Episode Transcript

Bob Sparkins

If you are wanting to create better videos without pulling your hair out, without the expertise of a nerd, then you're going to love this session of Free Tool Report. I'm joined by my good friend and godfather of video marketing, Lou Bortone. How you doing, Lou?

Lou Bortone 00:00:15 - 00:00:17

Good. Good to see you again.

Bob Sparkins 00:00:17 - 00:00:24

Tell us, what tool are we going to be talking about today, and what's the biggest reason why people should know about it?

Lou Bortone 00:00:24 - 00:01:02

Well, Today's tool is Descript.com, which is an AI video editor. I've been editing video for over 30 years, back since the days at E. Entertainment Television. And I've always been a Final Cut Pro, disciple, advocate, evangelist until Descript came along. And I use Descript every single day, and I use it 95% of the time for editing, which means I use Final cut Pro maybe 5% of the time. I don't really like the word game changer because it's used so often, but in this case, it truly is. It has changed the game when it comes to video and video editing.

Bob Sparkins 00:01:02 - 00:01:36

You've dropped a couple hints about your background just so people do know. You've been in the field for 30 years, but local news, Hollywood, all kinds of video, and so you're really good at video. For the person who has no idea of video editing, I think they're going to love Descript. Right. I'm getting into this myself because of my YouTube channel here. Using Descript to edit the episodes. When you were doing this as a professional, what would you say is that process people would have had to go through before this tool came along for you?

Lou Bortone 00:01:37 - 00:02:01

Yeah. Well, Final Cut Pro and After Effects and the other kinds of software that I used had fairly steep learning curves, and they were all linear editing, where you've got a timeline and you're doing all these little micro edits. It's like brain surgery in terms of the details. So this tool has turned that upside down and said, forget about timelines. Forget about everything you might know and not know about editing. If you can edit a Word document, you can edit a video.

Bob Sparkins 00:02:02 - 00:02:10

Let's dig into a project and show some of the coolest things that you really appreciate about the way that the software saves you time, gets your video content out the door faster.

Lou Bortone 00:02:10 - 00:04:01

Yep. So this is Descript.com. This is the home screen of the dashboard. And anytime I want to do a new project, I just go to new project. In this case, I'm going to open up a. A project that's actually in progress. I can record right into Descript, but because I'M a creature. I have it. A lot of times I'm recording on Zoom. So I'll just record something on Zoom and I upload it or bring it into Descript. What you can see here is it doesn't look like a traditional editing tool because you've got the word doc here.

They do have a timeline. So this is like in traditional editing, you'd be doing all this stuff down here with the timeline and the this and that. But with Descript, you can see when you upload an audio or a video, you immediately get this transcript, which is very accurate. And most of the editing that you're going to do is in this transcript and not in the timeline. In fact, they by default don't even show the timeline. So it changes the whole idea of video editing. And that's a good thing because again, you're editing a document, which most people are used to doing, and any edits you make here are reflected in the video. So if I take a line out here, I can either delete it or I can do my strike through here like this, and that line won't be red in the screen.

But the really cool thing about Descript, within the last six months is they created something called underlord, which is this little menu item up here, and that's basically their AI suite of tools. So this was good software before Underlord, but with Underlord, it's even more AI friendly and user friendly. What I typically do with a project is the minute I bring it in from Zoom, I go to Underlord. This is one of my goofy videos where I pretended to be a doctor and I did something crazy.

Bob Sparkins 00:04:01 - 00:04:07

I love this, by the way. This was your election dysfunction or something like that. Like if you have ed, what was it called?

Lou Bortone 00:04:08 - 00:09:31

Yep, Election Distraction. Because I found that a week before the election everybody was freaked out. So I just did a funny video about election distraction and how. How to overcome it. So what I do here is I can see this is all blank space before it was recording. So I can just select that and get rid of it. So I didn't have to go into the timeline and do all my slicing and dicing. First thing I do is I go to underlord. And you can see here they have sound good, look good, repurpose, publish down here and write all the bottom stuff. This is almost as if they had put ChatGPT into Descript. So you can do a lot of those ChatGPT sort of things like Brainstorm or write an outline. In this case, I've already got my script Here.

So I'm going to just go into Underlord, and the first thing I'm going to do is do studio sound. And this is great because that was one click here. And what that does is it takes out any dogs barking, background noise fans. Every time I go to do a video, the guy next door decides to mow his lawn. So I've got all that noise, completely eliminates all of that stuff, which is great. And it also makes it just sound a little better or richer. I use this all the time because I edit podcasts for folks, and if they record them on Zoom, they might have some background noise. And this just basically makes you sound like trouble sleeping. It just makes it a lot cleaner and crisper. Before we do anything else, let's do studio sound.

And then in here, you can see I even know if I'm reading a script like I was here, I might have ums and ahs, which I say a lot. So the next thing I do is I go to underlord and I say, remove filler words. And this goes through here and highlights the words. Now, again, I was doing on this one, I was doing a script, which I don't usually do, so there weren't too many. But I can see that there's an here or an ah here. And with underlord, I just go in here and say, okay, let's get rid of it. Remove all. And that immediately takes out all the filler words. So I've got no more ums and ahs and you knows and likes and things like that. I've also got pauses in here, which, I mean, I use it all the time. So I can see that there are little pauses. But if you don't know and you say, oh, shoot, I stopped and then I started again. I again go back to underlord and say, now let's shorten the word gaps. That's the next thing I do. So now I know that it's much tighter and I can say if there's a word gap of more than two seconds, cut it out or make it shorter. If I want pause in there. Sometimes I want a pause on purpose. I can go in and do it manually and say, don't remove all of them, just remove this one and this one. But in this case, I remove all of them. So now I've got a much tighter script. If I don't do anything else with this, it already sounds more professional because I've taken out the ums and ahs. I've taken out the pauses, I've taken out the Filler words, and I've added studio sound. So those are the main things that I do.

It does a few other things that are really cool that you could not do. Or I should say, if I did this in Final Cut Pro, it would have taken half an hour. But here, everybody struggles with green screen, because if you're on zoom and you don't have an actual green screen, you've got that sort of ghosty background. So what I can do here is if I can say, all right, I'm pretending to be a doctor here, I need a doctor's office so I can go to green screen, which again is one click and that's going to remove the background. Now, you can see behind me here, that's my actual wall. I don't have a green screen up.

But with Descript, you don't need that. What that's going to do is eliminate the background so that you can then replace it with whatever you want, animation or a photo. In Final Cut Pro, I would have had to go in and do it all manually and check the background and have to have an actual green screen tube. Do the chroma key with. I can go in here and change the background to white or a different color like that. And again, these are just a couple clicks. But what I typically do on the green screen is. So now I've got nothing behind me here.

One of the other cool things about Descript is they have stock footage. Normally I'd have to go to Pixabay or one of these stock footage places to find my background. The nice thing about Descript is I've got all kinds of giphys and backgrounds and photos and videos. So in this case, I want to do like a doctor's office. So I'm going to go to images down here and click show all. And then just maybe I'll just search for medical. So I'm doing all this within Descript. So now I don't have to go and search for specific images or go by images or backgrounds. Because everything is here in Descript. You can see that there are just tons and tons of all of these things.

For the sake of talk, I'm going to put this in the background. Like I've got my colleagues in the background here. I click on that and that then becomes the background of this image. It came in the front, so I got to do a little bit of tweaking here. And I have to say everything's a layer. So I just have to look at my layers and then just send that one to the back. So now I'm in front of my colleague, Sierra Thomas, and again, I can move myself around here. If I don't like that background, I can just take it out and do a different background again, I might want to just do a solid color in this case, I want to do just do a nice blue background here. It's a really clean green screen. You can see that there's not a lot of that ghosting or crazy lines or anything like that.

Bob Sparkins 00:09:31 - 00:10:11

I really love here that you're able to cut yourself out, basically, and then shift yourself from one side to the other. You've alluded to this idea of layers, so you could go in like, news broadcaster style and start showing scenes of other things off your shoulder or text or anything like that. So we're not going to get that far into a tutorial today, but I wanted to make sure people watching are getting their gears really turning quickly here on what is really possible. So you mentioned a couple things that I wanted to make sure people got. So editing the whole video just by removing text, that's pretty awesome.

Lou Bortone 00:10:11 - 00:10:11

Yeah.

Bob Sparkins 00:10:11 - 00:10:42

Being able to have the AI of Underlord remove or show you where there are additional ways to tighten up your video, which is obviously super important for any content. Talk to us for a minute about the scenes. Like, I want to give people the sense of you're not just taking the video as it is and using it, but you can also manipulate a bit more, especially if they're doing podcast episodes where there's another speaker like you and I are doing, or screen capture. How are scenes a factor of Descript?

Lou Bortone 00:10:43 - 00:12:51

If you record in Descript or if you record an interview in Zoom and you bring in both of the speakers, you can separate those and isolate them and say, oh, I didn't mean to say this, or I didn't mean to say that. The whole thing with Descript is you're not really doing much in the timeline down here. It's still there, but most of most everything's happening up here. So if I want to create a new scene or I want to separate something, I just do the backslash sign on my keyboard and that creates a new scene here. And if I want to just do a section, I can do the end scene here.

So basically what I've done now here is with my backslash thing, I've isolated this scene. So if I want to have something happen just in this part, like if I want to add a graphic, I can just go in here and find my. And drag that to this section, and that will only show up in this section because I've isolated that as a scene. So that goofy gif that I just brought in here will be from this part of the video to this part of the video. Once it comes in, you can resize it and move it around. So I like this. If I was talking about, I don't know, vaccinations or something, I'd have my little graphic pop up in this section. It's this, and it's the same with text. So if you want to add a lower third or a name or something here, you could just decide where you want that and drag it over to that section and then you'll have your name here. So I'd type in my name and move it down to the lower third and that way that would be set up there.

The other thing, before I forget, because it's really important and easy, is the captions within Descript. Because if you want to have captions on your video, which most people do these days, a lot of people watch videos with the sound off, you just go down to that. They have an entire section for captions, and you can just pick out a style. So if I pick out this style, it's going to basically take the entire script and caption it here once at.

Bob Sparkins 00:12:51 - 00:12:58

Wait a minute. So you don't have to work with SRT files and make sure that the timestamps are perfectly lined up.

Lou Bortone 00:12:58 - 00:14:15

No, it's. Again, it's just a drag and drop. So there's my lower third, my caption. If I click on that, I can customize it further. Maybe I don't like yellow. Maybe I want red or something. But in any event, I can change the font and the colors and all that kind of stuff. So as I do my captions, those are in there automatically. Now, oftentimes what I'll do, especially if I'm going to put this on Instagram or LinkedIn, is this little mystery button up here. I can change the orientation so I can turn it into a square video if I want. And that's just going to give me more space to move things around so I can move my waveform down here. I look a little bit disembodied here because of the background, but that's okay. Again, I can put other. I've got a lot more space, and normally that would take a long time, but in this case, you can see that I just clicked on square instead.

And I can do the same thing if I want to turn it into a TikTok video or YouTube short. So now I've got all this real estate that I can play with. I could add logos or other things. I can switch out the background. So it really gives you a lot more ability to repurpose because you can take that same video and with just a couple clicks, create the Square version for LinkedIn or create the portrait version for YouTube shorts.

Bob Sparkins 00:14:15 - 00:14:42

That's amazing. So generally speaking, you would do your text editor to get everything nice and tight, then you would do some scenes for your regular widescreen view. If that's your priority project, then duplicate the project and separately set up that orientation for the different content pieces or format that you're going to be working with. And all of that's being done in minutes and hours instead of days or weeks.

Lou Bortone 00:14:42 - 00:14:42

Yes.

Bob Sparkins 00:14:42 - 00:14:44

Which is absolutely amazing.

Lou Bortone 00:14:44 - 00:15:21

Yeah. And what I use quite a bit is if you select a section of type, I could say, oh, you know what, I want to take this clip and turn it into a promo clip. If I right click, I can just say, duplicate to new composition. This is a command that's hard to find, but I use it all the time. So I selected the text, I go to duplicate to new composition, and that creates an entirely new clip. But it brings all the elements with it, so I don't have to go back and redo the text down here or any or the background or anything. So I basically just copied and pasted a new version and that's the version that I'll turn into a square version.

Bob Sparkins 00:15:21 - 00:15:43

This rocks. Aloo, thank you so much for sharing some inside look under the hood of one of your projects for Descript. Obviously this is something that is pretty quick compared to the alternative, but it does still take a bit of a learning curve. You do teach people how to use Descript. What's one way or a future way people can become more proficient at using this software for themselves?

Lou Bortone 00:15:44 - 00:15:59

Yeah, I do crash courses on this in December. I do a 12 days of Descript course. I do a Discover Descript course a few times a year because it's constantly changing and evolving and improving. So I keep up with all those changes and pass them on to my students.

Bob Sparkins 00:16:00 - 00:17:10

That's awesome. So make sure to connect with Lou over at LouBortone.com and then keep an eye out for the next iteration of a class. Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom here, Lou, and for giving us that inside tour. And for those of you watching, make sure that you like and subscribe, of course, to the channel. Head over to FreeToolReport.com for some additional materials and check out the links in the Description below to get yourself connected over to Descript and try it out. Lou and I are both avid users.

We're also affiliates, so you are supporting both of our channels, depending on your choice of moving forward with Descript for your own business. They do have a free trial, of course, and you can play around with it and see if it's the right fit for you. If you also want to recommend a tool that you'd love us to dig into at Free Tool Report, make sure that you take a look at request a tool inside of the site over there. And if you'd like to be a guest as a person who wants to showcase a tool for entrepreneurs to make their life or their professional environment much more efficient, profitable, et cetera, there's also a way for you to raise your hand and say that you would love to be a guest on the show. Thanks again Lou, so much for being.

Lou Bortone 00:17:10 - 00:17:11

Here today and my pleasure.

Bob Sparkins 00:17:11 - 00:17:18

Chat again soon. Hopefully we'll have you back for another tool, because I'm sure you've got probably 15 or 20 more he'd be eager to talk about at some point.

Lou Bortone 00:17:18 - 00:17:19

Yeah, anytime. Thank you.