Templates, Layers, and Titles - Descript Q&A Session Replay

Replay from August 9, 2024 Livestream on Youtube. 

Transcript: 

Got a few reservations for today, or a few people RSVP'd, so hopefully we get a lot of good questions. And I got a few things on the agenda. I'm going to talk about syncing video with a voice if it, if it's out of sync, like my live stream probably is right now. I know that it is when I was testing it. Um, but at least you'll be able to leave your comments in the question.

I'll be able to respond to it even if there is a little delay between my video and my mic here because I'm using A new device. I got a fancy new camera here. So, and with that said, so what I'm going to show you first is a video here that was out of sync. So I used my, my Sony DSLR camera to record directly into Descript.

And what happened is I'm going to go ahead and play this and you're going to see that the video is out of sync with the audio. So it sounds like you have a whole team that needs to get up to speed on Descript or YouTube and you need it fast so Yeah, as you can tell it's pretty out of sync. And what I can do the way that I fix this is By going to the source file actually, sorry, I'm gonna go to the sequence.

So I'm gonna find the sequence and The easier way sorry getting ahead of myself The easier way is to create a sequence out of it. And the way that you do that, if it's not already a sequence, is to detach the audio. So if you right click on it, again, it's, it's not a sequence. If it was, there'd be an option here that would say edit sequence.

But what I'm going to do to make this a sequence is click detach audio and then right click on it again. And now I can see that edit sequence option. So I'll click on that. And now I can, now I'm inside of my sequence. So what I'm going to do here is I can adjust these layers relative to each other. So right now, and let me play this again to figure out exactly what's off.

If, uh, if the video is ahead of the audio or vice versa, if you have a whole team, if you have a whole team, so it sounds like the audio is starting just a hair earlier than the video. So the way that I can fix that is I'm just gonna select my audio layer And I can tell it's the audio layer because it's got the sound waves, but it's also got Well, that's really it is the sound waves and then the video layer has a thumbnail so you can visually tell that That's a video.

So what I'm gonna do is just take this audio layer and slide it to the right by like a fraction Quarter of a second half a second. It's kind of just eyeballing it at this point And what I'm gonna do is play it back over and over Um, adjusting it each time until it lines up and it's, it's all synced up.

So let's see how this looks. If you have a whole team that, so let me play it again. Hard to tell if you have a whole team, I think it might be too late now. I think the audio is behind the video. If you have a whole team, uh, maybe not. I'm going to adjust it a little bit more. So I'm, I'm moving the audio to the right.

which is going to make it, uh, come in later relative to the video. So when my mouse move or my mouth in the video moves, that's what I'm looking for. If you have a whole team that needs to get up to speed on Descript or YouTube and you need it fast. So that's getting better. You can see you, another visual cue besides the movement of my mouth is my hands.

So I'm saying Descript or YouTube and you need it fast. So. That's another indicator I can use. I can kind of scrub through here and see where I'm making those gestures. And that can kind of help me line it up, but let me just, let me just play it from the, I find it easiest at the beginning to go off when my mouth starts moving to when the sound should start.

So let's see how that goes. If you have a whole team, if you have a whole, If you have a whole team that needs to get up to speed on Descript or YouTube and you need it fast So that's not bad. It's not perfect, but I'm not gonna waste a bunch of time getting it exactly right Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about this But I think you should be able to tell what I'm getting at that I'm gonna adjust the layers until I can sync it up.

And again, the reason this is happening is because is because I'm recording directly into Descript with a DSLR camera that doesn't have a cam link. The cam link is a, another piece of gear that would make that connection even better. And I'm not using it right now. That's why you're seeing a bit of a delay in the live stream.

But if I had that, that would help reduce the error. Um, but I don't. So there's that big delay and that's how you can sync it up. Now, if this was. a interview and I needed to line up two different video layers where people are responding to each other, you know, it's a, it's a conversation, then it would be the same principle.

You would use a sequence and you would line up those two layers so that when one person asks a question, the other person responds and it's not all out of order. Sequences are the key to any multi track stuff. Okay, so let me know if any questions about that. I went through it pretty fast because I did sequences are definitely a more advanced topic.

So I get it. It's probably hard to tell just based off of that quick little intro. Um, and then the next thing that I want to show you with the same video is color grading. And color grading is very limited in Descript, but you can tell that this video is really dark. It looks Not good because it's super dark.

So what you can do is come to layer, Select the layer that you want to change the colors for, come down to effects, hit the plus button, hit color adjustments, And then if you hit these dials here, you'll have all your different color options. And the first one, the main one for changing the brightness of this image, is going to be our exposure.

So let me just bump that up to 15, still a bit dark, 20, 25. You don't want to get too crazy with it, or it starts to get all wonky, the picture will look weird. Um, that's already a little bright there. If I go up to 50, you can see it just looks way too blown out. If I go to like 35, 30, it's not bad. But again with this and this I say this all the time, but like with editing it's just make a change if you like it keep it if you don't like it keep keep adjusting until it looks right and so a big part of this obviously is knowing what all the tools do but It's it's really comes down to a lot of just just Trial and error in editing.

And so what I'll do is play with the contrast and I find with this camera at work, it looks best if I dial the contrast down. So there's like a negative 15 that looks a little flat. If I go up, if I go up above zero, it looks too red, reddish orange. So I'm a negative five on that and highlights. I don't typically play with the highlights, but let's just see how this.

Just to show you what this does. It's not really changing much at all. It looks pretty, pretty similar. And then, um, and then the other, the big one is saturation too. This is going to be how warm or cool the image is. It adds like a red or blue tint and Descript defaults to 6600, but I could do like a 6000 and that makes it look a little orange.

Or I could bump up to 7000 and it gives it that bluish tint. But I'm gonna, I usually just leave it about at the default, maybe a little, a hair lighter. So like 6500 is probably about right for this video. And that's okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave that for now. So, yeah, that's a brief, uh, brief introduction to color grading, but it's, DS Descrip is not meant for color grading.

It's not, not good for that you're gonna want to use if you, if you're serious about it. Da Vinci Resolve, or a really, the easiest color grading software is cap cut. Cap cut has a bunch of filters and it just makes it super easy. And then there's something called lutz, which are like preset. color adjustments.

And what's really, if you get really into this, what's worth doing is to come up with a LUT, which is a file of preset color grading properties, basically. And so if you always shoot with the same camera in the same lighting and the same office, then you can make a LUT that you think looks really good for your particular setup.

And then you just apply that LUT and it's, it's easy. You just have to do it once. Um, But again, that's getting into the weeds. If you're shooting with an iPhone, you're shooting with the webcam on your computer, that's all you need and you can keep it simple. Uh, okay. So another question I had on my list, um, I have a whiteboard over here with, with questions from the week written out.

Um, the sinking voice and video question came from Dane. So thank you for that. And then this next one also comes from Dane converting to audio. He asks when to use it and why. So converting to audio is something that only applies for the AI speaker voices. So if I come into a new project, I just open up a new composition and I say start writing.

Uh, the first prerequisite of using an AI speaker is you have to have it labeled as a voice that either you've trained or one of the stock voices. So I have these AI speakers, Dr. Johnson, myself, myself, 2. 0, et cetera. And I could select one of these, and then that would be the voice that whatever I write is going to get converted into.

So if I pick myself, I'll pick Ross three and I'm not actually going to write something myself. I'm going to use Underlord, Underlord in the top right here. If I scroll down. And I find, oh, and one second here, I'm going to turn on my, my cursor annotation so you can see what I'm doing. Oh, maybe you can't, well, I have my cursor annotation on, but apparently the live stream isn't showing it.

So I apologize for that. Um, okay. So I'm going to do write a script and then I'm just going to say, write a script about, Live streaming on YouTube best practices, whatever. I could give it a tone. I could give it intended audience, all this other information here, but I'm not gonna worry about that for right now.

I'll just hit submit. And there it is almost instantly. It starts spitting out a response. I'll say add to script. And I'll hit done writing. So I, my speaker went away, my speaker label, but that's okay. I'm just going to click on it again and I'll choose myself. And as soon as I do that with text written here, you can see that it starts pulsing and that's telling me that it's processing.

It's turning that text into spoken word using my voice that I trained it on. So it's going to sound like me reading the script and let's just give it a moment here. It's probably. Eight paragraphs. This will probably take a minute to a minute fifteen or so.

I'd already finished that bottom, very short paragraph. And then, um, once this is done, I'm going to show you, the whole point of showing this is the convert to audio thing and why we need to use that. So, if I come down to my timeline, I open that up, you can see my sound waves starting to come in. There was Have been, uh, created, those AI speaker voices, and let's listen to it.

Welcome to this guide on best practices for live streaming on YouTube. So, that's what it sounds like. It's done processing. But if I hover down on my timeline, you can see this button that says convert to audio. And then, in addition to that, a couple other visual cues. The words are a dark blue, so that's telling me they were light blue before I made them an AI voice.

So, Once they are processed as an AI voice, they're dark blue. And then the sound waves on the timeline are black. So all those are, are visual cues to let you know where in the process these, these particular files are. So if I hover over this convert or this, this layer, and it says convert to audio, what that's telling me is this is sort of in a draft mode.

And what that means practically is if I try to, for example, grab text, I can't slide it left and right like I normally could. I also can't grab the end of that clip and I don't get that bracket where I can adjust the length of the clip. And there's certain other things I can't do. Like if I, if I go to layer, I'm very limited on the properties I have.

I can change the volume. I that's pretty much it. Okay, once I convert it to audio, then I can do everything. I can put my mouse on the end, I get the bracket, I can shorten it. I can't make it any longer in this case because it's, it's already at the end of where that clip ends, naturally. But, um, if I zoom in, I can grab some words now, I can shorten it to get rid of stuff before it.

If I drag in the, to the right, it creates a gap clip, so it's amazing to me. Um, section of silence and no video or audio in that portion. Um, so that's what that is. That's how you, it's, it's essentially in draft mode until you click convert to audio, and then it's treated like a normal audio file that you can do anything to.

And again, only applies to AI speaker. If you have voice that you recorded, it's just going to be, you're not going to see the convert to audio button. Um, Yeah, what else? Any questions as I'm going through anything? Has anything come up so far? Let me know in the chat. Um, What else could I talk about? We could go into Templates, because that's always a hot topic.

Everyone always wants to talk about templates and Yeah, let's do that. So to apply templates, of course, you go to Scene, On the right side here. And once you do that, there's this browse templates button. And inside of here, you have drive, private and gallery. It defaults to gallery and gallery is all of Descript's pre made templates.

So these are, these ship with the software and then drive and private are going to be ones that you've made. So you have a lot. They just recently added a ton of templates here, which is great. Because it was super limited before. And all of these that you see in this view are essentially folders of more templates.

So if I click on this one that says Caption Templates, inside of it are a dozen or so caption templates. And you can see these are in portrait mode. It really matters what the aspect ratio is of the template versus what you're applying it to. So my project is currently in landscape. It's long, like a normal video.

But these templates are made for portrait mode, which is tall. So it's going to cause issues. If I try to apply this to my current project, I'll be able to do it, but things are just going to get a little weird because the aspect ratios are different. And it will prompt me if I want to switch my project to portrait.

But anyways, that's what these are. Pay attention to the aspect ratio. Of the template versus the source. This next one is audiograms. And if you hover over these, you can see a little preview of what that template is going to do. And so in the case of this audiogram, it's putting in two video files, like stacked on top of each other.

And then it might be hard to see through the live stream, but there's kind of the, the sound waves bouncing around their images of the two speakers in that, that video. And so that's what that would do. It would take two separate video files. Stack them, put them in circles and then put the audio waves associated with each of their microphones around their images.

There's ones with captions where it'll just read off of the script. It'll just display exactly what your script says and then put that onto your video. And there are, I mean, so many things here. A lot of these ones that are Well, like these ones say conversation and it says grunge. Podcast is the theme of this folder of templates.

And so you can see they're all black and white and kind of grungy, just like the name implies. So, uh, and, and once again, you hover over it, get a little preview. So I could apply that. Just click on it. It says applying layout. And then it usually doesn't take too long here. There we go. So it puts it in exactly like it.

shows. But from here, you could adjust things. So you could find this title layer, for example, the thing that says Grunge podcast. Oops. Let me select it back on the timeline. So the title here, and then, uh, you could change it. You could change the text that's in there. Just customize this to your particular podcast or show that you're creating.

And, um, that's the best way to use templates is, is to use them as a starting point. So I have a bunch of free templates available for download on my website, which is right here, DescriptMastery. com. And it's right here when you first, when you get right to the beginning, just get free Descript templates.

And I think it's in the description of this live stream as well. And so what you, you can use my templates or any templates exactly as they are. Or, what I recommend is use them as a starting point. Put in your logo, put in your font, put in your colors, and adjust it to your particular needs. And if you want to make one from scratch, all you do is find the scene thumbnail.

So let's say this here is my template that's already applied, or the settings that I've applied to my project. I can come up to the scene thumbnail, which is just scene 1 in this case, right click on it, and say save to template. And then that would put it into my templates folder. Um, and of course, again, I'd recommend making all the changes I want, change the colors, change the look and feel of it.

And then I could make that into a template and use it over and over in all of my projects. You can also save it up here as well, save to template, in the upper right corner. Or within a project. There's also this copy layout and paste layout, which is super handy. So if I make a, another scene, um, I can do copy layout from here and then paste layout.

And this doesn't make much sense in isolation. I'm just showing you that to expose you to it, but there's where this really, really helps is with an interview where you have multiple cameras. and you have like hundreds of scenes, then you could have a couple scenes that are your templates. For like, let's say you have two speakers.

There's one template where there's two speakers in the same view. And then there's a second template where it's just speaker A and a third scene where it's template or speaker B. You could use each of those three scenes like dozens of times or however many times you want throughout the remainder of your project.

But the point is once you get each one set how you want, then that's the only time you have to set it. Using the copy and paste layout method saves a ton of time and is where Descript really shines for editing podcasts like that. Um, okay. Still haven't gotten any questions in the chat, but I'll keep talking about random things that I think of.

Um, okay. So back to browse templates, let's see what else we got here. Maybe I'll show some of the ones in my, in my, uh, template packet. So I have the Descript mastery thing here is the exact templates I used on my course and on this YouTube channel. So for example, this outro, and actually let me apply that.

If I make a blank scene and I just click on it, applying layout, there it is. And what this template is. is you've probably seen this. This is, I use this a lot on my channel. If you've ever, if you've ever seen my videos here, um, this is on a lot of my videos. It's got my logo. It's got a watch next button.

And then the way that this works is I put this onto YouTube and then in YouTube studio, I go to edit the properties for this video and I'll add an end screen. So where it says watch next. Then I'll, in YouTube, put in a related video that I want the viewer to then get funneled to. So, super handy way to keep people on your channel.

And then there's also, um, the soundtrack. So I have like an outro 5 second soundtrack that plays. And that's it. It's super simple. And then, um, back to scenes, or back to templates rather, let's see what we got, in Drive, um, Netflix style subtitles, that's included with my templates package, it's just the standard Netflix font and color and positioning, and then, like, if I click on it, there's one for each aspect ratio, landscape, portrait, and square, and then that just gives you that professional looking title.

Subtitle or captions. So that, that brings up an interesting thing worth, worth mentioning. People get confused about the difference between subtitle and caption. The subtitles and this game, I'll define it the way that Descript defines it. So captions are what's burned into the video. Those are like you export the video and those captions, which are reading off of your transcript, are burned into the video, and the viewer can't decide to turn them on and off.

That's how Descript defines captions. Subtitles, on the other hand, are what the viewer can turn on and off, like in YouTube. But it's confusing, because YouTube calls them closed captions. So, um, different naming conventions in different places. Both of those can be exported, if you go to Publish, Export, and then Subtitles.

Um, and we've got a question in the chat, which I'll come to in a second. And yeah, so subtitles, you can, you can export these and then you can upload those into YouTube. And then that's what can give you, uh, the viewer the ability to turn on closed captions or not. And one note on that, YouTube will automatically transcribe your video.

In the original language. So for me, it makes English, um, subtitles, automatic automated subtitles, but it won't automatically create subtitles in other languages unless I manually add a subtitle. So for my most popular videos. I'll export a subtitle, manually upload it to a YouTube video, and then you can use YouTube's automatic translations to put it into French or Spanish or any other language that you want.

So, yeah, I could talk about that more if that's of interest to anyone. So, question in the chat is, whenever I bring in a guest on a different camera, the transcript looks fine. But the guest steps on the last, on the end of my last word. Yeah. So, um, let me see if I have anything I could show, demonstrate that with.

Uh,

I need it. I need a squad cast video to properly show this or any multi cam really. Uh, let me see this one. I think this might be,

uh, that's not a true sequence. Um, so I'll, I'll talk about it while I kind of look at stuff, look for something that I could demonstrate this with. So yeah, what happened is, is the, is the video coming from Squadcast or how are you using to record the, the interviews? Are they on the same layer or are they on different layers?

Cause, and is it in a sequence or not? That's really, really my question. If it's not in a sequence, then your options are more limited. Ah, okay, same layer. So in that case, um, well, here's one. Yeah, in that case, Descript's just going to transcribe it as it is. So you can't really, uh, let's see if there's any parts in here like that.

Kind of here where the words are super close. So what you have to do is just manually change the transcript. So like, you can select the words that your guest is starting to say as you're finishing your speech. And then you can go into correct mode by highlighting the words, pressing C on your keyboard, or hitting correct.

And then just changing it there. Um Yeah, it gets tricky when it's just one layer because that's what you're stuck with. If you had two layers, then you could, you could space things out, you could delete, you could silence somebody who's cross talking, like, things like that, but yeah. Hopefully that helps.

Is that what you're, is that what you're looking for? Just, just fixing the transcript or, or, um, Something else making it sound like it's not like there's not crosstalk. Cause if that's what you're looking for, you, you could try deleting. It gets complicated. You could try deleting it and then using AI speaker or regenerating.

But yeah, I'd have to see it to really give good advice on that one.

Yeah. So the best way is in the chat, he says, sounds like I should be using two layers. So the best way is to bring it in from Squadcast or Riverside or something else. Um, Zoom won't even do it. So this, this one that I just showed is Zoom. And this isn't really a good example because, uh, Zoom just puts it into one layer also.

So that's not ideal for a conversation. What you want is something like, uh, do I have any demonstration projects?

Maybe demo interview. Let me see this. No,

dang it. I'm just, I have things on here, but they're client stuff. So I don't want to show those.

Untitled project from squad cast. Let me see what this is. Okay, this is perfect. Because it's both me. I was demoing something. So, this is something I recorded in Squadcast. And it's two cameras of myself. I was using my cell phone and my computer. And if I right click on it, because it was brought in from Squadcast, I can hit Edit Sequence.

And then I get this view where I got my sequence for speaker A and sequence for speaker B. And then what you could do is if there was crosstalk, like let's say speaker B was talking at the same time as speaker A, I could simply select or rather isolate. I could hit, I could get to my blade tool. Oops, my computer is being really laggy.

Okay, there we go. Uh, and then just cut a little bit before. That part where there's crosstalk and then cut a little bit after that part. And then,

so again, we're, we're pretending that these purple sound waves right here are conflicting with speaker a, that they're talking over each other. So with that part, select that speaker button, and then now that's going to be gone and the other advantage of using, oops, I'm getting a error message on the stream.

If you didn't see me.

Anymore, let me know, but otherwise I'm going to assume that we're still good. Um, so the other advantage of this having them in a sequence is that you can apply automatic multicam where it'll take whoever's actively speaking. and show that person on the full screen display of the, of what's showing in the video.

And then it'll automatically cut your video into as many scenes as it needs to so that the active speaker is who's showing on the screen. Sorry about that. Thank you for sticking around. I see a couple of you still here. So, what I was just showing is this text layer. I don't know what the last thing that you saw was, but that text layer, you can make it freeform, where you can type anything you want in there.

Or, If you click on, if you go to layer, oops, hang on, that layer got hidden. There it is. And go to layer and then. Right here where it says type, you can change it to captions, which will make that just so it reads the transcript, displays the transcript, the words there. You can change it to speaker where inside of that speaker, guest A is speaking.

So it shows the words guest A on the screen, or you can change it to composition name, which just like it sounds like is taking the name of the composition, which in this case is Untitled Project from Squadcast. So it looks like that. You can change it to a marker. I don't have a marker, so it's not showing.

It won't show right now, but like if I add one, for example, whoops, not there, with the pound sign, with the hashtag sign, I could say marker one. And now inside of that scene, it just says marker one. And the last one is timer. And this is where it'll start from zero and count up. Or it'll display the current moment in time, depending on how you've set it up.

So if you hit these dials, you can say count up or count down, where it'll start from the big number, like the end of the video or the end of the marker, and then count down, um, or vice versa with the count up. And then where the beginning point is, whether it's the beginning of the scene, the beginning of the video, or the last marker, which in this case was that one that I just made, marker one.

So it shows 0 seconds right there. Placeholder for the templates. I am Guest. It starts counting up. So yeah, a lot of cool stuff you can do with the text layers. And I'll just change that back to freeform. And you can see it saved the data, like it called it anything I want and it retained that information in the layer um, when I reverted back to it.

So Any questions? Otherwise I'll keep talking. Um, if you go to this view, so if you go to layer, when you first click on layer, it's going to show you properties for the layer you have selected. In this case, it's the script layer. It tells me that at the top. And then I can change the duration, the audio level, add audio effects, all this kind of stuff.

If I hit this back button, though, this is what I want to show you. This is the layers that are in the current scene. And so I have a title layer, I have the track layer, which is showing, and then also included, hidden, is the guest layer. So because it's a sequence, all of that data is in the container, in this sequence, inside of the script layer of this, uh, scene.

And so I can hit that little eyeball. And it's gonna bring that layer back, but I can't see it because it's below the one that's labeled track one, which is taking up the whole screen. So if I wanted to bring that forward, I could just drag it and do that. And there it is. Now it's like that little floating version of me.

Um, and then I can also just hide it by putting it in the background. or completely hide it by clicking that eyeball and getting rid of it. The other thing you can do here besides toggling on whether something's visible or not is hit this little lock button and that'll make it so that you can't edit that property anymore.

So what I mean by that is with that title layer locked now, if I try to click on it, it's as if it's not there. So I, I try to click on it and it's clicking on the layer behind it, which in this case is there. So that's really handy for, I mean, it could be for this, this situation if I wanted to leave my title right there, but it's especially handy for like a logo.

If you're going to like leave a watermark logo in the top corner throughout the entirety of your video or some shapes or it would make more sense for a title layer in a different position that's not covering my face. But. Anyways, yeah, I think you can imagine how that could be useful. And then, um, below that you can do, you can mute the whole layer.

If it has sound associated with it, you can hide the layer. I already talked about that. You can lock it as well. So those properties are applicable to pretty much all layers. And then this is the view where you can see them. You can also see it from the scene property bar. So you click on Scene on the right side, and then you can see your three layers as well, right there.

Or however many layers you have. They'll all be visible. Um, and then each scene has a transition associated with it, or the ability to add transitions. And with transitions, you have two options. How they enter, in, or how they exit. And you add those by hitting the plus button. You can say in, and then you can do any of these preset type of transitions.

And Descript is super limited on these, um, you only have seven options here. But you can, you can apply a fade, blur, cross zoom, cross fade, dip to color, star wipe, wipe. And those are your transitions in. Transitions out, same thing, same options, same seven options. And if you apply any of these, like I'll apply a fade.

And then if you hit these, uh, dials right here, these are going to be your settings to dial in how you want that fade to look. So it's got a duration with fade. That's all. That's the only property you have is duration and it defaults to 0. 4 seconds long. So 0. 4 seconds from the end of the scene, it's going to start fading out.

And by the end of that 0. 4 seconds, it's going to be completely in this case, black. There's gonna be a black background. Um, but that layer is going to fade out like that. It is super quick, so I don't know if you can see it, but if I scrub through, you can see how 0. 4 seconds out starts darkening until it's gone.

And then, um, I could change it to any of the other options right here. I could click Fade, and I could switch it to a cross zoom. You can see that, how that looks. It does like a big blurry zoom in. And if you click on the dials, you can change the duration. This one defaulted to 0. 8 seconds long, and a blur amount of 200.

So that's how intense the effect is going to be. So let's play it. A, just like that. It does like that slow zoom in or cross zoom type of thing. And then you have cross fade, which is where it's going to, this is sometimes called dissolve in other softwares where it like fades out of the first clip and then into the next clip.

Dip to color, star wipe, wipe, wipes the other one I use fairly frequently, where you can specify a direction. So like, if you want. You're seeing that you're currently in to slide off to the slide up and out. Then it'll be that up arrow down and out will be that one to the left, to the right. And then once again you can change how quickly that transition happens.

So let's try this with it sliding to the right. I'll show you how that looks.

And it's, you can barely even see it, but it works best when you have something changing in the video. So like if I, uh, if I had two scenes where it was just me talking, um, You wouldn't even be able to tell that a transition is happening. But if it's me and then the next one is me zoomed in or a completely different scene, like a B roll, then those transitions work a lot better.

They make more sense there. And sometimes you can use transitions to cover up, uh, jump cuts to an extent. So like the other way to add fades and crossfades, by the way, is this white dot right here. So on the corner of a clip or the, the edge of a clip, I should say, you get this little white dot and if you grab it and you slide to the right on a, on the beginning of a clip, that's going to add a fade in.

So it's going to start from. Zero opacity where you cannot see the layer and then it's going to fade over the course of the length of that triangle, which in this case, if I hover over it, I can see is 0. 96 seconds long. So over the course of almost a second, it's going to go from invisible to a hundred percent opacity.

Um, and if I click on that white dot, then I get, oops, my camera just shut off. Let me switch. Uh, well, you know what? I'm going to go without a webcam. That's okay. So, Yeah, over the course of that second, it's going to do the fade in and it's not only for the visual component, which you can see up top here, it's also for the audio component.

So you can change these individually. I could click delete and then it would remove the audio portion of that fade. So it's a visual only fade, which I do all the time because, um, if you do the audio only fade, it'll fade out your voice if you're still speaking. Which I don't want for most of my videos.

Um, so that's how that works. And then the, uh, let's see, you can change the timing as well individually. So let's say I wanted the, the visual fade to be three seconds long, but the audio fade to be only that two seconds. 96 seconds. So now you can see I have a slightly lighter triangle that goes much longer.

And then the darker triangle that goes just that first second, um, on the timeline here. And so here, let me make this bigger so you can see what I'm talking about. Um, and you can, you can grab these layers by the way, and just expand and shrink them. So you see that lighter gray triangle, that's my Uh, Visual Fade, and then the other one's gonna be my Audio Fade.

And it's darker because it's the two gray fades overlapping, so I'll show you how that looks, and I'm gonna make some cool templates that just like that. Uh, okay, so, that's Fades, and, oh, the reason I brought all that up is, let me just get rid of both of those, that's a fade when you draw from the beginning and drag to the right.

If I take from the beginning and I drag to the left, into the adjacent clip, it creates that cross, you see that X looking thing, and that's a crossfade. So that's going to be what I mentioned is kind of like a dissolve effect,

and it's not even doing it, but basically it will fade out of the previous clip and into the next clip. So it'll be a fade out into a fade in. And, uh, it's not working because it's a sequence, but that's normally how you do it. And then, uh, let's see, what else could I show you with that? Same properties, like if you click on the white dot, So, it's hard to find.

There it is. Um, then you can change the length. These are, by default, it does the visual and the audio component of that fade together. But I could change, I could get rid of the audio one, I could change the length. Yeah, you get the idea. I won't beat a dead horse on that one. Let's see here. So yeah, those are, those are some handy little tricks.

Changing zoom is a really valuable thing to implement in your projects. If I, for example,

let me make this. So here's a really easy, fast way to make a layer fill the entire canvas. If I right click on it and I click position and then fill canvas, it just takes that video, blows it up to fill the entire canvas. Really fast and easy like that. And, uh, What was I going to show you? Oh yeah, zooming.

So, if I take what's in scene one, which is this video right here, I could change the zoom level right here. I could say like 125, 150, something like that. And then, that's only going to apply to the video in scene one. If I wanted to. Notice this thing below that says current scene or all scenes. So right now I'm only applying that to this one scene by having current scene on.

So as soon as I go to scene two, it's back to that original view where it's at a hundred percent instead of 150%. So that's kind of a way to keep things visually interesting as you're speaking or as someone on your, in your video speaking. Like that. Um, so you could do something where like maybe the speaker asks a question and then like a, like a rhetorical question that they're about to answer.

And then as soon as they answer it, you zoom in for it, that type of thing. Um, add some interesting visual effects to it. The other thing is. If you double click on this, that puts you into the reposition mode. So you can see these gray lines or these gray grid lines that popped up. Um, you can drag and reposition.

So before my head was getting cut off a little bit, I could just make it drop myself down a little bit. So there's a little bit of margin above my head. Like so, and I could hit done and then that's going to look just like that. If I double click on it again, uh, this is in addition to being the repositioning mode, this is also crop mode.

So if I wanted to just make this. Image what's displaying smaller. I could just grab the edges and then crop it just like that. And that kind of stuff should look all familiar from PowerPoint or anything you've used in the past. And I've actually got a, Oh no, that was my cell phone clip. So that's, that's fine.

I'm going to leave that. Um, yeah. And then you can also flip these with that button right there. Flip it, uh, horizontally. You can rotate it 90 degrees per click. You can put yourself into a little circle. So landscape, of course, is going to be the original aspect ratio. And then if I go to portrait, switches it into portrait mode.

If I go to square or circle. Then that's a super easy way to do that. Um, I could add a layer around it. I could go to, or a border rather, go to layer and then, uh, let's see here. We're blanking on it. It should be in, where is that?

Maybe because of the sequence, I'm not seeing it.

But anyways, you can see that when I switch it to a circle, there, it, this is the corner rounding element. So if I click on these, this is going to show me the four different corners, and it put it to 10, 000, which is a complete circle, obviously. By default, it's zero, and so by changing that top right one, it makes the corner square.

like that. So it's kind of like, looks like a teardrop now. Um, and it says mixed right there. But if you have that, that button closed, it's going to change all the corner properties together. So there's 250, 500. Um, oh, hey, Dane, welcome for the last few minutes here. Uh, I answered your question at the very beginning.

So you have to check that out. See if See if that's what you're looking for. Uh, let's see here. Put that to zero. And then this one is the rotation. So zero degrees, it's going to be flat. And then if you bump that to 90 degrees, it rotates it 90 degrees to the right. 180, it's gonna be upside down, and so on.

Um, let's see here. Any last minute questions? Not, not probably enough time to go into anything new, but if not, I'll pitch one more time. My, uh, templates. If you go to DescriptMastery. com then right here at the top, you can get just enter your email and then it'll send you links to my templates. I have, there's 113 of them or something like that and there's YouTube intros and outros, transitions, sound effects.

Uh, what else is in there? Um, zooms, different types of zooms, animations, multispeaker, like interview templates, all sorts of stuff. And, um, as I said, feel free to use them as they are, or use them as a way to learn, or use them as a starting point to then add your own logos and fonts and things like that, make them your own.

Um, yeah. Another, another live stream in the books. I'll do this again next week and same time, same place here on YouTube, 1230 PM Pacific. See you then. Thanks for joining.