Speaker 1: In this video, let's learn how to use Descript in only 15 minutes. Clock's ticking, so let's jump into it. All right, so we're inside Descript. First thing we want to do is we want to make a new project. So we're going to click New Project. Don't worry about New Classic Project. It's going to ask you what kind of project you want to make. And you can always change this after you make it. But is your project going to be a video-based project or an audio-based project? So we're going to select Video Project. Click Done. And now we're inside Descript and we've got our interface up. So let's go over what each thing does, and get a brief overview of how this all works and how it all plays together. So inside here, we can see we've got our composition, which basically acts like a tech stock. Up here, we can't see anything because we don't have any videos loaded, but this is where our video playback would be. Over on the left side is going to be where our scene thumbnails are going to be. And we'll go over that a little bit later. And then over on the right side, it's empty because nothing's selected. But that's where our settings will be if we need to adjust a clip. Up here on the top is going to be our different options. So we've got our media. This is going to be where all of our media files are going to be, our videos, photos, audio. Over here, if you want to record something new, we can record directly. This is going to be if we want to add some text inside our composition. But honestly, it's a lot easier just to do it directly inside the composition. The shape button is if we want to add some shapes inside our video. And then lastly, we've got our template option. And this is going to be where we can apply custom templates to scenes, which we'll go over a little bit later. So easiest way to figure this all out, let's just import some video files. That's the best way to learn how this works. But let's just say I want to upload a file. And now it's going to add this file. And then it's also going to upload this file to Descript server in the background. So I can access this on any other computer or share it with the team in any location. And then if I just either click add or just drag and drop this file over here, you can see that it's going to add it to the spot. And if you drop it in that purple box or if you drop it here, it's going to automatically start transcribing the file. You can go into settings if you don't want to transcribe every single file. Maybe you had the file transcribed somewhere else and you want to import it, which we'll go over in a future video. But by default, it's going to automatically transcribe your files. And then this window will pop up where you could select what language your file is in and how many speakers it has. If you're not sure, you could also say unsure. And it will try to detect the speaker names. But for right now, since this is a new project, no, we don't have any speaker names loaded. Now we've got our video loaded. One thing we could also do is we come up here to the top left. We can change our settings. So by default, it'll use whatever settings your video is at. But let's say we wanted to reframe this or create a social media video, TikTok video. We could come over here, select portrait. And if we just tap our video and come over to layout and come over to the width and height, and we could just scale this video all the way up. I'm just going to undo that for this case. We've got our video loaded in. It automatically transcribes it. And as you can see, it basically has turned our video into a text document. So now to edit this video, it is as easy as editing a text document. So if I click anywhere and I can either press the space bar or if I hold down the option button and click, it will automatically... ChatGPT's paid tier. Start playing. And James Clear. So also one thing you'll notice is this new thing popped up on the bottom. So this is a timeline. And I'll talk about this a little bit later. But it is basically a real-time playback of wherever our cursor is in the script. During peak times, this is a visual timeline representation of all of the video clips and moments. And you could also see that it shows a rough version of the transcript down here. This is going to come into play if you need to do more finely detailed edits. But for right now, we don't need to worry about the timeline. We're just going to focus on the text part. So in this part, you can review your text and you can run through it and proofread it if you need to. So like over here, ChatGPT, I'm talking about ChatGPT, but it writes it out as two words and sort of spells out ChatGPT. So if you need to make a correction while you're reviewing through your transcript, you just highlight the text and then you just click correct. And then you just type out the new word. So you could run through your transcript, proofread it. I'd say if you were just editing this video for yourself, this is just for your reference. You don't really need to have a proofread transcript. But I would advise doing a final pass if you want to, once you publish your video, so that you can export the transcript as captions and upload the captions to YouTube wherever you embed this video for accessibility reasons. And in that case, after you whittle this down, it would be good to do a pass and adjust your transcript. Now let's talk about editing our video slash text. Let's say I just want to cut out this line. So if we play this, Joey Dowd, each week, twice a week, we send out video signals. And I just want to go straight to... So let's jump into... I'm Joey Dowd, let's jump into the five links. So if I highlight this text and I just press delete, you'll see there's a little icon here that indicates that there's a cut in the video, this little dashed vertical line. So now if I hit play this back... Everyone, I am Joey Dowd. So let's jump into the five links. It automatically made that edit for me. I didn't have to like mess with any video timelines or anything. I just adjusted the text and it automatically made the cut. And that's pretty much the riff of what you would do with this. You would just run through this, adjust your text, and make all of the edits that you want to make. And I'm just on one video clip. You could add as many video clips as you want, and you can pull whatever excerpts or sound bites you want from those video clips and mix and match, incorporate them inside the script, and it will automatically edit that video in real time. So in this example from a video we did about James Clear's newsletter, we were pulling from multiple podcast sources, and then I was writing out inside Descript. You could just write out text. And we'll cover it in a different video, but you could also turn this text into AI voice text. But in this case, this was just to write out a script and incorporate it with podcast clips that we had. So you can see here in the beginning, we have scripted part for an intro line, and then multiple video files being pulled, and then multiple lines from different videos all edited into this one composition, this one video. So if we click over here, we can see that this project has multiple compositions. So in one case, we downloaded different clips from CBS News, had it transcribed. And then let's say I just want to use this section. I can just highlight this text, copy it, come back over to my main project. Let's say I want to add it after this Tim Ferriss clip. If I just press enter, add a new line, and paste it, it automatically pulls that extra clip in, adds it in here, and I'm able to edit with multiple video clips by simply copying and pasting. So when you're editing the script, as I noted, you can just delete parts. Okay, so let's say I want to remove that part, but let's say for the sake of this video, I'm like, I don't know, maybe I want to bring that back later. I don't want to fully delete it. I want to remember what was there. So if I highlight it, instead of pressing delete, I can press strikethrough, which they call ignore. You could also access this by doing command backspace, and that will strike this out. And so we can see visually here, I can still see that this text is here, but I can see that it will be ignored. So if I play this back, it skips it, it acts like it's a cut, it acts like it's not there. But when you're reviewing the script, you can still see that that text is there. So this is more useful for ideas or like longer sentences or paragraphs where you're like, I feel like I need to cut this out for the sake of the video, but maybe I'll come back to it, or maybe I'll reuse it. I don't want to fully delete it and forget about it. And by the way, nothing is actually deleted. This is non-destructive. So anything you remove, it is still in your source video file. You can still bring it back. So let's say we've run through our video. We have condensed everything that we want to condense. We have all of the spoken word is what we want to say. The next step we're going to do is add the visuals. And the way we do that into script is we add scenes. So scenes are basically a way to think of, hey, in this section here, I want to mark a start and an end point, and I want some sort of visual to happen here. So when I come in and I drop a B-roll, another video clip or a screen recording, I just want it to show up for this section. And we're just going to mark out each section inside our script that we want to have a new visual happen. And the way we do that is we add a forward slash. So let's jump into another project. Let's say we're editing this social media clip, this TikTok video. Starts off with the intro. So I'm going to want to add scenes. So with each of these shots, I'm going to want to show something different. So I'm going to want to make each of them a scene, and it's going to get a lot easier to add a visual exactly where I want it to be. So I added these returns, but I need to add a forward slash. If I just type in a forward slash, we could see over here on the side, it just added a new thumbnail, which indicates, oh, this is a new scene. So you can see it's highlighting everything in the rest of the video because that's a scene. But if I just come over here to this next line, add a forward slash, new scene. And so now if I click on two, this line of text is a scene. First line, this is a scene. And then I want to add another scene here, and I could add a forward slash, or also I could just click this slash button if you don't want to use keyboard shortcuts for whatever reason. So let's say I want to show a visual, and let's say maybe I want to use like, I don't know, some stock footage. So if I just come over here to media, we could see I have all the files that I imported. But if we come over here, we can see that these are freely available stock footage clips that I can use. And you could search. So let's say I just want something that is, let's see what social media pops up with. Cool, so I'm flying through social media icons. So if I just click this, it will download it. And you can see it just highlighted this whole little section that I marked as a scene. And down here in the timeline, it marked over this scene section, hey, this is the video that we're displaying over this entire section. And now I'm going to want to click on it and scale this up so it fills the entire frame. And now if I play back, we could see scene one still remains unchanged. And now we've got our video. And then we go back to our regular shot. And so you could just run through this and apply any visual you want to any starts and then whatever section you just marked out. Now, I just mentioned that, yes, you could grab stock video from here, but also you can get stock images, stock gifs, you can get stock backgrounds, music, sound effects. So there are tons of free tools and resources already built into Descript that you can pull in and add to your projects. Now let's talk about another time saver, templates. All right, so we come over to the templates and let's say we just add this vertical template. Style might not be the best, but it saves you time. You could see this bottom part uses dynamic captions, which shows whatever we transcribed here in real time. Now the style may not be fit for you, but what is useful is if you build out your own custom looks, either using the shapes from over here or text features or other templates, if you just right click on the scene, you can save this template to be your own custom template so that you can use it in the future, like some of these templates that we have here. And lastly, let's talk about the timeline. The timeline you'll need to use if you need to fine tune your edits a bit more, or if you need to cut out moments of silence in the video, or if you want to show media across multiple scenes or have a bit more control over it, you're going to need to use the timeline. Now real quick, let's jump into a project that is a bit more polished and completed. So we can see here has a bunch of scenes, a lot more scenes, a lot more visuals added. So easy enough to mark out a scene, drop in a visual, and also drop in different screen recordings. So if we stretch up this timeline, like I said before, this is a visual representation. Also, if you've used any other video editing tools, this is a more classical view of how you would edit your video. So if we expand the timeline view, we can see all of the layers here, and these layers correspond to all of the layers inside our video. And so if we want to manually adjust, let's say we need the background to display longer than a scene, we can just grab the layer of the background and drag it across as long as we need to. And we can manually adjust how long that background image or whatever image, whatever layer you want, how long that stays on screen. The timeline also comes in handy if you need to fine tune where an edit is made. So when we're editing in the document or the word view, Descript does a pretty good job of matching up the edits of the video to the words, but sometimes it might misjudge where a word actually ends in the audio. So it might cut off a word, or it might leave a little extra gap after we stop saying the word, which we want to trim up. So the video is a little bit tighter and cleaner. So if we come over here to the end of the clip, we can just manually drag the end of the clip and have it end where we need to. And we could use the audio waveforms as a guideline to see where we stop speaking and where we want the edit to be. Now there are a lot of effects and features and we're not going to cover them in this video, but the one thing that you will probably want to know how to use and be interested, especially if you're doing social media videos is adding dynamic captions. So if we just come over here, click the text, click add captions, we can see that it's highlighted down here with captions. And it is showing our captions in real time, but it is not the most interesting looking. So if we come over here, we can change different options like how live text is displayed. So if we have a style for the active word to highlight it, if we want to change the style of future words, and what we want to change the current text to. So there's a lot of customizable options here, changing the font, adding a background so it's more legible, adding a border. So you really customize it and customize how it animates. So you can see here, we now have one word highlighting at a time. And then also we could even do things like if you want to display more text at once, we could stretch this out and make it bigger. Or if we want to display only a few words at a time, we can make it smaller. So it's really flexible and really easy to add animated dynamic captions to our videos. And then once we're done with everything, we're going to want to publish it. So if we come over here to publish, we can either share this composition as a shareable link, which is most likely not what you're going to want to do. You could also publish directly from Descript to most major platforms. You could publish it directly to YouTube, to Buzzsprout if you've got a podcast, Restream, Wistia. So most major platforms are supported here. Or if you just want to export the video file, you come over to export. You can choose if you want to export it as a video, audio file, or if you want to export the transcript, you just indicate what section you want to export. Most likely it's just going to be the current composition, everything you see here and that you edited, what resolution you want to export it at. And it'll also note if your composition was in a different size, what kind of quality you want to export it at, and some specific audio settings. And then if you want to include any metadata like some of the text here, and then you just click export and choose where you want to save it, and it will export your file and you are good to go. And that's it. You've exported your video and now you're good to go. Now we just kind of scratched the surface of what you can do in Descript, but this should get you up and running. But if you have specific questions or things that you're trying to accomplish with Descript, let us know in the comments below. Also, if you found this video useful, please hit the subscribe button and give this video a thumbs up. Thanks for watching. I'll catch you in the next video.