna add to your project. Let us know if this is what you were asking. If you were asking something else, feel free to re-clarify and we'll be happy to demo that as well. It sounded like you were trying to make the image, the background, and it was just cutting off the head or the body because it was showing up in front of the speaker.

[00:35:53] Speaker 2: Yeah, happy to expand on that. Yeah, but look at Gabe swimming in the ocean. The purple ocean. The purple ocean.

[00:36:16] Speaker 1: All right, do we have any other questions coming in? Otherwise, we'll continue to edit around and try out new things or old features. Old features and new features alike. New tricks, old tricks. Do you have any new features or old tricks you've been using or playing around with?

[00:36:35] Speaker 2: Personally, it's not really an editing trick, but I guess I just discovered that Rooms has an audio-only feature. I don't know if that's semi-new, but I guess I just never paid attention. So that's really helpful. We have a lot of users asking, hey, when are you gonna have an audio-only session where you can see the other person in a call but not have it record video? So that's- Yeah, it's been there for a while.

[00:37:01] Speaker 1: Cause that's what I use. I always do video, but then I only record audio because for my stuff, I only need audio. Yeah, I always just left it on audio, this video. See me here in this void. But yeah, that's helpful. Do you wanna show how this was recorded? You might need to re-share your screen if you have to go to a web browser, unless you're in a browser.

[00:37:26] Speaker 2: I am, yep, there we go.

[00:37:29] Speaker 1: Okay, do you wanna show how to get there?

[00:37:33] Speaker 2: Let's do a Rooms recording. That's how we got that three-person recording that we just did. So there's two ways to do that. You can either start a new project. This is helpful if you wanna sort of pre-organize prior to recording, or you can just jump right into record. So if you click on record, you have the option to record with others. And taking you to this link is gonna open up your room. Hello. So with this, you can sort of change your video input, audio input, stuff like that. And I'm the host, so I'm just gonna click join. And from this next room, you'll have this invite link. The cool thing about this link is it's going to be persistent and it will never change. It's sort of attached to your drive as the editor. So you can easily just share this or upload it to like a scheduling software. And I get asked a lot, like how are we gonna make sure that guests don't just jump in at any time? That is a great question. So the host needs to be in the room to start it. And when a participant tries to join, there's gonna be a little pop-up here that says allow or deny. So there's no really room for error as far as people just jumping in at the wrong time, which is helpful. But this is what I discovered. I just never looked apart from video and audio. You can switch it to audio only. But there it is. You just click record. Once you're done, you press stop record. All your files will upload and it'll be imported into a brand new project, which is how we got to our project that we were working on. Here. Super easy and fun. So if you haven't tried it, it's definitely worth a shot. Gives you a lot of flexibility for editing because it does give you individual files as opposed to some other services where it's just sort of one conference call. Let's say I didn't wanna see Trevor this whole time. I'm just gonna delete his layer. Wow. Can't believe you would do that. We can hear him, but we don't wanna see him. Same with myself. It's just gonna be Gabe in the ocean. See how you like it. There you go.

[00:39:57] Speaker 1: Equal opportunity. Three members of the support team. Oh God, the ocean sound is still there. I forgot we generated that video with sound.

[00:40:07] Speaker 2: Oh no. So I'm gonna click on that layer and then just meet this purple water track. But yeah, please, please throw in any questions if you got them. I'm just gonna go ahead and keep editing away here.

[00:40:28] Speaker 1: I guess we are happy to answer any and all questions, even if we've gone over something as well, even if you've asked it in a previous week. Otherwise we're just gonna keep randomly doing actions on this project. Yes, we are. So you wanna try some multi-cam action here?

[00:40:47] Speaker 2: Read my mind. That's exactly what I wanna do. So I don't think we've sort of touched on scenes yet. So scenes are a way to segment your video. Right now, this whole project only has a single scene, which contains the whole 10 minutes and 46 seconds. To add a scene, all you have to do is click forward slash on your keyboard, either on the script. So I'm gonna add a scene here, or you can do it on the timeline as well. Adding a scene in itself doesn't really do anything, but I'm just gonna show you the power of scenes here. So now I have this whole section here within its own scene. And let's say I just want it to be, want it to be me for this entire scene. Now that I've made that edit, it's only gonna affect the scene. So when it gets to the end of this. Except I'm still hanging out there. Scene boundary. Oh, there you are, bye-bye.

[00:41:41] Speaker 1: Bye.

[00:41:42] Speaker 2: Bye, be gone. See ya. You'll see that when it gets to this next scene boundary, it's gonna go back to how it was. Let's discuss.

[00:41:52] Speaker 1: Go.

[00:41:54] Speaker 2: Just like that. So this is a great way to add visuals, organize your video into segments, and just make really cool edits, pretty much. It's a powerful way to do that in Descript. So with that said, I could easily just manually add scenes here and then choose a person to be the main focus for each scene. But this would take ages, especially on longer recordings, which are like an hour, an hour plus. I don't really wanna- How long could you talk about a purple ocean for?

[00:42:30] Speaker 1: Apparently 12 minutes. That's how long we've had. Which is great. I think if we actually saw a purple ocean, I would be talking about it longer than 12 minutes. I would be. Because it's hypothetical, yeah. Yeah, me too. I talk about it every day. That's when a pig would fly, right? Yeah, I was like, remember when we saw that ocean that was purple? Like wild. Rainbow purple, it was crazy.

[00:42:54] Speaker 2: The coolest thing ever. So that's the manual way to do that, is adding scenes, making visual changes to that scene, adding a scene, so on and so forth. If you wanna do this, especially with this type of recording where you have multiple cameras, you can use our automatic multicam feature. And doing so basically takes your- It reads the script. It reads the speaker labels assigned to each speaker, which is analyzed when you upload a file. And then it attaches it to one of the videos in your sequence. A sequence is- The way we handle that in the script is we have multiple files that are in the script. It has to be in a sequence, which is just a container. Oh, I think we have a follow-up question from Janelle here.

[00:43:46] Speaker 1: I was referencing B-roll, where you don't see the speaker, but the uploaded image. Someone running, even though the image is 16.9, it only takes only half the video section, and pulling it, and pulling it, you can't see the full body of the person running. Gotcha.

[00:44:02] Speaker 2: Oh, okay.

[00:44:06] Speaker 1: So it just sounds like when you're adding a layer into the video, either an image or a video, it's getting- I wanna see the speaker, but you just added an uploaded image. The image only takes up half the video section. And when you pull it, I think I see what you're saying. Do you wanna just add an image to this real quick?

[00:44:31] Speaker 2: Sure.

[00:44:31] Speaker 1: I understand, just like any old image.

[00:44:36] Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm so tired of this forest one.

[00:44:38] Speaker 1: This forest one. Is this just the default, the first ones you see? We should. Yeah. Whoa.

[00:44:45] Speaker 2: There we go. Whoa. Oh, dig it up.

[00:44:50] Speaker 1: Okay, now, if you try and grab the edges, not the corners, the edge, and then extend it. It's gonna zoom in. It's gonna kind of zoom in. And if you drag that, now, if you drag, so now if you move that here, it's not the full image. We're only getting part of the image. It's not the image is expanded, it's that we're zoomed in now. So instead, undo that. If you, if it needs to first, it needs to fit. This image is not 16 by nine. This is something else by nine. This is probably like 14 by nine. It's a little bit of a random guess. I don't know. It's not perfect. So to do this, there's, you can go to position and then fill scene editor. And this won't crop it. This will just kind of make it so that it fills the scene editor. Or if you undo that, if you don't want any cropping, you can grab the corners of the layer and do that. So this is now, it's not cropping anything. It's just making it so that you're filling the scene editor with the image. And now you can move this around. So depending what part of the image you want. I like how that looks. It's a little bit, because this is just a landscape photo, it's hard to tell when you're cropping versus when you're just zooming in. But for a person running, you'll know if like a foot is cut off or something.

[00:46:32] Speaker 2: Yes. Also double clicking on a layer on the scene editor will enter a crop mode. I don't really have anything to crop here, but that's how you would sort of manually crop into a section like that. If needed, it doesn't sound like- Just the clouds now. Just the clouds. Cloud nine.

[00:46:52] Speaker 1: We got another question here. Oh, sorry. I got excited. How can I add music to my audio podcast?

[00:47:03] Speaker 2: Oh, great question. Similarly, it's pretty much just drag and drop. So if you have a file of your own that you want to use, you can go to project and upload that file from your computer. If you already have it uploaded to your media library, which is a newer feature, really cool. You could pull it from there, but you would just upload it to your file list here and just drag it into your script. I don't have a music file here, but I'll just grab one from our stock library to demonstrate. So to media, clicking on the audio tab gives you your music and sound effects. So I'm just gonna go ahead and just drag this into my script. I wanted to start at the very beginning, so I'm gonna drag it into the script here. And the green underline sort of shows you how far that layer extends to. Another sort of visual way to see this is if you expand your timeline, click on this little caret, click and drag, you can see all of your layers here. So you'll see this audio track. Go on for typically the length of the audio file, three minutes.

[00:48:16] Speaker 1: Yeah, and you can loop it if you need it to go through the entire video, or you can make it shorter if you just need it for like an intro, like a 10 second blip of it. Do you use the slip tool often or do you use the properties panel to change what part of the clip it's on?

[00:48:33] Speaker 2: I've been starting to, yeah. I found this section to be really helpful. And if you don't really wanna open up the timeline, that's a great way to do it. But if you do, if you're used to like more traditional editors, same thing if you hover over the edge of a clip, you can trim it by clicking and dragging. So now I can set this to be as long as my first scene. And like we explained before, if you click on any layer, it should show you the properties under the properties tab. So I could turn down the volume by a lot, I'm suspecting. So let's play that back and see.

[00:49:13] Speaker 1: We have three members of the support team topic generator. And the topic of today is the ocean turned purple. What does that mean? Let's discuss. Hey, that sounds good.

[00:49:28] Speaker 2: Kind of fit perfectly, honestly.

[00:49:30] Speaker 1: Kind of fit perfectly. But what if you wanna change the, what if like a minute into that sound clip is actually better?

[00:49:38] Speaker 2: Oh, good question. I'm gonna click on that layer again. So we can change the start at position. Right now it's at zero. So let's move it over to a minute. So this isn't changing the duration of the actual clip in your timeline, but it's changing where it's playing from. So before I had it right at the beginning, let's play it from a minute and see how that sounds.

[00:50:05] Speaker 1: We have three members of the support team where we have used a random topic generator and the topic, the ocean turned purple. What does that mean? Let's discuss. Now it's kind of a harsh transition. Yeah. Add a little fade, fade Reno in there.

[00:50:25] Speaker 2: Fade Reno? Let's do it. Little fade Roni. Fade Roni. I'm gonna zoom in here and I'm gonna, let's make this little, this is the script track. So anything that's on the bottom most track is your script track, which is typically your video or audio or a sequence file that is being transcribed. So just to demonstrate, if I highlight this word in the script, it highlights it on this script track. So I'm just gonna pull that down and make it a little bit smaller. And fades are useful if you just don't want like a really abrupt ending. Maybe I just want this to fade out. Gradually. So at the edge of each clip, you'll have this really white, really tiny white dot that you can click and drag. And if you drag it inward, you'll have this fade. You'll see that it fades out now. So let's go ahead and play it back. Let's discuss. So instead of it just like hard stopping, it sort of lowers in volume gradually. Now it's a lot better. Very smooth. And there's, there's how to add an audio clip. Thank you for your question.

[00:51:33] Speaker 1: Thank you for your question. Any other questions we have? We're a little less than 10 minutes left in this session. We'll be back next week, same time, kind of the same place, same space rather. But yeah, if you have any other questions, feel free to ask. We are still here for a little bit longer. Otherwise, what else do we have?

[00:52:00] Speaker 2: Sharing.

[00:52:01] Speaker 1: So sharing is caring.

[00:52:04] Speaker 2: Let's say you've made your masterpiece and you're ready to share it with the world. I am. I am. We have options. We've got options for you. To the top right, you'll see the export button. And if you click on that, it'll default to our Descript web link, which is basically a unique web link that allows you to share your content with the world. So if you click on that, you'll see that you can share your content with a unique web link that you can share with others. And it plays back your video with a transcript. So let me just publish that to show you what it looks like. But this is really easy, quick way if you just wanna get viewers to get notes on something, or if you have a collaborator and you don't wanna go through the hassle of downloading the file, uploading it to like Google Drive or something. This just gives you a standalone website just for your video. And they can quickly see that. So let me open up this link really quick. And this is what it'll look like. So it's still rendering, might take a couple of minutes, but they can play back the video and the transcript is right here to the right side.

[00:53:05] Speaker 1: Do you wanna send me that link privately? I'll show how to comment if you were to share it across collaboration with people. Yes. There we go. So I'm gonna add a comment from my end and I'm not logged in. I'm not, you know, I'm just gonna add this. Oh, I am actually. Hold on. I'm trying to play it. Oh, it's still rendering on my end. So I can't really, you know what? Okay, I added a comment. So if you refresh, you might need to refresh, but you see that other view on there. I think that's me.

[00:53:51] Speaker 2: Yay. And then there's this comments button here. You click on that. I love this music.

[00:53:57] Speaker 1: That's me.

[00:53:58] Speaker 2: There it is.

[00:53:58] Speaker 1: I do, I love the music.

[00:54:00] Speaker 2: Thanks.

[00:54:01] Speaker 1: And you can, so this is helpful, that check mark there. If you're working with other people, you basically can respond to edits that you want. So when that edit is made, they never have to open up Descript. You can press that check mark and say, all right, that edit was made. This edit was made. This edit was made. You can collaborate back and forth without really needing to talk to each other and bother each other. Just makes collaboration a lot easier. This was a follow-up question, which is how to add sounds. I don't know if that's to the background or for the background. Do you mean?

[00:54:41] Speaker 2: Like sound effects?

[00:54:42] Speaker 1: Yeah. So is this like sound effects or is this more music? Is this beyond what we were adding or just general sound to the background throughout?

[00:54:58] Speaker 2: Yeah, happy to show both. Just so we can. Yeah, we'll show it all.

[00:55:02] Speaker 1: We'll show it all.

[00:55:02] Speaker 2: We'll show it all. So let's remove what I've done here. I added this background music earlier. And if you have a file that you already wanted, you know you want to use, you can upload it using the project tab. This is where you upload your files here. And if you have a piece of music that you want to use, that's where you would go to do that. If you want to use our stock library of images, videos, and audio, you can go over to the media tab and then switch over to audio and find something specific, like inspiring.

[00:55:38] Speaker 1: There is so, there's so many audio options. You could spend an entire week just listening to the stock options. It's crazy. Not that I've ever done something like that before. Never. It's never my work playlist. Inspiring songs to work to.

[00:55:57] Speaker 2: Inspiring beats to do homework to. Don't stop believing. So I'm just going to grab this track and then throw it on top of my script here at the beginning. Oh, I have, Quinn does have a question. So that's how you would- Yeah, I just did that.

[00:56:16] Speaker 1: So this might be our last question that we'll handle for the day. Also, Janelle, thank you for joining. Always a pleasure. Thank you for your questions. And how can you duplicate a video and keep it matched to audio? I have videos of people on Zoom, and when I make clips, it's hard for me to put one person on top, the other on the bottom. Yeah, that's a pretty common question. If you import specifically from Zoom, which is why if you're doing like interviews, I would just use Rooms at this point so that it does, it has everything pretty much automatic. Like it will give you separate videos. So when you create clips, it's just built for Descript, but we know a lot of people like Zoom and use Zoom. So we have the ability to do that too.

[00:57:01] Speaker 2: Yes, that's a very common workflow actually. So thank you for bringing that up. I did a quick Zoom recording just by myself, but this is pretty common as far as having to focus on a specific speaker. So I would start with uploading your Zoom recording to your project. And what I like to do personally is create a sequence with it. So I'm just gonna right click on my Zoom recording and then create sequence. So now I have my Zoom recording in here, and I'm gonna add my Zoom recording again as another file or another track, sorry. So now I have two versions of this track in my sequence. And then whichever one you don't wanna use, I'm just gonna mute that track. So now I have two videos, one audio source. And once you're done with that, you can click Done. A sequence will pop up here under the Sequences folder, and that's what we're gonna drag into Descript. This gives us more flexibility as far as sort of faking having multiple files. Ooh, why is it showing Gabe? Okay, anyways, but this is, now we sort of have two files that we can play with. And if it's a screen recording, you can set your self-orbit to the side, and then there, I think it was just loading up. That's weird.

[00:58:29] Speaker 1: Quinn asked, is it important to do this pre-edit? Not necessarily, actually. If you have your edits already, if you use the detach audio, it will create the sequence. And the sequence will be the full file, but it'll now be the sequence. So you should be, theoretically, you should be able to do this even after editing, though in general, it's always best to have your files kind of preset with what you're gonna be working with in case there is any issues. Because when you're in a sequence, you can add additional files to your sequence. And that, if you're adding the same file in the same Zoom recording, it should be the same length as the other Zoom recording you're using. I hope that makes sense. If it doesn't, if you're still struggling with this, feel free to reach out to our support team in the meantime. We also, we do have another webinar in about an hour. This is a sort of separate series. This is about social clips to global audiences. So this is a little bit more about, I think, translations and clips. But feel free to attend that, and this kind of workflow might be shown there as well.

[00:59:51] Speaker 2: Great tip.

[00:59:52] Speaker 1: Great questions today, too. Yeah, great questions. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for all your questions. Any final words from you, Salvatore?

[01:00:01] Speaker 2: Go forth and edit.

[01:00:03] Speaker 1: Go forth and edit. Sounds good. Well, thank you for attending. Feel free to keep asking us questions, contact us in support, and maybe we'll see you next week. We'll be here next week, so maybe we'll see you. See you around, yeah. All right.