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>> I don't have a mic. I don't have lights. I don't even have a camera.
>> It doesn't matter.
>> I'm going to sound so dumb.
>> Descript will take care of it for you.
>> I'm not going to do it.
>> You're the only person who can make reinsurance interesting.
>> Well, on video, I look like a freak.
>> Just hit record and Descript will do the rest.
>> All right, do it. Here we go. In today's world, what doesn't affect your
[music]
>> Understanding the impact can be difficult.
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>> The reinsurance world is built on understanding, predicting, and managing risk on a global level. It's the most powerful predictive system on Earth.
Sweet. Welcome, everybody. Season 12 Descript is upon us, and it felt different to not have the surfer intro. What is up, everybody in the chat? We're almost at 200 people on YouTube. I am your co-host, Aaron. We are going to be talking about all the awesome new features that can help make your videos sound and look better today in Descript, and we have a couple of guests that are going to be joining me here shortly.
What we want to know in the chat is what single thing would help you make your videos better? So, is it camera quality? Do you need a good microphone? Do you need to be able to edit faster? Is it your lighting, and you don't have good lighting where you film? Throw that in the chat and let us know what single thing would help you make your videos. Maybe it's your time. Like I just don't have enough time to make more videos. Maybe it's your perfectionism cuz it's got to look absolutely perfect before I hit post or send it.
And as we're seeing where everybody is from around the world, some of the uh top things we're hearing, I see lighting in the chat. Thanks for the the shout-out, Teddy. They're more fun when you're here with me. Editing faster and better. Learning Descript. Just Where are these buttons and how do I get these effects and things to show up? Audio is a big priority for Warren. Lighting and time. A teleprompter. Good thing that is built in to our recorder and it's also in rooms now. So, you can have your teleprompter right below your camera if that helps you. Storyline. Intro slides with motion graphics. Adding all the polish. Love to hear it.
We have a bunch of different ways to do this and new features that you are going to love to be able to address all of these things. I will say personally my favorite one that I've been playing with is the re-lighting. As somebody who tries to set up good lighting and then you use our new lighting features. We have two different ones. It makes a huge difference and it's so easy. Just click a button, takes about 5 seconds, and all of the sudden your lighting looks excellent.
So, our our real agenda here today is we want you to be able to polish your footage and make your videos your own. All the little creative tweaks and things that make it you and let your personality show in the content that you're making. We are going to show you how you can now do that with Descript cuz a bunch of these are new features. And I'm going to be joined by some people live demoing what those features are, what they actually look like, they're working, they're in the app today, and how you can use those. But of course it's live, so if you want to see something again or hear it explained or want to know how it works, we can send you links to those feature pages, all of that stuff is going to be live.
So, we are going to start with our first guest today who is joining Sherry. Welcome in.
>> Hello, hello everyone.
>> Sherry is our visual editing product manager, which how would you explain that to somebody who doesn't work at a tech company?
>> I work on all the things that help make your video look pretty. Like that is literally how I think about it. I'm a colorful person. I like working on colorful things. It's why I have this job.
>> And in other words, you've been really busy lately at Descript then.
>> Indeed, it's really fun. Um I There's just so much stuff about uh that we've just launched, so I guess the chance to get to talk to you all, seeing how many of you guys were excited about lighting, but also a lot of these other features. Um it's hopefully right up your guys' alley.
>> Yes. Well, thanks for joining today. We're going to demo some of these new features that you've been building to help our videos look pretty while people in the chat, if you guys want a link to uh follow along, you can have Descript open if you would like, but we'll also put a QR code up later that will open into the app and you can find where all of these knobs and buttons live that Sherry is going to show us.
>> Um awesome. Is it Is it my time to go?
>> Yeah, let's fire up the screen share and show off what you've been working on.
>> Coming up. Okay, guys. So, what I have here, this is a video that we actually shot in the Descript office. This is our kitchen area and this is my teammate Kion. He's one of the engineers who built a lot of features that you'll see. And specifically, he built the generative music feature that I will be demoing. But this is a video a tutorial. And so, I'll play it for you and I'll kind of walk you through how I generally edit videos end to end and then we'll talk about, you know, how do you use features and which ones are new along the way.
So, quickly I'll play it for you and you'll hear there's a ton of echo. This is recorded in our office.
>> When you need to finance an expensive item
>> So, the first thing that I will always do is I go in and I turn on studio sound. And then so, we'll play that again and you'll just hear the difference.
>> When you need to finance an expensive item
>> And then so, all of that background noise is gone. The second thing I immediately do is I remove filler words. This one is not so bad, only three, but I will just remove all of those so we get rid of all of the ums, the ahs, the likes. And then the next thing that I generally do is, you know, I'm looking for if like we flubbed a line somewhere. So, for example, down here. So, you can see how easy it's, you know, that's not really quite right. And instead of getting my teammate to re-record it, I usually use regenerate so I can just type it in. We'll say how easy it all really is. And just for note, Kion's already given me consent to use his voice and so, I just hit regenerate and when it's done pulsing and becomes solid, then I can play it back and and literally in his voice. So, you know, you just saved a retake.
Um and while that's running, the other thing I wanted to show you is our hot new feature that we're really excited about. Um it's called jump cut smoothing and so one thing you'll notice is that when you're chopping up your video, you can get these jump cuts and they're represented by these dashes. Um so why don't I play this through and you can kind of look and you'll notice the jump cut, so we can look at that together. Let's make it a little bigger so that you can see what's happening. Okay.
>> together from things nobody really knows. Here
>> And then so you can kind of see there's that stutter and you know, some videos, especially you know, maybe on shorts or shorter form content, it's kind of the style, but definitely for certain longer form content, um the the jump cut like looks unprofessional. So we'll we'll play it one more time. Uh
>> from things nobody really knows.
>> Like you can see that it skipped. Uh and then the thing that we can do here is I can click on the line and then there's regenerate. There's two options. There's audio and video or audio only. And when I hit regenerate here, it is going to clean up that seam. Uh and the way it works is we actually have an in-house research team. Um it takes a bit of time, so we're going to let that run too. But the way it works is we have an in-house research team and they created a really powerful custom trained model and it looks at what is happening um in terms of the visuals and the audio before the seam and after and it basically artificially in-paints. It it creates uh the bridge for what it should be. Uh and so when this is done running, we'll play it back and you'll you'll see that the the jump is gone, which is pretty wild.
Um Okay, so while those are running, um I will show you some of the visual things I do cuz I usually always start in the audio and then I go to the the visuals. So, what I'm doing now is since we're doing visual stuff, I'll go up here and I'll hide the script so I can focus on what we call the canvas. Um so, one of the first things that you'll notice a lot of you guys talked about lighting. Like this really isn't that well lit. Um and so, we'll go to properties. And then we have two types. So, there's uplighting, which just brightens the whole video, and then there's portrait lighting that kind of creates that uh portrait or bokeh effect where the background is slightly blurred and dimmed. So, I'll show you both. Um Okay. So, that takes a second to run. So, there. So, it's kind of before boom, better lighting. Before, after. Um and then I will show you the other one, which is portrait. And so, you can kind of see that it's blurred the background a bit and then brighten the foreground. Uh you can always change up the settings of how much foreground and background you want, but again, just show the difference. This is before and then after. And so, this is really useful if you want to make sure you pop a bit more. In this case, since it's pretty dark, I'm going to go with uplighting just to brighten it overall. Uh we also have the color adjustment, so you can change some of the color presets. Uh and there's more back here. Um and then the other thing that is new and was highly requested was we finally gave you guys white balance. So, I can like pick a point here. And then we have everything that's nicely balanced out.
Uh the other thing you'll notice that I tend to fix immediately is when I'm doing these types of videos where I'm speaking to the camera, so I'll play it.
>> to finance an expensive item, like a
>> You'll notice that Kion isn't really looking at the camera. Like it or it isn't quite focused in. And so, within effects, we also have uh eye contact, which is here. So, we can turn that one on. And then when that's done running, it will focus his eyeballs. There you go. So, again, I can show you guys the before and after. So, this is before he's looking down, and then after, he's looking at the camera. So, again, cuz it removes that need to reshoot.
Um and then beyond that, there's just a bunch of really fun stylistic stuff that we can do now uh that it wasn't possible before. So, we have all of these new visual effects. So, like ASCII, color tone, invert, which looks scary on people, but honestly is quite helpful for uh graphics, like logos, if you need to invert the colors between the black and white. Uh like, for example, this one I have really enjoyed, vignette. Um and then what it does is, depending on the amount, you kind of get that uh that focus. So, it gives it a bit of a dramatic look for emphasis. Uh and then the other thing that you can do is you can change the roundness. So, it can go from perfectly round to more like oval and long. So, you can just choose how you want to be framed. Uh and then another personal favorite of mine is VHS. So, if you're just going for that slightly retro feel, again, really good for a moment of emphasis, the intro or the outro. Uh I think I'll leave that one on vignette.
Um why don't we go back and take a look and see if the audio stuff had finished. So, we'll show the script again. Oh. Okay, so this one is done. So, I'll play this back, and you'll see that this is the artificially generated version that you honestly can't really tell that we uh made that artificially.
>> How it all really is.
>> After you log into the platform
>> Can you do that one more time just to see the magic or hear it?
>> You can see how easy it all really is. After you log in
>> So again, supernatural. Um, our jump cut smoothing is still crunching away, so we'll come back to that. Um, a couple other things that I want to show are uh Okay, so Let's go back to this I'll show you the script. So in this scene specifically uh we're talking about buying a Honda Accord. Like that's what's in the script. Uh and then when I look at the image that's here, like this is not a Honda. This is definitely some sort of SUV. So what I can do here is I can go edit with AI. Uh and there are actually two modes. There's the replace, um which is the pencil tool, and then there's the erase mode if you just want to erase it. And then in both, so for example I use the pencil tool, I'm drawing and then turn the SUV into a Honda Accord. Um and when that's done pulsing, uh we can check back on it and it should be a Honda Accord.
Um so while we wait for that um the other thing that is new are uh transitions. So we have this whole library of new transitions. I know that a lot of you disliked Not a lot. Some people have written in and we've read it that you dislike having smart transitions on by default. Uh one easy thing that you can do now is you can have none and apply to all. Uh Oh my gosh, our Honda Accord is done. But as you can see, it's clearly a Honda Accord.
Um and what we can hopefully tell is uh this is it's only working image now, but the intent is to have this work for video. So, you have that mess on your desk that you film that you need to erase in your B-roll. Like, we're going to That's the next step. You can do that. Um and what's coming in the next few weeks is actually uh a related version of this, which is uh what we're calling Fill with AI. Final name not exactly decided, but if you have that rotation and you need to fill in the black bars, instead of dealing with those black bars, we will uh paint it for you and fill it in. So, you can let us know in the chat if you're excited for any of those. But again, we're starting with the image version to nail that, and then the whole point of it is that we get to that video version since we know that there's so much in the B-roll that you would probably want to fix.
Um but yeah, so within the transitions, you have the apply to all to none. We have a lot of really fun new ones. We have um like push, pull, move out. Um shake is one of my personal favorites. Obviously, you can't use it all the time, but it's quite fun. So, here. Well, and you can do a gentle versus strong shake. So, we will play that through.
>> box, here you'll enter in the item name.
>> just It's fun. You just get more expressiveness. Um so assuming you we've done all of that um what we might want to do now is add some music. And so, this guy here, this guy on film, he's the one who made this feature that's coming out shortly for all of you. Um it lives or will live under generate audio. Um and so, what say I want a little jingle? I mean, this company is called Credit Crazy, so uh fun add jingle for credit crazy. Let's make it short. Um And by the way, if you aren't sure what you want, we have this inspire me button here. So, you can just step through and decide if any of these strike your fancy. Uh but we'll go back to my jingle. I do want some lyrics. And you can add your own or if you just toggle it on, uh it will create lyrics for you. And then there are more options, too, if you want to specify genre, mood, or things to avoid. Right now, I'm just going to hit generate.
Um and while that runs, um in that script, I talked about the Honda Accord. So, maybe I'll do uh like a car revving engine sound effect. So, we'll we'll have that. Oh, let's see. Okay, it made it. We're going to listen to this together.
>> Got some big, big dreams, but [music] your pockets are low. Go crazy, crazy, watch your wallet grow. Yeah, credit [music] crazy.
>> Pretty good.
>> [laughter]
>> You can download it. You know what? I'm going to throw it in. It's going in. And then we have our car revving engine sound. Um so, this is where you'll find it when this launches, which is very soon. Uh cuz you can see we've got it mostly built. Uh it'll be in AI tools. It's also within media. So, for example, if we you search for something and we don't have the media that you want, you can always click generate with AI. Uh and you can make your own music. Uh it it just helps create that much more custom uh sound effect or background music or sound that goes with what you're trying to express in the video.
Um, let's go back one more time and see if uh our great jump cut has been smoothed. Okay. Okay, let's see. I think Um, here. Okay, so let let let's watch this back. This is where the jump cut used to be.
>> It's actually woven together from things nobody really knows.
>> So, I'll play it back one more time again and jump cut and now it's been completely smoothed over.
>> It's actually woven together from things nobody really knows.
>> Pretty cool, guys. So, You're going to wait a little bit.
>> If you noticed his arm in the jump cut was all of a sudden extended, it actually filled in the frames as his arm moved. That I think is the best part, not even the speech and the facial expressions, but it got the body to smooth out the movement between the the cuts, which is I'm like I don't think that's ever existed before. It's pretty amazing.
>> No. No, it hasn't. Um, and one fun fact about this is uh the researcher who built this, he was an intern with Descript when he started the project and he came back, joined us full-time, and brought it over the finish line, which is pretty cool.
Um, okay, the last thing I'll show you is I'm done editing my video, um, but I kind of need I need a YouTube thumbnail for this. This is going on YouTube. And so, this just launched, guys, yesterday. So, you can tell us in the chat if you noticed it. Uh but, it's where it lives over here down under publish. You can also get to it from the export, so if you hover generate, that also take you there. Obviously, I was generating some stuff beforehand, but uh let's give it a shorter title. We have all of these uh styles. They're defaults, or you can upload your own. So, it opens the file picker, and it's the kind of thing that I can take a screenshot of something from Canva or from YouTube, and then just dump it in there and be like, "Make more in this style." Uh and so, let's pick this one. And it can pick I can pick a frame. So, I'll try to find a place where Keyon looks good. Let's That That looks fun. Okay, we're going to use that frame. Uh and then, we'll hit generate. Uh and so, it's crunching away. Uh but like I mentioned, as someone who used to work at YouTube, which was my job right before this, I think we all know, or it's probably not a surprise to you, that thumbnails are incredibly important uh in YouTube. The extent to which the top creators are paying for personal thumbnail designers uh just to get those additional likes and clicks. Uh and so, this The whole intent of this and the inspiration for this is like, "How do we make it easier to create a decently eye-catching thumbnail uh just because this is something that you pretty much need for every video."
Uh all right. So, looking at this, I think Let's see. We can look at our options. I kind of like this one. So, I'm going to click set a share page thumbnail. And then, when that's done, there it is. All right, I think that is everything that I had for you guys. Uh if you have questions, hopefully Erin will tell me what your questions are.
>> Are you ready for some questions, Sherry?
>> I am. But yes, this is kind of a bit of how I edit end-to-end. Um a bunch of these are new. My team built them. We're really excited. If you have complaints, I'm here to take them. If you have compliments, I'm also here to take them. So, yeah.
>> Let's start with the lighting question. What would you tell Colorado Biodental Aesthetics on YouTube if their raw footage was not well-lit? Is it now possible to make it look excellent or really good in post?
>> It really is. So, there are different gradations. So, basically, when I was testing and running the evaluations for is this ready to launch, I was basically testing across different lighting conditions. So, there are some where it's genuinely it's a cave. And it's like with that, it is not going to go from bad to awesome. But really, in all these very common situations where it's very poorly lit, there's almost one very tiny light source. Like I've done it where it's like it's a windowless room with one light in the corner. Like those it significantly improves it. And um you can also tune the default. So, I would say we have the sliders for the controls. The default is more for the average lighting scenario, but if you record it in a really poorly lit place, I would crank that up and it will make it look good.
>> Awesome. Uh so, how about let's go jump cut questions. We had a bunch of them. For people who aren't aware of that little pop-up, the voice consent that you mentioned, could you just explain that for our users?
>> Yeah, so you do need voice consent. Um so, for example, when it's my videos, I give the voice consent and pretty much uh you record a little sentence of you speaking and it just we can confirm that I, the editor, um have consent to edit the video. So, that when we fill in the the audio and the video that it matches, but it's very easy. You basically read these two sentences out loud and it's uh it it's considered the consent.
>> Yeah, and if the person's not there, they can send you an MP3 that you can just drop in. I've had to do that before.
>> Um you don't even need the MP3. They're actually on their end able to go to the three-dot overflow menu and share the consent. So, that's what Kion did for me. He shared his consent with me and then I got to demo it.
>> Yeah, awesome. Okay, now some eye contact. Did that apply the eye contact to the whole video? Um and then the other question was if there are two people on screen like this and you hit apply eye contact effect, what do we expect to have happen?
>> I will have to get back to you on that. Uh I will have to double-check cuz honestly, in my own videos that I record, I am usually the only person. Um but we have your handle, so we will get back to you on when things break down. At a certain number of people, it does break down, but I have to get back to you on what the limit is.
>> Yeah, how about did that apply to a whole video or is it going to be scene by scene?
>> You have the option, so you can decide to apply to the whole video, you can apply to just a scene. Usually, I apply it to the whole video. I don't see a reason to not, but again, if you want that granular level of control, you can apply it to certain scenes, too.
>> Yeah, and then how about people who want to go experiment with Jump Cut cuz it's live, you can use it today? How do they identify in their script where you were adding that little regenerate?
>> Yeah, let's go look at that again. Um So, when you make edits, let's minimize. Uh when you chop up things, you know, say you had retakes that you chopped up, uh we mark that with these vertical gray lines. Uh and then you can click on that and that's how you get that regenerate cuz that's anywhere that indicates that you have a jump cut between the two segments. And then you have that option to audio and video or audio only.
>> Is there I know another question was is there a plan for a video only option?
>> Ooh, I can take that back to the team. Uh this is not my feature. Uh it's my another team, but I can definitely pass that on to them. That is really good feedback.
>> And then let's end with a music question. Can I go put that music or sound effect that you generated on YouTube, on my personal stuff? Are there any copyright issues or limitations to how I can use it?
>> So there is um rights checking that happens even before you generate. So if you try to generate something that is copywritten, like for example, you put in copywritten lyrics, uh you will get blocked. Uh so there's that first check that's happening. Uh and then obviously beyond that, there is a chance that um you know, if you ended up somehow snuck in some profanity into there or whatever the case may be that it could get blocked on the platform level, but the intent of the feature that we created is that you have full rights to this. This is uh safe and usable on all the platforms. Uh unless you try very hard to somehow break it. But yeah, there's there's already checking. Like we we do intend to block you from copyright infringement, but if you do somehow sneak past, then obviously the platforms are also checking, too.
>> Yeah, I think YouTube is the gold standard of if you can put it on YouTube without a copyright strike, then you can put it anywhere and you'll be fine. Yeah, and for the people who asked, can you bring your own music? Like if I recorded something in GarageBand and have my own, can I also add that to my project?
>> Uh yes, you totally have your own music. Um I wasn't sure if you're meaning like, "Hey, can you modify my music? Like make a sound effect off of this?" And that would be a future thing. Like right now we aren't able to attach the music to the prompt box to, you know, turn that into something else. Um hopefully I'm answering the question right. But yes, if you have your own music and you have the rights to you can definitely use it in the project today. Uh and when this generative music feature launches, you can prompt for music. And in the future, we'd love for you to take your own music and then kind of remix it uh with us.
>> Yeah, so basically you can bring your own, you can find stuff that's already there in the app, or you can generate your own. So now there's three ways to add that to your project. Yes. Um and then I guess the question I didn't see this and maybe uh my bad Say Yes to College, but what did that mean when you clicked remove filler words? You got the pop-up and it said there are three, and then there's a little toggle about harsh cuts. What does that do if you enable or don't enable that feature?
>> This is a
>> [laughter]
>> I think that's what they're asking, so I wanted to I wanted to throw their question to you.
>> Um the heart um Again, this is something that I will have to get back to you on. I've always just taken it
>> [laughter]
>> as a user as like, "Yeah, do that for me. That sounds great." So I think we'll have to get back to you on what exactly that feature does, unless you know off the top of your head, Aaron.
>> I mean, I think it's going to look at places where it's too harsh to remove the filler word and you're going to have a really bad jump cut or it's there's no space between the next word and it's going to deprioritize making those cuts for you. I'm you know, I'm not the person who built it or anything. I do use it a lot. So I think it's just going to be more selective of which filler words it's going to remove in that one fell swoop.
>> Um, but I can totally ask right after I go off air and then I can drop the answer in the chat.
>> [laughter]
>> Yes, and we save the chat. So there's obviously a bunch of questions that we won't have time because we still have Trev and some cool creative examples and want to make sure that everybody who's watching has a link to be able to find this stuff which I'm going to let Fiona handle. There we go. So this will take you into Descript into a project and you can try these out whether it's the effects, generate the music, redo your lighting. Basically all the excuses that you had in your head of why you can't put the video out or make it or I can't shoot it until I get a better light. Uh maybe not. Just just hit record and you can probably fix those or at least make them usable. So thank you for sharing all of the cool things that you and your team have been working on Sherry. Which one is your favorite out of all of these?
>> Oh my gosh, you're asking me to like pick from my favorite my favorite children.
>> Yes, which one's your favorite kid?
>> know if you I don't know if you guys have noticed, but hopefully you guys have you know, we've been we've been on a really big push just to be able to level up the basic foundational editing blocks to level up the way you can be more expressive in video and so hopefully that's something that you guys see. Um and uh appreciate. Uh but please don't make me pick one. You know, my team's watching this.
>> [laughter]
>> Yeah, and if you want to read, all of those are in the link. Especially some of you saying, "I'm not a QR code person. Just give me the link." Trevor and support just put the link. The blog has everything that's new. It has little GIFs that show you what they look like and how they work. I'll say my favorite is actually now how you can stack effects. So, instead of VHS, which is my personal single favorite effect, you can redo the lighting and then add eye contact and do this and you get this layered effect of how you can use things in really cool combinations. That's my favorite part. Yes. Well, thank you for joining and for everybody who didn't grab that, there's the blog post to read. And we are going to have Trev join us from the creative team. What's up, Trev?
>> Hey y'all. How's it going?
>> Are you ready to show us some of your favorite ways that you use these as somebody who's making videos and visual creative assets every day?
>> Oh, yeah. Yeah, I the thing that you just said about stacking effects, I've got some good examples for how we can do that.
>> That was not planned. That was a happy accident.
>> That was not a happy accident.
>> I want everybody to appreciate the background and the ambience of Trev's setup before he screen shares cuz then he's just going to be a little square in the corner. He's got the best setup by far and I've lobbied for him to bring this one back. So, excited to have you on today.
>> Yes, me and my Jim Carrey shrine today. Thank you for joining in. All right. So, should we get into it or
>> Yeah, let's do it. Fire up the screen share.
>> Cool. All right. So, first off, I'm going to kind of just show you uh, video that I uh, just a raw raw video that I recorded. Um, my family, uh, back home in Pennsylvania always asked me, uh, I'm a surfer and I I surf here in Northern California. They're always concerned about sharks for me. So, I decided to just, you know, create a quick demystifying video about that. And out of the gate, you can kind of see like, you know, similar to what Sherry brought up, just we've got some work to do here on the lighting and also, um, as we look in the script, there's a lot of ums and ahs and retakes and, uh, just, yeah, we're sitting at like 9 minutes of footage. I want to get this down to like five. So, I saw someone in the chat just saying like, what's a quick way to like, um, just do a rough pass of the edit, uh, you know, quickly. So, I've got this this prompt that I I kind of reuse in Underlord and we're just going to paste this in. I'll I'll walk you through what what it does here. Um, but it basically says, I've got this this video of myself. Let's start with these edits, uh, and it's going to remove retakes, remove filler words, shorten word gaps, apply the studio sound, apply eye contact. And I tend to talk a little slow, so I I like to set the entire timeline to 1.1 or 1.2. So, we'll fire that off. Um, and I'll kind of just, uh, yeah, hop to a the cleaned-up version of this. Uh, close the Underlord window for now. And so, this is what Underlord did. Uh, you can see it it it trimmed down my video to about five five-ish minutes, which is awesome. Um, and yeah, I'll kind of just uh basically we'll uh we'll just revert that real quick. Um and I'll show you just like the kind of the before and after. So, here's what I sound like, here's what I look like. I'm not looking at the screen that the the audio and all of that. So, we'll play it.
>> I surf in Northern California. And every time I mention that at dinner
>> So, yeah, I'm not looking at the screen. It's uh the lighting is not too great. So, what Underlord did when I typed in that prompt is now my eyes are are um you know, on the camera. And you know, we play that back.
>> I surf in Northern California. And every time I mention that at dinner
>> We're already looking much better. Um Now, from here um yeah, basically kind of kind of similar shot to Keon, we have this like back-lit thing. So, I think portrait lighting is going to be the best option for us. Um if we turn that on, you can kind of just see how quickly we can go from uh a not so great-looking shot to a nice-looking shot. So, that's already doing some work, but for this video, I kind of want to do something a little bit more creative and kind of get into what Aaron was talking about about stacking effects. So, I'm not actually going to show my background. I'm going to green screen myself and put some B-roll behind myself. So, I'll give you just a quick demo of like what that video looks like. Um and this fun thumbnail that was created through the thumbnail generator. Um sharks don't want to eat you. It's true. So, let's let's play a little bit of this. I surf in Northern California. And every time I mention that at dinner, on a call really whenever I talk about it, someone asks the same thing. Aren't there sharks? Aren't you worried? What are you, crazy? Yes, there are. And no, I'm not. Great. So, we're already hooking people in the fifth first 15 seconds. That's awesome. So, let's hop over to our like fully finished video and I can kind of just show you what's going on here in the timeline with just some of the effects and color adjustments that I've I've chosen along the way. So, we'll start with that that first one. You kind of notice the shot where things went red and and then they went kind of like crazy blurry. What's happening here? Well, one of my favorite effects that um is is new is this color
>> We're still seeing your uh web link version where you paused it.
>> All right.
>> You did get some love for your There you go. We got some love for your your thumbnail though. People like that in the chat.
>> So, we'll hop to the timeline here of the edited video and you can see I've got, you know, a lot of stuff going on here. Um but this first shot where it things turned red, what's going on there? So, this is what's happening. So, one of my favorite effects uh to use is called color tone. So, I put on color tone and you've got the option here to do like a a duotone effect and you can kind of choose the color that you want. Um and really just like tweak shots um accordingly. And you can go duo, you can go mono. Um but this is a great way to just kind of like tweak footage uh and and color things. Um and then as we get into stacking effects, this next shot has got um uh zoom blur, which is another one of our effects. And with the zoom blur, you can, you know, change the blur amount. Um you can change the X and Y. Um but this is kind of creating that effect where it goes from uh regular footage
>> Aren't you worried?
>> to
>> Yeah.
>> kind of this like intense little shot. So, from there, uh I've got some more just B-roll in here that uh I've um you know, I'm talking about where I'm from. I'm from Pennsylvania. Uh which like was nice to kind of just put a VHS effect on there. But sometimes maybe you want to do more than that. And now now you kind of can. So, I've got this like this next shot of a surfer on a wave and um I've got color tone added. I've got film grain. So, if we turn those things off, like the the shot itself is like kind of looking really sharp. That's not really what I want. I want more of kind of like a vintage vibe. So, turning the color tone on, I'm able to kind of change the highlight and the shadow colors. And then adding a film grain effect, this is making this kind of look like a retro um shot. And same thing here for the next
>> Can you pause for a sec? Just because a bunch people in the chat want to know how did you take the video you shot talking head in your office or bedroom to get B-roll behind you? Cuz this is the same raw footage, right?
>> This is. So, yeah, what I've This was a I I sort of created my own layout pack, which you can do um anytime uh in a project by um clicking layouts here and changing layout pack. We have in our gallery a bunch of different layout packs or you can create your own. I've got this one that I just created for this demo, which is called green screen. And what it has is you can see here it's got a camera track that's [snorts and clears throat] green screen with a a media layer behind it. And so in this one I'm off to the side, in this one it's got two media and in this one I'm really small. So as we like kind of cruise through this video you can see that I'm using this layout to quickly just get this effect where I'm hopping between um these different layouts of me green screen, which was you know something that that any of you can do now with Descript right right now. It's just a create a layout pack and and maybe maybe this is this is one that will will add to our default layout packs for for people to to to use. You know, it could be a good good um addition. But yeah, that's how you would go about it. You would um create your own layout pack and then once once you're you know, say I'm um I'm here and I want to like change this I would just choose a different um orientation that I've already created. And then fill that placeholder with the the b-roll that I want. So uh that's that's a little bit kind of how process for that goes. Um But
>> you you green green screen your talking head and then put video or images behind you. Since they asked and we're talking about it, do you have any tips for people with long hair? Cuz your hair is actually coming through really well in the green screen.
>> Yeah, so that's that's one thing I I tried to kind of spike my hair up for this this uh this shot um uh just so that it was it would you know give a really challenging you know time to green screen and I feel like it did a good job. Now you'll see like on shots like this it's working really well because my background is light and like you can't really tell where the seam is. Um if we were to hop over to something like this uh let it load for a second. Where I'm down here. Now we can kind of see like oh yeah you can kind of see the edge. But this is where I kind of creatively chose like all right I'm not going to have myself full in frame in this shot. I'm going to make myself a little bit smaller cuz my footage is is darker and like you might notice that seam a little bit more. So that would be my recommendation if you're if you're using green screen you're putting footage behind you um try to choose footage when you're full frame that is um that is going to be more lighter you know uh than than darker and you won't you won't kind of notice that seam. Um at least for the hair. We we really do a good job of just like shoulders and face and and head and all that stuff. But to uh to kind of move on here and just talk about some of the other effects that are in this video yeah. Like you'll see here this shot um I'm stacking three effects. So I've got film grain, I've got color tone, and I've got the VHS. Which really just kind of turns this very polished shot into something kind of fun and retro that looks like oh this was filmed in you know, the '90s or something like that. Which was sort of what I was going for for this video. Um but to kind of talk about a different effect uh that I feel like is not only useful for um shots like Sherry demoed with you know, Keon's vignette, but I've got this the shot later on where I'm talking about, you know, seals on uh and how sharks like seals. So, we'll just play that real quick.
>> These are the ones with big seal colonies. Because that's what the sharks are there for.
>> So, here I was able to use vignette to kind of highlight something in my B-roll that I wanted to highlight, which was like something that I haven't really been able to do before in other ways uh very quickly without having to bring in you know, maybe like a transparent file or or whatever. But, here I'm able to kind of dial in that amount and really like focus on the attention. You can choose the feather and feather that out. And change the X and Y because it's going to be default to center, so I can really like get this over on the beach and like really highlight these seals in a way that's sort of fun for this video. So, I would say that not only is this great for your A-roll, but a lot of these effects like color tone, vignette, um film grain, those sorts of things are are awesome for um for your B-roll. Uh similar here, I I use vignette again to kind of like highlight this um this image of uh where the sharks migrate and stuff and we can kind of just play
>> Most of them leave. They swim west to a cool
little spot in the open ocean, roughly halfway between Baja and Hawaii.
"Which is awesome." Yeah, it kind of just like takes that image and adds like video-ness to it, which is which is cool. And and similarly, like I didn't really have videos for all of these shots in here. I had images. So, if we get to here, or like these are just images. This is just an image, but I'm able to use film grain and and VHS to make these feel like they're kind of moving the video forward. So, we'll just play that real quick.
Farallon Islands. This is the rocky cluster that you can see on a clear day about 30 miles off the coast of the Golden Gate Bridge. So, this is what they look like without the effect. It's just an image, you know? And and same here. This is just an image, but sort of a creative thing that you can do with images and videos to kind of keep your aesthetic going for the rest of your video.
So, yeah, I had a lot of fun putting to this together and and just stacking our effects. Yeah, some of my favorites that I used: zoom blur, vignette, the the VHS, obviously, the film grain, and and the color tone. I would say color tone is probably one of those ones you'll find you're going to probably use more than you think.
And for shots where, um, let's see. For shots like like this where I'm kind of like maybe talking about an an ominous, uh, you know, surfing by yourself out there. Um, there's this thing called selective color, which, you know, if I if I turn off these effects, again, this is like a highly polished, you know, shot. Um, but using selective color, I'm able to like kind of make this gray and kind of scary and like, you know, put some film grain on it or whatever. So, it really the power of kind of color grading and adding effects is now like fully at your your fingertips with just like all of these visual effects that you can stack on videos, on images, uh, in your B-roll and in your A-roll. So, that's all I got.
"Those images, things that you found in the stock library?"
"100%." Yeah, most of the, I would say probably 90% of the images in here, uh, are just, you know, by going up here to the stock and I'm, you know, type in shark and, uh, I can cruise through the videos and, you know, add them to my my project. Um, and yeah, we have videos, GIFs, uh, images. I found myself using, you know, all of these categories and then adding effects to all of those things. Um, and then yeah, brought in a few, uh, examples like, uh, when I was showing, um, you know, maybe like something like like this of like a a map. Uh, that was something, uh, that wasn't, you know, maybe quite in the stock library, but for the rest of it, this is all this is all made in Descript from the the stock audio here to, um, the just the B-roll. Everything was just under the hood, you know, and these these are things that that are just kind of right here at your fingertips in the sidebar. So,
"Which to me means one of the problems with stock media is it's always kind of generic, right? You're not going to find a retro 90s video of something. But, what you're showing us, you can find the video and it looks polished and modern and make it look like it was shot on a, you know, shoulder VHS camcorder in 1994 with the same raw piece of media. You're just adding an effect on top of it."
"Exactly." Like these two these two shots, these two back-to-back shots, really, they had different color and both of them were different shots, but I was able to kind of make them look like, oh, this is like a sequence that's like sort of building and having the same look. Whereas, um, uh, just before before today and before, you know, our our some of these new effects came out, you'd kind of just be trying to trying to match the shots a little bit better and now you can really dial that in and kind of have a a sort of, uh, cohesive type of..."
"[snorts]"
"...type type of edit."
"Yeah, multiple people in the chat want to know, Trev, how long did it take you to create this surfing video?"
"Yeah, so, okay. So, if we if we were going to just go back here to our our unedited. This is 9 minutes of of footage. So, it took me 9 minutes to record it. Um, and then Underlord did that first rough cut and and less than a minute, which got it down to five. I basically didn't touch anything after that. It was it was pretty good. It got rid of all the ums and the and the breaks. And then adding the B-roll was was probably the longest part, but I would say it only took, you know, maybe an hour or two to just get all the stuff in here just by searching stuff in the media library since it's right here. I didn't have to go on, uh, stock site and kind of grab things and upload them. It was all here and I was able to just like create my scenes where I wanted to show a new piece of B-roll and add it in. Yeah, I would say overall this this video from from start to finish from shooting it to to being done with it was less than less than 3 hours, 100%."
"Yeah, which is amazing. Uh, for 5 hour. Yeah, and for all the polish and detail and the cutting you had to do. What about for people who say, 'Okay, I didn't know we had the stock media. I found something. How do I get it from that sidebar to be my background or be in my project?'"
"From the sidebar to be to be in the like..."
"Yeah, like Larry on YouTube wants to know, 'How did you actually get that into your video from the media library or the stock library?'"
"Yeah. So, I'll just go to our, like we don't have any scenes in here or anything, but if I were to just, you know, search for, you know, one of those clips, there's a couple different ways. So, if I were to just click it, it's going to, you know, load. It's going to add and now it's going to put it right here in my timeline. Which is great. It's going to just kind of like put it right at the start. If I were to to create a scene here and now I have a scene break where I'm talking to the camera and I've got this, I can also just take that same shot and drag it right to where I want it in the timeline. And once I do that, it's going to do the same thing. It's going to take a second, but then it's going to put it right exactly at that scene marker. So, scenes were the way for me to to kind of create the the mental like, 'Okay, this is where I'm going to put this B-roll. I'm going to put a scene there. Uh, this is where I'm going to put this B-roll. I'm going to put a scene there.' And then now I I can just drag to whichever scene at the top of the scene and it's going to put it right right there. It's going to snap to it, which is which is pretty awesome."
"While you're setting up those scenes, could you show Jonathan how you would add, say like a logo watermark style or a lower thirds to label you as like Trev, lead surfer bro or whatever your title would be in the video?"
"Yeah, so we've got, um, if I were to change my layout pack here and I were to go over to just our Descript layout pack. Um, you use this layout pack. And I would say probably our, yeah, here we go. Our speaker. We've got this thing called speaker. And if we were to choose that, it's going to pop all these layers in here, which, you know, you don't even really need to see any of that stuff. But if you did, they're right there under the hood. And then you can just you can come here and you can say Trev. Yeah, that's great. And it already it already added. Look, it already added 'Northern California surfer.' And it did that because of, uh, each of these layouts have, I'm going to mess this up. I forget what it's called, but it's like it it they read your script at whatever point you're at and it will, um, it'll add context, uh, into the layout that you choose. So, it already grabbed this this title by kind of like looking at the script here in my first my first line. And all of these layouts have pre-baked in animations."
"I surf in Northern California. And every time I mention that..."
"Which is awesome. I didn't have to do anything. I just clicked one button and got lower thirds. It's got this nice gradient, so you can kind of get that pop of contrast. And you can you can change these things up. Say you want to, you know, make this, uh, different, you know, size or shape or whatever. Um, or, you know, put your logo here. Um, this is a way to, um, kind of create custom lower thirds for your videos."
"Yeah. And do you have a published web link that we could put in the chat because we have some people who are aspirational surfers that are like, 'I want to see the full 5-minute fine cut version.'"
"Yes. Yes. I'm going to just share this in our our private chat here. You can copy and paste that into the the live one. But it's ready. It's up there. Have yourself, um, if you live in in California in general or are afraid of sharks, this video will hopefully help you to just unblock you from getting in the ocean. As That was my That was my, uh, my intention in making it is like, 'Sharks aren't our enemies. They're our friends.' And, uh, yeah. Change my mind."
"[laughter]"
"Yeah. And then we'll we'll end with this question. Can you have Descript generate any of the images or videos to put in your background?"
"Oh, 100%. Yeah, I didn't, um, actually, I did one generation for this entire video, which I'll just play this real quick. Um, cuz I just couldn't I couldn't find anything that was that was helpful. But so it was this image here, not this one, but I'll play it."
"Everyone is. You're lying if you say you aren't, unless you're some kind of shark whisperer."
"So I generated this image. I was like, 'Give me a shark whisperer,' and it was like, 'This is great.' It nailed it on the first first try. And it doesn't even really look like AI. It pretty, it got it got pretty much everything. You know, got the scuba diver, got the shark. It nailed the concept. So all that is is right here in generate media. And yeah, here we go. You can see my prompt. This one's kind of funny."
"And we have a bunch of different image models. So if you're loyal to one, there's GPT, there's Nano Banana."
"Yep. All of them are right here. Um, and you can change your defaults at the at the project level. If you always want to use Nano Banana or you always want to use, you know, VO or Seed Dance or whatever. Uh, and all that's here and then all of that's also in Underlord, too. You can ask Underlord to help you generate content and it'll put it into your timeline. So."
"Yeah, very cool. Well, we're going to bring Sherry back on and wrap up here as we get to the top of the hour. So I got to ask Trev the same question I asked Sherry. Of all the new features and bells and whistles that can make your video look polished, Trev, what's what's your single favorite?"
"Woo. I don't know. I think the the up the up-lighting and the portrait lighting is like a really big unlock for just those shots where you're you're backlit or you're not in an ideal location. Like it's it is like you said, Aaron, like one click just sort of fixed my shot. And like that's that's something that's huge for a lot of these these, um, videos where, you know, we're just on our laptops in a space where it might not be so great. And uplighting and portrait lighting really take takes care of that."
"Yeah. And I think the way you showed stacking with a lot of stock media, people might have thought, 'Oh, I can put effects over my talking head or my screen share.' But the way you can take something that's kind of bland and boring and make it look exactly how you want it is probably the best way I've seen someone stack stuff. Now that I've seen your project and how you built it. Yeah. Well, the the big theme here, as you can see, is all of us have had this internal voice like, 'If I only had a better mic. If I only had better lighting. If I had the fancy camera I'm saving up for, I'd make more videos or they would finally get views.' The whole idea with season 12 and what Sherry's team has been building and Trev is showing off here is those excuses are less and less even valid. And as somebody who's like spent money on mics and cameras and lighting, Trev, I want to know, what's your take on people who are getting into video now? Like, would you tell them you need the fancy mic and camera and learn how to light your room or just..."
"I don't think so. I mean, it an external webcam is helpful, and those those have like really come down in price. And that can get you like 90% of the way there. Like, this this camera that I'm using now is, um, the Insta Link, um, two, I believe, and it's like kind of it's you can zoom in and out, and it creates like this blur effect in the background, but they're pretty inexpensive and I would say just a good webcam can can take you pretty far. Um, and even using your own AirPods, uh, you know, or or whatever. I I I think the the barrier to entry to make a good video is like getting lower and lower. Whereas 5 years ago, yeah, maybe you did need to buy a camera or or this or that."
"Yeah. And Sherry, I'm curious what your take is on what led your team to focus on these features? Like what's the overarching theme and motif to all these effects and tools that have been added to Descript lately?"
"Yeah, so the theme that I was going after is what I call content augmentation, which really is just keyed off the insight that most people aren't generating from scratch. Like everyone's bringing something into Descript. You have to be roll, or you have a recording, or you have intent. Um, but just that a lot of that stuff isn't quite perfect. Like maybe it's in the wrong aspect ratio, or it isn't well-lit. And so really we were just going after every stage of that journey of where there might be things that aren't quite right with your content, and how do we just help you make that better? And that's just been the whole push, uh, for us for the past few months. And so hopefully it showed. Hopefully these are The intent is for it to be useful and helpful, and these are honestly things that I have wanted for a very long time for myself, for my own videos that I put on my very tiny YouTube channel."
"[laughter]"
"I am way less of a pro than Trev at video editing, and I think that's what keeps me in the game because, you know, you don't have to be a pro to do this."
"Yeah. I I think the YouTube thumbnails is going to be one of the favorites because it's you had to have a different app or hire someone to do it or go to a different piece of software you pay, and like I don't even want to learn how to make thumbnails. I just want to put the video out and get views, but you had to, so Yeah, for everybody who tuned in today, we appreciate you guys joining. All of this stuff is in the blog post. We're calling it season 12. It's the package. And like Sherry said, it's just this idea that the most important thing you can do is now just hit record. Don't worry about all those little things that used to keep you from creating. Descript exists to help fix those and make them look polished and let your, uh, personality and your expressive nature show up in your video without having to be a video editor or a thumbnail designer. And just make that shortcut from 'I have an idea' to 'a video that I'm going to hit publish.' And I think we have a a QR code there. If you want to get in and see all those effects that Trev was using on the stock media or how to put the jump cuts moving when you take out your filler words, like Sherry was showing us, you can grab that. We really appreciate you giving us your most important resource, which is your time today, and we are pumped to hear what you think. We want your feedback. If you're posting stuff on socials, tag us. You can DM our brand account on any of your platforms if you have cool use cases you found or things that you wish they could do, please let us know so we can make it better for you. Trev and Sherry, thank you guys for coming on today."
"Yeah, it's awesome."
"Yep, thanks everybody. Have a great one. Go make a video if you haven't already today."
"[music]"