It’s never been easier to make a donut. I mean, a video. Hmm, let me fix that up. It’s never been easier to make a video. Today, I’m going to show you exactly how to create and edit videos just like a document in Descript. Now with my business, I use Descript to rack up over a million views on Instagram, reach nearly 500,000 accounts, and bring in tons of new leads, all in just a few months. So, when Descript approached me to partner on this video, it was a no-brainer. Now Descript just released a new update packed with AI power. So, if you’re looking for an easy way to add captions, green screen effects, remove filler words, and even create clips from your long form content, you’ll love this tutorial. Let’s dive in. To get Descript, head to the following website. You can click on the card in the top right. I’ve included a link in the description below, or you can scan the QR code on screen. From the homepage, scroll all the way to the bottom and then click on download to download Descript. Now Descript works on Windows and Mac and also has a web experience. Once you’ve finished installing Descript, click create an account to get started. Fill in your account details, click the button at the bottom, and then click open to get back to the desktop app. Okay, let’s maximize the window and then bump up the text size with control shift equals, so you guys can see. Now Descript will ask you a few questions. As far as I can tell, they don’t affect your experience until you get to the pricing page. Now everything I show you today is available on the free version, just in limited quantities, so for now, make your decision and click get started. Okay, here are a few other questions which don’t tremendously impact your experience. And we’re through. Time for a little orientation. Welcome to your drive. Inside are your projects, which you’ll create videos from, your quick recordings, which allow you to screen record, Learn Descript, where you can see tutorials on key features, an AI speaker hub, where you can create an AI version of your voice for speech generation, and a template library to make it easy to create new videos. You’ll need a higher subscription tier to use this. By default, every project you create will be shared with everyone in your workspace. But if you want to create something just for you, you can use your private workspace instead. All right, team, let’s make our first video. It’s an ad for a real product, and I’m going to show you exactly what I did to make it in Descript. Start by clicking on projects, then new project, video project. Okay, first things first, let’s get your clips in by dragging and dropping them into the script editor. Now as part of the import, Descript transcribes any speech in your videos and shows the text in the script editor. There’s also a checkbox down here to combine files into a sequence. You do this when you have two or more clips for the same scene, like two cameras, two mics, et cetera. We’ll leave this unchecked and click done. Now while that’s loading, let’s get familiar with this interface. First up is the scene rail on the left. Scenes work like slides. Each of them is a segment of your video. Now each source video that we just added turns into its own scene. On the canvas, you can arrange layers and elements on each scene. And the sidebar has all sorts of goodies to upgrade the quality and production value of your video. Finally, there is a timeline, which you can see by clicking show timeline, which lets you move or trim scenes. Show or hide it by pressing shift, control, S. But Descript is about document first editing. And back in the script editor, you see all of our videos have been automatically transcribed. First, we need to clean up the clips to remove pauses and retakes. On the transcription, you’ll see large pauses as a row of dots. You can click anywhere on the script and press the space bar to play. Normally to trim these, you’d have to go into a video timeline and trim it by hand. But with Descript, you can select the pauses just like you’re editing a document by double clicking on them. Then press delete to delete it. Let’s do that again with a pause at the start of the next scene. Note how I can click and drag and just select the part of the pause that I want to delete. Let’s check the transition on that. Click on the script in the previous scene and press the space bar to play. Without demanding more of your time, the way you can do that. Pretty smooth. You might be thinking, it’s cool to remove text, but what about adding or changing it? So, I made a mistake in this scene talking about four essential skills. Instead of mental skills, I should have said mindset, but I don’t want to reshoot the scene. And that’s no problem. Descript has a feature called OverDub which clones your voice using AI. Now to use OverDub, you need to assign a speaker to the scene and to do that, select the entire script of the scene, right click and then click change speaker or press the @ key. Then Descript allows you to assign a speaker directly to the scene. I’ll type in David, click on create speaker and we’re ready to go. Next, select mental skills, so the context menu pops up then click on replace, then OverDub. We’ll type in mindset and press enter. Now hover over mindset and click on enable speech generation. You’ll need to train the AI to clone your voice. You can check out Descript’s privacy policy for specific terms on what they can and can’t do with your voice at descript.com/privacy. When you’re done recording, click submit. The word will fade in and out while it works on speech generation. It’s too bad Kevin isn’t running this tutorial because I think his AI voice might already be in Descript, so it could have saved us some time. We’ll wait a few seconds and we’re done. Let’s play the clip. Pacing and mindset. So every athlete. Sounds just like me. Cool. Let’s explore some features beyond text editing. Let’s go to the first three seconds of the video by clicking on scene one in the scene rail. Let’s listen. Rowing coaches, do you feel overwhelmed trying to support? Did you hear that? When I say the word overwhelmed, my voice gets quieter. Fortunately Descript can help us here. This is a great time to introduce Descript’s AI companion, Underlord. No one wants an AI Overlord, but an Underlord to handle all the tedious work. That’s just fine. Underlord is already open in the sidebar and it has a feature called studio sound, which should help our audio sound more consistent. Let’s click it to see. Let’s play this one more time. Rowing coaches, do you feel overwhelmed trying to support? Overwhelmed now sounds at the same volume as everything else and it’s gotten rid of most of the echo. Awesome. Okay, even with better sound, this adds a bit boring because there’s nothing going on in the background. Let’s change that. In the third scene, when I start talking about the product, let’s show the product in the background. Let’s drag this clip onto the canvas for this scene. You can drag this layer anywhere on the scene, but we need it full screen, so let’s drag it to the top left so the title bar is hidden and then expand it so it’s full screen. Now we’ve got this clip that plays like this. The way you can do that is through an app called Rowing. But we’ve lost the speaker and that do not disturb at the top is also annoying. To fix the do not disturb, let’s go to the timeline. Click on show timeline. Before we edit this, let’s create some breathing room. Click on layer to remove the sidebar, then expand the entire timeline with these drag handles and expand the script track with these drag handles. So, we’ve got two layers to work with. The bottom layer will always represent the script track and the top layer is the clip that we just dragged into scene three. Now to get rid of the do not disturb, we have to move our mouse to the left edge of the clip until your cursor becomes a trim icon. Then click and drag a couple of seconds until we get rid of that do not disturb. Then move the clip back to the start of the scene by clicking it and dragging it. The start will snap to the start of the scene. When you import a clip, it gets cropped to the length of the scene, so if the clip is longer than the scene, you can extend it by clicking and dragging on the right edge of the clip, just like we did with the left edge. Okay, now the clips in good shape, let’s use Underlord’s green screen feature to bring me back into frame. First, I want you to see what green screen actually does, so let’s move this clip behind me. To do that, right click on the clip, go to layer order, then send to back. Then select the scene in the timeline, click on Underlord in the sidebar and click on green screen. Underlord will take a few seconds to remove the background from the speaker in the video. Finally, I’m taking up too much of the frame. So, let’s select me in the canvas and drag me down so we see more of the product. Perfect. We’re getting close with all of these techniques, but we’re not quite there yet. Let’s clean up our interface by hiding the timeline and also hiding the sidebar. Did you know that up to 40% of people browse Instagram without the sound on? So, if we launched our ad right now, we could risk missing a major part of our audience. Fortunately, Descript has another useful tool for us, captions. Click on captions in the sidebar. There are a number of preset caption styles to choose from and you can hover over any style to see a rich preview. Let’s use karaoke classic. After clicking on it, Descript automatically adds captions to every scene. These captions are pretty small, so let’s make them bigger. Start by opening the timeline. Next, let’s zoom out using control minus or control mouse wheel down. Now scroll to the beginning so we get the whole timeline in one shot. Finally, we’ll open the timeline wider to see all the layers. I usually like to edit caption formats just once, so I recommend you delete every caption layer except the one in scene one. To do that, click on each caption layer and press the backspace key or the delete key. I’ll go ahead and do this for all of the scenes except for the first one. Next, I’ll hover my mouse over the right side of the caption layer on the first scene and then drag it all the way across to the end of the clip, making sure not to extend the entire video past the end of scene six. Click anywhere on the captions layer and then click on the layer button in the sidebar to bring up the properties pane. Make sure that all scenes is selected so we make this edit only once. To increase the text size, let’s go down to the text panel and change this 50 to 120. Let’s get a closer look at these captions by hiding the timeline. And we can see that the white text doesn’t quite stand out enough against the background. Fortunately, we’ve got some options, so let’s add a border. Go over to the style pane and click on the control panel icon to open up custom settings. Click on the plus sign next to border and you can see the change is much clearer. All right, this is looking good so far. Let’s play a short clip. The way you can do that is through an app called ROWHERO. Okay, so there are a few words that are misspelled from the transcription. Fortunately, they’re easy to edit. Descript doesn’t know about ROWHERO, so we got to tell it how to spell it. Double click on the word to select it, click on correct, type the correct spelling, and then click correct all. Here you’ll see all the misspellings Descript intends to correct, and then you can click correct all. And just like that, our captions are updated. Awesome. Now, if we kept working on this using the techniques you’ve learned so far, we could get this ad out to English speaking markets now. But what if you wanted to localize it to other countries? And yes, Descript has a feature for that too. Click on Underlord in the sidebar, and then scroll down until you see translate, and click on it. Select Italian from the language list, then check dub speech. We’ll assign AI David as the voice for everything, and then click submit. This is going to take a few minutes, so it’s a good time to grab a coffee. Okay, and we’re back. So, we’ve got English on the left and Italian on the right. If you’ve got your own translations, you can put them in the text boxes on the right-hand side. Well, let’s see what Descript has created for us. (Speaking Italian) Wow, I’ve been learning Italian for two months, and that’s definitely the best Italian I’ve ever spoken, and it wasn’t even me. Italian speakers, let me know in the comments how this sounded. And keep in mind, this feature is still in beta, so Descript is constantly improving it. Click done to confirm the translations. Now, all of these techniques can save you a ton of time editing videos. Let’s quickly go through what it’s like to export your video. Click on the publish button in the top right of the editor. You have two options, publish and export. Publish goes directly to a website for you to share with others, or directly to YouTube or a number of other video hosting or podcast hosting sites. Export saves the finished video to your hard drive. In the top right, you can choose the language. You can also change the resolution, the quality, and the audio settings before you export. Now, you’ve seen how to work with short form content, but what about long form content? Now, here’s a 10-minute video that I filmed with my phone. May I direct your attention over to the canvas where I’m making a classic non-Gen Z mistake, looking at the center of the phone, not the actual camera. And you guessed it, Descript’s got a feature for that too. So, click on Underlord, and then we’ll click on eye contact. Now, normally this takes quite a few minutes to complete, but I prepped it ahead of time so you can see the difference right away. If we click on the eye contact switch again, you see my gaze shift, turn it back on. I’m looking straight at us. Great. Now in 10 minutes of speaking, there are a few places where I trip up. You’ve already seen that we can edit the script directly, but what if we could get most of the edits done in one click? Go back to Underlord, and then click on edit for clarity. Descript will attempt to cut any unnecessary words, phrases, or even whole sentences and tangents. Click submit to start. The simplest way to view the edits is to click on copy edits to new composition. Just a quick note, if you want to go back to your original composition, use the composition selector in the app bar. Let’s look at the edits. First, I’ll zoom in to make this easy for you to see by pressing control shift equals, and then resizing the canvas. It did some good work, removing some small unnecessary phrases that would be harder for a human to spot. But it’s not perfect. And if you find something that shouldn’t have been removed, you can move your mouse over it and then click on the undo icon to restore it. Now it’s time for the grand finale. Many creators make shorts to advertise their long form content. But the problem is it can take hours to find the clips, cut them correctly, and caption them. Descript can help with that. We’ve already got Underlord open, so scroll down to create clips and click on it. The AI has been trained on tons of viral clips, and it chooses the moments from your long form content that have the highest chance of going viral in just a few seconds. Let’s look for three clips for about 20 seconds long. Next, let’s choose a layout. We’ve only got one person, so let’s choose minimal for one person. You can also hint to the AI what you’re looking for in the clips. Let’s leave it blank to see what it comes up with. Click submit to make the magic happen. So that took about 15 seconds, and we’ve got three clips and a reason why for each clip. You can also see the length and an effectiveness rating out of five stars. Let’s look at the last clip. If you have the basics, you’ve got one as a beginner, you’ve got these other up to three as intermediate. Now, is this clip going viral even for a rowing fitness niche? Probably not, but is the topic something that could have a huge reach in fitness with a tighter script? I definitely think so. When you’re done reviewing your clips, click done to save all of them as new compositions. And now you can export them all separately from your main content. And with that, you’ve got an ad and a great set of clips to post to your social channels. Now you’ve seen Descript’s video editing in action, what are you most excited to try first? The green screen, the auto captions or something else? Leave a comment and let me know. Remember, you can get started with Descript for free by checking out the link in the description or scanning the QR code. This is David signing out and I’ll see you next time.