Episode Summary
Descript has been redesigned and upgraded with some pretty appealing features. However, while such a significant change is exciting, it raises questions and maybe even concerns among users. Therefore, we invited Harmony Jiroudek and Kevin O’Connell from Descript to join us on this episode of Recorded Content and give us more details.
Harmony and Kevin share what made the team take such a big step and what customers who have already tried it think of it. They also discuss the features that are now available on the app and how the redesigned version will enable more creativity and efficiency for users.
Featured Guests
- Name: Harmony Jiroudek
- What she does: Harmony is the Customer Success Manager at Descript.
- Company: Descript
- Noteworthy: Harmony is an accomplished mezzo-soprano and has participated in several American and world premiere performances.
- Name: Kevin O'Connell
- What he does: Kevin is a Product Specialist at Descript.
- Company: Descript
- Noteworthy: Kevin is a musician, audio engineer, educator, and arts advocate.
Key Insights
- Scenes are a new way to imagine video editing. They are part of the Descript update, or as Harmony describes it, the most significant redesign in the app's history. ''So, instead of the standard timeline, NLE, with tons of clips and granular work in a stacked clip view, we're breaking up a Descript project and video editing by scenes. It's like a combination of a standard video editing doc and slides. So scenes are a way of chopping up your script and your video into sections and organizing your visuals,'' explains Kevin.
- What about the old projects? With the launch of the new Descript, existing customers might wonder what will happen to the pieces that have already been created and what they have to do to keep them. ''No one needs to do anything right away. Your classic projects aren't going to be taken away from you or migrated immediately. But the goal is to eventually migrate from the classic and move everything to this new user interface. So there is going to be a short period where folks can still work on their classic projects, or even create them. But we're eventually going to move away from that, and everything will be in the new user interface,'' says Harmony.
- Green screen and background removal became a top priority for our AI team. This functionality will make Descript even more appealing to new users and provide significant value to existing ones by enabling creativity and efficiency. ''We were modeling what types of videos we would love to see creators make in Descript. A lot of them were green screen-enabled, especially Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok videos. So many of them are using background removal or green screens to create new depth and layers in their videos. [...] So the folks that have designed Overdub Studio Sound and a bunch of other AI features also developed the green screen background remover. So being able to remove your background from a standard interview or selfie-style video on the street gives you many more options to add some text behind you, put yourself in a different space, or be weird and creative when you edit,'' says Kevin.
Episode Highlights
The Biggest Redesign in the History of Descript
”We were calling it ‘storyboard,’ and now it’s just the ‘new Descript.’ You’re going to see a completely updated user interface, which is much cleaner and easier to work from the script view — and not have to go down into the timeline. So many new features, stock media, libraries, templates, green screen effects, and new video effects. It’s a whole thing,” shares Harmony.
Internal and External Feedback Prove There’s Always Room for Improvement
”We were hearing from people — media creators — about the challenges they were experiencing with all the classic apps and programs we’ve been using for a long time.
We’ve also been lucky to have, internally at Descript, a ton of talented and brilliant media creators who are our product developers, engineers, project managers, and product managers. We all collaborate internally on what’s working and what isn’t. […]
The folks working on our engineering product and design teams created a clear canvas and reimagined Descript from the ground-up, building a new foundation for how we organize, edit, and collaborate. And it’s setting us up for some cool ideas and features in the future,” says Kevin.
First Impressions
”Most of it was navigating the new user interface. People were saying, ‘Hey, I can still edit my audio and video like a Word doc. Cool!’ But it was mostly like, ‘Where did my project files go?’ Or, ‘Oh, I see that the Properties panel has changed slightly.’
So there are some intricacies like if you click on the scene versus the canvas, that will change your properties over on the right. So, a lot of it for existing customers was recalibrating and understanding where everything had been migrated,” explains Harmony.
Templates in Descript
”Templates allow you to templatize scenes or a full edit. So as you are working on a full edit and have it broken up into scenes, you can templatize each of those parts of a larger template project and apply them to projects across your drive. Likewise, collaborators can access templates you’ve made and vice versa.
And it allows you to do your design work upfront, whether that’s specific font styles, colors, or bringing in motion graphics. A lot of folks do templatize that and slap on a subsequent episode, and you don’t have to apply them individually each time you’re going into an edit,” says Kevin.
”You create a template almost exactly the way you create a traditional project in Descript. And then, you can create different versions of that template like you would with compositions.
The only difference is that once you create those, you have to publish them. So when you publish that template, you can keep it private, or you can publish it to your drive so that everyone on your drive can benefit from it, or you can even publish it publicly, and then it would get added to our gallery of templates,” adds Harmony.
