Descript Q&A: Layouts, Multicam, Media Library, API (Full Transcript)

[00:00:31] Speaker 1: ♪♪ ♪♪ Hello. Hello, everyone. Greetings. Welcome. Greetings. Good greetings. Good morning. Good Tuesday. Good 11 a.m., at least for me. Welcome to the Descript support Q&A. We'll get started in just a few minutes here as folks start to trickle in as we get closer to, well, I guess it's already 11 a.m. Because as we get closer to 11 a.m., as we get closer to the actual start time, we have technically started. We're here every Tuesday at 11 a.m. Pacific. We'll just wait a few 30 seconds. How are you doing this fine morning, this fine half middle of the week? Oh, it's going.

[00:01:24] Speaker 2: It's going good.

[00:01:25] Speaker 1: Halfway to the middle of the week. Exactly. It's pretty good. How about you? I'm doing well. I'm doing swell. I'm ready to take this on and answer some questions. All right. Let's get started here. Welcome to the Descript Q&A. As I mentioned, we are here every Tuesday at 11 a.m. Pacific time, that is, with members of the support team. That includes me, Trevor, a member of the support team. And me, Salvatore, another member of the support team. And we also have Alex, a member of the support team, in chat, helping out with some links, answering some questions as they're mentioning to add questions to the chat for anything that we can't get to. We have a few other resources that we'll get to in just a moment. But the chat is the place to add questions. This is for anybody and anyone, regardless of where you are in your Descript journey, whether you are just getting started, you're a seasoned Descript editor, as you can even display it now on LinkedIn, or if you have never used Descript before and just stumbled upon this, everyone is welcome. And the goals of this space is to answer your questions live. And that is what the chat is for, and that is what we are here for. Some other resources in addition to this is we have a Help Center that we'll be sharing some links to in the chat as we answer some questions and do some demoing. There are walkthroughs, tutorials, troubleshooting guides, all sorts of great information that you can reference. Pretty much anything that's in Descript, there is a corresponding Help Center article for your needs. If you're watching this on YouTube, which I think everybody would be, there are other tutorials, reviews, announcements, and all past webinars are available on the YouTube page, including this one. This will be available as a recorded live event that you can watch. We also have a growing community of Descript users on Discord, Reddit. We have an official Facebook group you can join. We'll share some links on how to get involved with that. But that's just a great place to talk with other Descript users. And we are all pretty involved with that. We have some folks on our team that will be there answering questions. Our DMs are open on there and stuff. And then just like this, we have other live events available. We have a full calendar of webinars and other live events that you can join. This is here every Tuesday at 11 a.m. We have office hours in our Discord at 1 p.m. on Wednesdays. That's Pacific time. And we do have another webinar. I think we have it this week. I think it's this week. We have, I think, like webinars almost every single week, if not every week, in addition to this. So lots of places to ask. I already see some questions being asked, which is great. We'll get to those in just a moment. If we don't answer a question or if we don't answer the question in its entirety, you may hear us say, submit a ticket, just because if it's a specific bug that we can't really demo or replicate, you can get in touch with our support team directly, straight from the app. So if you are using Descript, you can press that question mark in the top right, and it will bring up a dropdown menu that you can do. You can select contact us or contact support, and then get in touch with us directly. That's all I have to say on that. And now we can jump fully in. I see some questions here. We got one, having some trouble with custom layouts. That's from Norm Fields. If you want to specify exactly the question, we'll definitely go into how to use custom layouts, and we'll hopefully cover what you're struggling with. Okay, I do see you have a follow-up there. Let's cover that one first, and then we'll get to this one from Sharon. I just want to show this right here. I do my presentation slides in thirds, so I can put the text in two thirds and cover one third with the video in post-edit. I've tried to set up a custom layout to apply, but it never works right. Totally. Do you think there's a way to try this or show this? Do you need some time to set this up, you think? Because I see you're doing – like your slides are in thirds, you're saying? And then cover one third with the video post-edit.

[00:06:12] Speaker 2: Let's see. I might have some slides that we can play with. Create a new project here. I guess the question is, will the slides be sort of always changing? I think the use case for using layouts would be to have sort of a set layout of assets I use a lot. So like a background, the way that your video is positioned. But if the slides are always changing, I think that's a good idea. Background, the way that your video is positioned. But if the slides are always changing, we could still work with that.

[00:06:55] Speaker 1: I just wanted to clarify. Yeah, because using a layout should be – okay, so 16 by 9 slides with the video cropped to 9 for a one third cover on the slide. Gotcha. Yeah, this is definitely possible. Do you need a second to set something up or do you want to share your screen now or how do we want to tackle this one?

[00:07:15] Speaker 2: Let's get this to my screen. I think I should be ready in a moment. Perfect.

[00:07:23] Speaker 1: Excellent. I'll let you lead that, jumping in. And I do see some other questions. I'm seeing a few questions that are asking the same thing about multicam when you have multiple video tracks and when you're adding them to your project they're not sort of at the same time. Can you share a video where you've done that? If you have a video that you want to share here, we can pull it up just to have a reference point. You're welcome to – oh, actually, I don't know if you can send a video in the YouTube chat. I think there's like a blocker on it. Interesting. If you submit a ticket – if you submit a ticket like right now, Norm, we can pull it up or I can pull it up on my end and then we'll have a reference point of that and then we can kind of try and troubleshoot from there. I'll find the ticket as you submit it in and that might be helpful. And I see we have an API question. We'll definitely touch upon that after we get through a couple of these initial ones.

[00:08:38] Speaker 2: All right, here we go. There we are. All right, so I'm starting with a blank project and I've just uploaded some slides that we used to use for our previous support Q&A on Zoom. I think I have one more follow-up question. For the video, are you usually using – is it like a recording of yourself speaking or is it just sort of B-roll that you're working with, Norm? The reason I ask is the way we set up the layout depends on what kind of video you're working with. If it's something where you'll be speaking and it's going to be transcribed and you'll want the transcript visible, we'll just need to set it up slightly differently, but definitely possible either way. All right, so while we wait for that, I'm going to grab a video really quick. Using our handy-dandy Media Library, I'm going to jump into this project and just add this file to the Media Library. And I'm going to go ahead and click on the video. And I'm going to click on the video. Add this file to the Media Library. Never done this before, actually, so I'm kind of excited. Successful.

[00:10:00] Speaker 3: There it is, yeah.

[00:10:01] Speaker 2: So what is the Media Library? The Media Library is pretty new. It's sort of been a longstanding feature request. We have users who have a lot of assets that they use regularly, like an intro, a piece of music, or a recording that they like to use across all projects. Previously, we didn't really have a global place where you could pull files from. You would just have to upload it again. So this was sort of our solution to that. So now within a project, you can import from your Media Library. So if you go to your Project tab, and next to Files, you have this plus sign. You could add from Media Library. And I just uploaded a video to that. You could also access that via the Media Library in the Drive view. So you could add files here as well. So let's see. We've got a follow-up. I have the camera recording from the presentation. Okay. Perfect. All right, so let's go ahead and work with that.

[00:11:01] Speaker 1: We'll pretend that the video you're adding in is the same as the presentation. It's just the video.

[00:11:07] Speaker 2: Exactly. So when I'm building this layout, I would start with the camera recording just so we have a script track. Oops, added that too many times. So I'm going to drag my video recording into the script. So we have sort of this like setup default 16 by 9 layout. And from here, I would just sort of position this how you'd like it to appear. And as far as the slides go, we're going to be using what we call layers. And layers are anything that go on top of the script track. And the script track is your recording, your audio, video, anything that you've uploaded that's transcribed and in the editor. So, for example, if I highlight a word on the script, it's highlighting it on the actual video as well. So just to play this back. I want to delete completed. It deletes it from the script and the video. And now I'm going to add the slide in as a layer to the very – just on top here. Do you want to make a quick scene? Nope. Yeah, let's do a scene. I'm going to break this up into this 10-minute video. Yeah, it's just a long video. So scenes are what we use to segment your project into sections. And in this recording, I just added a scene marker. And all you need to do to accomplish that is to click forward slash on your keyboard either on the script here or on the timeline as well. I could do it here, and it adds a scene marker. Okay, so I'm just going to add the slide, I guess, right on top. Sort of just position this all the way to the end of the scene. And same thing. It will default to being 16 by 9, but I can sort of just resize this to fill the screen how I'd like it. If you double-click on the layer in the scene editor here, you can enter crop mode and just reposition it like so, which is helpful if it's not centered. So yeah, so far this is what we have. If that's all you need to sort of work with to start with, you can save this as a layout. Or if you want to make this even more sort of simplified, you can add some captions that you know you'll be using that can sort of speed up the process as well. So I have my video, my script track, which is my video, and then we have the slide, which is a layer and a caption layer. So I'm pretty happy with this. And to save this as a layout, I'm going to right-click on this scene thumbnail, this very top filmstrip-looking section on the timeline, and then I'm going to save as a layout. And I'll just call this slide, slide with video. There we go. If you don't have an existing layout pack, you could create one, or you could add it to an existing one. Let's create a new one. Slides layout pack. And we're just going to check all the elements in this scene that we have set up. We have the script, which is my video recording, the slide, which is added as a layer, and a caption layer. Create pack and save. And the only sort of limitation with this is it's going to be using the same slide over and over again, but you could certainly swap it out. And I'll show you how to do that. So that layout is saved, and we're just going to go move over to a blank scene here. Let me just reset this layout for this scene. So pretend like we just made a new scene and everything is back to normal. I'm going to go ahead and apply that layout to this scene. And there's a couple ways we can do that. On the script, you can click on the scene thumbnail there, or you could click on it here, and then under properties, the layout section will apply. So I'm going to apply the slide with video layout, and everything will apply as you had it. And if you want to replace the slide that's in this project, or in this scene, sorry, you can right-click on the scene editor and then replace the media with the new slide that you're wanting to add for that section. So this way it keeps the formatting the same. We're just swapping the slide out with each new scene. So I think this will probably be the quickest way to go about that. Placeholder frame, that could work as well. It would be the same process. You would just click on the placeholder and then fill that placeholder with the new slide that you're using. So either way would work. Sometimes if you're just creating it from an existing project, you might have a slide in there already. So that would be the main difference. So hopefully that helps a bit.

[00:16:08] Speaker 1: Yeah, and if there's still some lingering questions on that, feel free to, on this specific question, feel free to reach out to support with your project, and we'll be able to look into exactly how you have it set it up, how you have it set up so we can share a screen recording on how specifically for your slides and your video, because we're just using what we have on our end. But when you reach out to support, we can take a look at your project specifically and go from there. But we also have some other questions we want to make sure we do cover. This is, so this is, people were asking, this is one of, I'm having a hard time with multi-cam editing. When I import the footage, it lays them on the timeline side-by-side versus stacked, like what I've seen on video tutorials. There's another question from earlier that asked the same thing with multi-cam recordings. So we do have something that we can share on how to do this. And if you want to pull that up, we will show this.

[00:17:10] Speaker 2: Sure. I think I have the related ticket for one of these questions pulled up. So we're happy to go over both of these. So to sort of break down these questions, we have a situation where we want multiple videos, one after the other. And then we'll have another scenario where you're needing to combine multiple videos into one, what we call a sequence. That way they can all play simultaneously and cut between them. So I think to start with the first one, if you want to just have your videos one after the other in a project, I would recommend just dragging them into the script one by one. So I'm going to open up a blank composition here. And let's say I have a four-part recording and I just want them to be sequentially one after the other. In your composition, we have your blank editor. And then you can go to your Project tab and upload your files there. And to sort of just upload them one by one, we're just going to drag the first file in to the script. You'll see that it populates with the transcription. And then to avoid having it play on top of each other, we're just going to grab the second file you want to upload and then just drag it right after that. So that way it's continuous. So this is part two. And if you have a part three and four, you would just repeat the steps and sort of keep adding them in, like so. If you're in a situation where everything's sort of jumbled and playing at the same time, I would maybe consider starting with a new composition. So you don't have to open up a new project in the project that you're in. If you head to the top, you can click on the title of your composition and you can open up a new one within that project. That way it gives you a blank slate to work with. All of your files are still there in the Project tab. And you would just drag them in. And if needed, you could delete the old one, like so. So hopefully that helps.

[00:19:09] Speaker 1: Do you have that ticket pulled up? The one that they submitted?

[00:19:17] Speaker 2: I just found it.

[00:19:20] Speaker 1: Yes. I think I see the issue here is they were dragged in as an additional layer rather than in a sequence.

[00:19:28] Speaker 2: Yes. So let's pull up that question because this would be the sort of flip side of this process. So let's show this one. Having a hard time with multicam editing. And it lays them on the timeline side by side versus stacked. So this is where we would use what we have called sequences. Sequences are used when you need to combine multiple videos all at once. So if you have, let's say you have an interview and you had three cameras, two microphones, et cetera, we would use a sequence to sort of package all of those files into one. That way we can neatly place them into the script. So let's go ahead and go over that process. I'm going to start with a new composition again. So you would upload your files into your project. And I'm looking at the ticket. In most cases, the script will ask you if you want to create a sequence. Sometimes that may not happen. But if that's the case, we can certainly manually do it. So we've got your files uploaded. All we're going to do is multi-select them using shift and click. So I have my two videos here that I want to combine. And when you do that, you'll have this pop-up that asks if you want to create a sequence. And that's what we'll want to do. So we're going to create a sequence. You can set the speaker labels here if you need to. And then once you're done, it will have a new window open up. And this is what we call the sequence editor. So once you've selected the files, they'll all populate here. And this is where you'll line things up. If you have a count-in or a slate track, you can just line up all the video tracks so they're in time. But with Rooms, if you need to mute something, if you have...

[00:21:20] Speaker 1: I was just going to say, with Rooms, all of this is done automatically. If you record using our remote recording tool like we did, it should be done automatically. And all these steps are not necessary. However, importing externally, you will need to remember to do this step.

[00:21:41] Speaker 2: That is a great call-out. And yeah, with Rooms, this should all be done and sort of everything should be ready to go. But if you're doing like an external recording, this is where you would just line up all of your video files and mute ones that you don't need audio from. And yeah, once you're all set and ready to go with this, you would click Done. And then in your Project tab, again, you'll have a Sequences folder that pops up. And that's where you'll find your sequences that you created.

[00:22:15] Speaker 1: This is the one that we just made.

[00:22:16] Speaker 2: I'm going to click on that and drag it onto my script. And you should see that... your multiple layers will be shown side-by-side here and they'll play at the same time.

[00:22:31] Speaker 1: ...to Life Tips with Descript support, Episode 1. Isn't that fun?

[00:22:39] Speaker 2: Yes, it is. And there we go. So now we have a sequence on our script track. And another way to sort of double-check... that you have a sequence is if you expand the timeline by arrow here or horizontal... line, on your script track, you'll see the stacked rectangle icon sequence track and not just a single file. Awesome. Yeah, you should be able to run automatic multi-cam with no issues.

[00:23:13] Speaker 1: So that covers a couple of questions. I think they were generally asking the same thing, just what to do when you have multiple tracks that you need to do different things with. Can you... We got a question about... I'll just show it up here. How can I save music in the library as a favorite or to a folder? Do you want to show what you did earlier when you added a file to the Media Library?

[00:23:35] Speaker 2: Yes, yeah. Let's head over to our dry view, which is just the main homepage. So I'm going to click on the Home button here. And from here, you'll have this tab here that says Media Library. So if you head into there, you can add files here that you'll be using frequently across projects. So in this case, like a piece of music that you'll be consistently using, you could just add that file here. So you would upload it here. And so when you do create a new project, you can pull files from this Media Library instead of having to upload it each time. So right now, we only have this image and my video that I uploaded. So if I were to create a new project, for example, and I'm adding files, instead of uploading it from a computer again, which does use Media Minutes, you can pull from your Media Library, which has already been uploaded. And you would just click your music there and it will import it into this project.

[00:24:38] Speaker 1: And there's not a way to favorite it, but you can create folders within your Media Library as well and organize it from there. You can name the folder Favorites or something, or Always Use. There are ways to organize within the Media Library, but we don't have a star function currently. We do have a Feature Request page. If you find something that would be a quality of life improvement or just something you want to see in Descript, we do have a great Feature Request page that we do check fairly often. It's how the Media Library came to be in the first place, where you can submit any requests that you want. We'll submit a link to it in the chat that you can go to and upvote any existing ones or add a new one from there.

[00:25:31] Speaker 2: Yes, we do review that regularly. So that's a great way to look into that.

[00:25:38] Speaker 1: We do have a big question here I want to highlight. Let me just find it real quick. Okay, here it is. Could you explain in simple terms what the new Descript API slash Descript MCP is? What does it actually do? And how is it different from using Descript normally? Well, we do have some answers in the chat already, but thought we want to address it from here. If you have not heard, we have introduced the API as a... We used to have a very mini version of it. This is not that. This is pretty expansive and only going to get better as we unlock new capabilities to it. But yeah, we have an API now that you can use. The API, it's sort of different than the MCP. I like how we were explaining it in the chat. The API, if you're unfamiliar, is a way to basically work with Descript without having to be in Descript. It's like basically sending a moving truck and sending a shipping box. So if you are working, maybe that's not the best analogy. Do you have a good analogy you like to use? Can you explain like I'm five analogy?

[00:26:57] Speaker 2: Oh, that's good. How I would describe an API is it's like adding a pipeline into Descript. So Descript is this closed platform where you do your edits, you upload your videos, you work with Underlord. But with an API, we add a pipeline. So from outside of Descript, you can send data, you can send instructions and allow for more flexibility if you have like an automated process that you want to accomplish. And MCP, like Alex mentioned, takes that a step further. I think with Cloud, that's going to be like the main sort of, probably the easiest way to work with the API is you could prompt with Cloud. Cloud sends that data to Descript via an API. So it's just taking things a step further.

[00:27:51] Speaker 1: Sorry, go ahead. So I thought of a better analogy I like to use. If you're in a restaurant and you want food on your table, you have to ask a server to create, to put the food ticket to the chefs. The chefs make it, they bring it back to you. That's kind of what an API is. Instead of just making the food yourselves, which you always can do, you always can go into a kitchen, get the ingredients, make the food yourselves. This makes it so you don't have to do that. A common example is if you have Google Drive and you want to upload a video, you can upload a video to a specific folder in Google Drive and there's an automation. The API allows you to import it directly from Google Drive, apply an underlord prompt to that video and then edit the video for you automatically. And then you can open up Descript and boom, there's a project that you never even touched that all you had to do is upload a video into Google Drive to do. It enables you to do things like that. The MCP, as we were describing, just takes it a step further. We've done some fun things with that using Cloud where we're creating all sorts of automations. I actually did something with our webinar where I created an automation where anytime we're done with the webinar, it will take the video stream, it will upload it to Descript and then it will basically create a clip every time there's a question and highlight the question, name the clips, what the question was. So now we have every week for our own personal reference, we have Descript projects of every single question we get in these webinars, in these Q&A sessions, which is pretty helpful for us. So we can look at trends and go from there. We can further automate by exporting the transcript, uploading that to any sort of documents. There's just a lot of fun flexibility you can have from there. But for most people, this might not be anything you touch, but for businesses, this is a huge, huge unlocking, basically just a canvas to work with. Anything else on the API or do we want to kind of move on from there until we get more questions? No, no, I love that analogy. That was really well said, I think. I have to come up with a perfect one. I like the restaurant one. I like saying like, it's a food ticket. You order food, you bring it to the kitchen. The kitchen makes the food and brings it back. That's like the API connector is the server. Someone else made that up. Okay. We have a question about, here's just a follow-up on the media question. Even if the music is in your Descript media where you hit the plus button and add to the music to the video you're editing, not uploading your own music. Okay. So you want to save stock music as a favorite so you don't have to find it each time. Totally.

[00:31:03] Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah. I'd be happy to give a quick example. So I think what Janelle is mentioning is adding a favorite piece of music that's in our stock library. So in a project, if you head to the media tab here you'll access our stock media library. So we have a collection of images, videos sound effects and music. So whenever you do add a file from the stock media to your project it'll actually import that physical, not physical but that actual file into the project which you can download, save it to your computer. But in this case, I'm just going to leave it by adding it to the project. So in your project tab, once you do add that piece of music in you'll see it under the stock media folder. So this is the elevate your love instrumental in my example that I want to just keep reusing save it to my media library. So now that that's in this project I can click on this three dots next to it and add it to my media library. That way I don't have to open up the stock media tab each time and search for it, try to find it, import it. It's going to be sort of just accessible via the media library now. So I've added that there.

[00:32:19] Speaker 1: A huge pro tip with that is that our stock media partners we don't necessarily own the, or like rather we're not in control of whether some of these songs tracks, clips are going to be accessible from them all the time. We've known that some favorite tracks are like gone. They're no longer accessible, but if you save them you will still have access to them. So if you have a favorite music track that you always want to use as an intro, make sure to save it. You can access it from your other projects as well still like you can import from other projects still but the media library is just the one-stop shop to save your favorite and most used clips and media.

[00:33:06] Speaker 2: Yes, good tip.

[00:33:10] Speaker 1: Now we can access Elevate Your Love at any time. What does it sound like?

[00:33:15] Speaker 2: Let's take a listen.

[00:33:18] Speaker 1: I want to hear the elevation.

[00:33:29] Speaker 2: Ooh, I'm sold. There we go. That's sold. It's staying right there.

[00:33:34] Speaker 1: It's staying right there. We've got to create a new folder and say the best music.

[00:33:38] Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do that. I don't think I got to show this earlier. Fave music. So this could be one way to organize your media library your music tracks in there. I wonder if I could, oh, there we go. There's your media library, your music tracks in there. I wonder if I could, oh, yes, I can. You can drag and drop right into the folder. Is that new? I have no idea.

[00:33:56] Speaker 1: Dragging and dropping? I think it might be. Is that new? Am I seeing this for the very first time, dragging and dropping? Images, yes.

[00:34:05] Speaker 2: So you can just drag the file right into the folder so that's pretty cool. But you can't do that on the DriveView though. Let's see if we can do that.

[00:34:15] Speaker 1: No, you can't.

[00:34:16] Speaker 2: No, you just, if you click it, if you just click and hold it will just open up the project. One step closer though.

[00:34:24] Speaker 1: One step closer. That was the test run is the media library.

[00:34:27] Speaker 2: Exactly.

[00:34:29] Speaker 1: If you hadn't known, Descript can update every day if it wants to and release new things every day just automatically to your 2.2 Descript. Just basically deploy it anytime because it's now working throughout the cloud and it's a web-based tool and also works the same on the desktop. Randomly, I guess not randomly, but you might wake up one day and find new features on Descript without having to restart or update it or do anything on your end, which is super cool because previously you had to restart anytime there was a change and it was not fun for people. Do you remember that? A new version is ready.

[00:35:15] Speaker 2: Trying to block it out of my memory.

[00:35:16] Speaker 1: New version is ready, Saga. No, but those days are long gone because it's better now. We figured out the better way of doing it, which is always cool. All right, any questions that we have beyond what has been already asked or if we didn't quite cover the questions that were asked and you want some more clarification, feel free to ping again in that chat. We'll be happy to cover it. Otherwise, we can play around with an existing project and share some common workflows.

[00:35:50] Speaker 2: Let's do it. I'm going to open up the project again that I was showing with the two-person recording. This is a scenario where we had an interview and I had to create a sequence. Now we're just going to edit it. This is from Room, so it automatically did that for us. Earlier, we covered on how to create a sequence manually. We have these two recordings and let's just get to editing, I guess. If you haven't played around with the main feature of Descript, which is script-based editing, you can make edits, cuts, and just clean up your recording via the script. Instead of playing back and scrubbing through the video, if you have a section that you know, oh, I don't like this at all, you can just delete it just like a Word document. I don't like this at all. Let's get rid of it. This is a really powerful way to just edit your video using the script. With this, we have some tools that can help us. Since we have a transcript, we have some AI tools that we can put to use. Instead of me just manually going through this, I'll take it a step further and use something like Edit for Clarity. Edit for Clarity, what it does is it analyzes the entire script. It looks for filler words, digressions, any kind of fluff that you might not need for this recording. I'm just going to click on that to start with. On this next page, you'll see some parameters that you can adjust. The intensity, if you want low edit, medium. Want to go heavy? Let's stick with heavy and see what it suggests here. Click Submit.

[00:37:44] Speaker 1: I think I accidentally just showed the chat for a second. The whole chat.

[00:37:49] Speaker 3: Here it is.

[00:37:53] Speaker 2: We're on fire. I love it. After a couple of seconds, you'll see that 144 suggestions are being presented to me. You can click on these individually. You can accept the edit or decline them, and it won't keep the edit. I'm going to go ahead and just click Done because I'm pretty confident that that'll be good. On your script, you can see what the edits look like. The script text will be crossed out like this, which is really helpful if you end up not wanting that edit. Let's play this section really quick. It decided to just remove this little blurb here for people to rent. Maybe I did want to keep that, so I'll just hover over it and click Restore. Rent. I actually like that out, so I'm going to Command-Z to undo that. It's as easy as that. If you want to undo an edit, just hover over it and restore that edit if you decide to keep it in. I like how this looks, so I'm going to go ahead and roll with it. Another thing that I like to do personally when editing an interview or a talking head presentation is improve the sound quality. With this particular recording, we just did it via our laptops using the built-in mics. If you don't have an external microphone, we do have this feature called Studio Sound which can improve your audio recordings specifically for speech. Let's go ahead and just apply that really quick. Let's listen back, see what that sounds like now. We did end up getting another small trailer for our car because right away it sounds louder, it sounds more even, the ambient background noise is removed. Let's turn it off and compare really quick. So much stuff. We loaded up the car, got the kids, got a very handy tool. I'm going to turn it back on. If you want to adjust how intense the effect is, right next to it, you'll have this effect settings where you can adjust the intensity. If you're working in a sequence like we are in this case, you can double-click on your script track which is on the timeline to access the Sequence Editor. Alternatively, in the script, you can right-click and edit the sequence and you can adjust Studio Sound individually. If I wanted medium strength on mine, and then 100% strength for Trevor, I could play with those individually. Yes.

[00:40:37] Speaker 1: Using the MacBook audio definitely doesn't lead to professional audio without Studio Sound.

[00:40:44] Speaker 2: You're right. They're better than most though from what I've heard. They're pretty good. They're pretty good. They're not studio quality. I remember they had a whole campaign, Studio Worthy Microphones.

[00:40:55] Speaker 1: I mean, they're kind of studio worthy once you apply Studio Sound.

[00:40:59] Speaker 2: That's true, yes. They should have an asterisk next to it.

[00:41:02] Speaker 1: With an asterisk, yes. If you apply Descript Studio Sound, then it's studio quality.

[00:41:07] Speaker 2: It'll truly be.

[00:41:09] Speaker 1: You will probably still have to adjust the intensity. I love 70% to 80% in between that is like the magic range for Studio Sound for me. Yes, it's a sweet spot.

[00:41:21] Speaker 2: If you find that sometimes Studio Sound might be a little aggressive, I find that if you're in an extra echo-y room where the echo is almost as loud as your voice, you could find that Studio Sound will cut off your words sometimes. The intensity slider can help mitigate that for sure. But yes, I'm happy with how this sounds. Let's go ahead and look at visuals. By default, we just have this side-by-side, which looks okay. But if you haven't messed around with layouts yet, layouts are a great way to quickly apply a look to your scenes. We have one single scene in this project. I could add more. Let's see. Maybe when I stop talking, I'm going to add a scene marker here. When Trevor stops talking, I'm just adding little markers to my project here. Nothing is really changing right now. But let's say for this first section, under this scene, I want it to be just Trevor. I can rearrange this manually, or I can fill the scene editor, whichever. Then you'll see once it reaches the end of the scene, it'll switch back to normal.

[00:42:34] Speaker 1: Welcome. We have... Just to highlight this, because we just got a question sort of related to what you just did. How did you work with the different audio when it is two videos in one project? Right now, we're seeing Salvatore edit each video individually because these are separately recorded. You can do that just within the main editor by selecting each layer individually and resizing them, adding different effects to them, etc. You see how this is just affecting my video. It is not affecting anything else in here. If we want to do the audio, we can open back up that sequence editor, which we had opened just a moment ago. Yeah, the sequence. You right-click in the script or in the timeline, and then press Edit Sequence. You can also do... I think it's Shift-Command-O on a Mac. Then it's probably Control-Shift-O on Windows. That's how to get to the sequence editor, which will show you all tracks in the sequence container.

[00:43:44] Speaker 2: There you are. This is what's being referenced in your editor. This is the full two separate files that we have. If you needed to make volume adjustments, apply individual audio effects, this is where you would do that. Studio sound, let's bump that down to 70% for Trevor, and then for myself, make it 100%. This way, we can affect individual layers, individual by themselves, which is really helpful. Then we'll click Done. Anything that you do in there will apply in your main timeline here.

[00:44:25] Speaker 1: As far as just the sequence editor goes, what we would recommend is applying... You can definitely apply individual effects, audio levels, individual effects like studio sound and settings within those, the advanced settings. What we would not recommend is applying cuts within the sequence editor. All cuts we would recommend doing in your main script editor because if you make any cuts in the sequence editor, any time the sequence is referenced, it's referencing also these cuts, so it can just make some confusing and potentially project-breaking stuff. Nothing that can't be fixed, but it just makes it a pain for later. The script, it's the best place to actually do your main edits, but specific effects, you can always apply individually. I hope that makes sense and didn't cause confusion and chaos amongst the audience.

[00:45:24] Speaker 2: No, that's a good thing to call out because if I, let's, for example, just remove this entire section. It's about, I don't know, 10 seconds or so from the script. I'm going to delete that entirely. If we open up our sequence editor again, you'll see that that section is still here. That's because we're just referencing the sequence and the files within them. So if I were to delete something here, if I cut off Trevor, now when we go back to our main timeline and play it back, Trevor's video will be gone for a minute. So that's just...

[00:46:01] Speaker 1: Yeah, which not really what you want. I mean, it's worse if you make a cut in the middle of it and then drag it over and that really screws things up, but just to make it cleaner. I just thought I'd call that out because I don't know how often that happens, but it has happened a few times in my experience. Someone reaches out, my project is broken beyond repair. It's never broken beyond repair. You can always repair it.

[00:46:29] Speaker 2: When you say cuts, you mean the actual transcript itself, I'm assuming? Yes. If you're trimming any sort of deleting of sections, you can do that via the transcript here just by highlighting and deleting. If you want to work in the timeline, you could delete it here as well. So I could just click a clip, delete that from the timeline. And I might as well cover some useful tips for working in the timeline if you're used to more traditional editing. If you click on S on your keyboard, that will split a clip. So let's say I just want to get rid of this moving word. I'm going to split this clip by clicking S and you'll see that it cuts it in half and I can just delete that word. Be familiar with. I've completed a move.

[00:47:22] Speaker 1: The cool thing about Descript, sorry, it's just you can use the timeline if you are familiar with it. We do have a fully functioning timeline editor, but if you do not come from timeline editing applications or like Premiere, Final Cut, Audacity, any digital audio workspace, you can just use the script like we're showing right now. You never have to open up that little timeline at the bottom.

[00:47:46] Speaker 2: Precisely. Options. We have options. Options galore. Okay. Yeah, sort of a preview of what that might look like if you want to add an image to the scene. Now that I've divided this into this own little section, let's go into media and let's add a little overlay to the scene. If you hover over that in the script, you'll see that it highlights all of the text that's within that. So now I have this image overlay for the scene and I can move it around, resize it, and once it gets to the end of the scene, that image will disappear.

[00:48:39] Speaker 1: Welcome, we have Sal on.

[00:48:42] Speaker 2: Oh, a little too soon. Once it reaches the end of that scene marker, the image is gone. So very, very handy.

[00:48:54] Speaker 1: I don't like that image, so I'm getting rid of it.

[00:48:57] Speaker 2: But yes, yeah, that's pretty amazing. It's really fun to work this way and it takes some getting used to, but I think once you've gotten the workflow down, it's really helpful for this type of content and editing. But yeah, great questions. Please keep them coming. If anyone has questions, please drop them into the chat. But otherwise, I'll just keep on moving along with some edits here.

[00:49:28] Speaker 1: Do you want to show automatic multi-cam? Because I know we had a few folks in the chat that were questioning about basically how to edit with this type of footage when you have two people talking or multiple camera angles or anything. We can show you how to do a lot of this without even having to put a lot of legwork in.

[00:49:50] Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do it. So, so far, I've been doing things pretty manually, like I'm making Trevor the main focus for this scene. For the next scene, I want it to be myself. You could certainly do this if you want, but we have a feature that will automate this process for you. It's called automatic multi-cam. So if we go to AI tools again, you'll see it might be recommended if you use rooms to record, but if not, you can just scroll down and under looks good, you'll see automatic multi-cam. And this only works if you have a sequence. So in this case, we do. We have those two files in the sequence, which is being used in our script track. And what this does is it takes the speaker labels, which are identified when you import a file or upload a file. And it just tells the script, hey, when Trevor comes on, focus on this video in the sequence. When Salvatore comes on, focus on his video in the sequence. So the styles, we have two styles here. We have show only active speaker. And basically all that does is it shows the speaker in full screen whenever they start speaking. Automatic is a little bit more fun. It's just a bit more dynamic. It can show the two speakers side by side. And you have cutaways with that, which will show like reactions. So if I'm speaking and then Trevor reacts, it might pan to Trevor for a moment. So I like to keep it like that. Just leave it alone pretty much. Camera setup, you typically don't have to touch this, but it's good to just double check. And if you click onto the settings here, right next to it, you'll see that the Trevor speaker label here is listed. And it's pointing at Trevor's video in the sequence. Salvatore pointing to my video. So sometimes it's a good place to check if things are not working right.

[00:51:47] Speaker 1: We got a quick question here. I've seen one of my teachers I watch. They add a written text box that starts with the title and then opens up fully. I'm wondering if it can be done in Descript. I'm wondering what you mean by open text. You mean by open up fully, if you're referring to captions or if the text transforms or animations, because I imagine what you're looking for is probably possible. I'm just not quite sure the exact animation or look you're looking for is. Do you know what this question is referring to?

[00:52:25] Speaker 2: It sounds like it might be some sort of animation. So it's like a text box and then maybe it sort of expands as the video goes on.

[00:52:37] Speaker 1: Yeah, I love the question. I just want to make sure we're answering and going down the right rabbit hole here. Do you want to, if you can, clarify just a little bit more how it looks and what you're sort of looking for? Because we can add a title. We can add something to a title right now or a text box right now. Yeah. And then maybe we can go from there. Starts with a large title, then drops into a full text box with the titles. So I wonder if it's something with smart transitions that we can demonstrate.

[00:53:18] Speaker 2: Yeah, let's give it a try. So for this first scene, let's just add a title element. Our podcast. And then you'll see when it gets to this next scene, it goes away.

[00:53:41] Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe demonstrate how we can show like a smart transition. Sure, yeah.

[00:53:51] Speaker 2: So smart transitions are on by default. So whenever there's a scene, if there are different visuals between the scenes, there'll be a transition added. So let's, for example, I've added this text box here. And it fades out. You can always change the animation manually. So if you click on that element in the scene editor, you'll have this animation box and you can click out. So what I want to happen when this is ending in the scene, let's do maybe a slide. And I want it to slide out. And let's make the duration longer. So there's a lot of parameters that you can affect here. And I want it to slide down. Let's sort of just see what that looks like.

[00:54:40] Speaker 1: To life tips with Descript support, episode one.

[00:54:49] Speaker 2: That's pretty cool. Yeah, there's a bunch of options here as far as presets go. And you can also have your own custom animations. If you're used to working with key frames, that's a pretty fun thing to try out. But I would start with these presets to see if there's something that might look similar to what you're going for. I think the slide might be the closest in this case. And you can do that with any sort of element in your scene. So let's have Trevor slide out as well. There we go. Zoom and pan. I think for script-tracked elements, it's a little bit more limited.

[00:55:26] Speaker 1: Support episode one.

[00:55:32] Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's my mistake. For script-tracked elements, so in this case, Trevor's video, which is on the script, it's either custom or zoom and pan. But for layers, you have all of those presets available. So hopefully that's something similar to what you're looking for. If not, we'd be happy to look. So maybe it is in a different frame or frames.

[00:56:02] Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not, just transparently, I'm not quite sure what the sort of end goal you want from here. However, what I may recommend is if you have a specific video that you're referencing, like you've seen this somewhere, if you reach out to support and say, I'm looking to replicate this in Descript, and then you share the video link, and then we can actually see the animation or what the text is, we'd be more than happy from the support ticket to show exactly how to do that. And you can even reference that you asked here and we did not demonstrate it. So they know like, oh, okay, yeah, we remember you. But yeah, we love getting specifics of like what you see because chances, it's possible that was even done in Descript if you watched it on like a different channel or something.

[00:56:56] Speaker 2: Yes, and great way to call out how to access our support team. So in a project or in the Drive view, you can click on this question mark and there should be a contact support button here. And that'll take you to create a ticket. If you're on a paid plan, you can chat with us live from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.

[00:57:18] Speaker 1: Yeah, and sorry that we didn't quite answer or cover it as you would hope live, just as we're coming to the end of the session in a few minutes here. But yeah, we are totally happy to cover that directly if you reach out, if you have the video link somewhere because that would be the best way to be like, ah, yes, I know exactly what you're talking about.

[00:57:44] Speaker 2: Yeah, we'd be happy to work with you one-on-one with that. But yes, great questions.

[00:57:52] Speaker 1: Do we have any quick last minute questions before we come up? We're about two minutes away from the end of this week's session. But as I mentioned, we are here every week, right here, same space, 11 a.m. Tuesdays, Pacific Time, YouTube, the support team. Support team. Descript. Questions and answers.

[00:58:16] Speaker 2: That's right. Those are the constants in life. So you can always count on that. Those are the constants.

[00:58:24] Speaker 1: Gotcha. Okay. Oh, maybe I can quickly try and look this up if I can find something. I'll do my very, very best to look this up. I don't know if I'll see this. Let me see.

[00:58:40] Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Let me run automatic.

[00:58:42] Speaker 1: Oh, I see. Maybe if you're referring to captions, you want to showcase captions real quick, if maybe this is what this is. Sure, yeah.

[00:58:51] Speaker 2: So add a caption layer. We're just going to go to our caption tab and pick one of these sort of pre-made styles. I'm going to go with the classic one-word karaoke preset here. And might just take a moment to apply, but it should be ready. There we go. Life tips with Descript support, episode one.

[00:59:15] Speaker 1: Isn't it? Yes. Welcome. We have the Descript spelled wrong. But that's a good call out that this is pulling from your transcription. Captions pull directly from your automatic transcriptions, which you can correct. Yeah.

[00:59:31] Speaker 2: So if I want to correct just the spelling, and I'm not going to mess with the audio or video, anything that's associated with the script, we're going to highlight it and click correct. So in this case, Descript was not transcribed correctly. So I'm just going to correct that so that it appears correctly on the transcript.

[00:59:55] Speaker 1: But there you have it. There we have it. If there was anything that we did not answer, we are, well, back here next week, as I mentioned. But you can also reach out to us directly on Discord, on Reddit, wherever you would like to reach out and get an answer. We will be there.

[01:00:13] Speaker 2: Like Batman.

[01:00:14] Speaker 1: Like Batman and Robin. Exactly. All right. Well, have a great rest of the Tuesday, everybody, and see you next time. See you next time. Bye-bye.