I think it’s an app on my laptop, but I don’t really know, so I’ll include all the words to cover all the bases.

Until 2021 I was using Screencastomatic to edit my videos and that involved zooming into a wiggly line thingy and snipping out bits of video I didn’t want then playing back the video to see if that had worked, or if I’d snipped too much, and then going somewhere else to get a transcript of what I said, except it didn’t accurately reflect what I’d said so then I’d have to spend some time changing that too.

Probably Screenscastomatic has been updated since then, and definitely, I don’t really know what I’m doing with either tool, so please don’t consider this a comparison review. But now you have the context of my lack luster video editing skills, you’ll understand why I was so giddy with excitement when someone pointed me in the direction of the Descript video editing tool software app thing.

The easiest way to explain what Descript does is to show you.

First, watch this polished-up video of me espousing my love for it.

Here’s how I created that video:

1. Recorded it on my phone
2. Uploaded it to Descript
3. Applied ‘Studio Sound’ to improve the sound quality
4. Removed the ‘ummms’ and ‘ahhhhs’ using a tool that identified filler words and replace them with a short gap that effectively silences me when I’m ummmming and ahhhhhhing.
5. Removed any long pauses by chopping the gaps out in the audio timeline thing at the bottom (sorry didn’t catch that in the Editing Video. I also do this to snip out any interruptions…cats, deliveries, kids).
6. Removed a half a sentence that didn’t go anywhere and wasn’t needed.
7. Moved the section where I explained that there was a Filler Word tool, because I felt like it didn’t sit well at the start. It interrupted my intro to Descript where I started to explain what I use it for.
8. Took out a sentence I wasn’t loving.
9. Fixed the transcript (which fixes the captions) to reflect what I actually said.
10. Downloaded the video to my computer
11. Downloaded the srt file to my computer (for the captions)
12. Uploaded both files to Vimeo

And here’s a video of me editing the original video to get to the polished-up video:

In that video I’m showing you each of the techniques one at a time.

In reality, after I’ve done 1-4, I do the rest of the work simultaneously. I just watch the video back from the beginning and make all the necessary changes as I go.

I also want to say that in that video 👆 showing the editing, it looks like the audio and video are a little out or the video is a bit jumpy. It just looks like that sometimes, but it’s fine when the file is exported and played back.

And now here’s the original video just in case you wanted to see the raw material I was working with. The captions are the ones autogenerated by Vimeo.

I am no expert at all on this. All self-taught and muddling through. One day I’ll invest some time to learn how to do it properly, but it was so easy to just jump in and get started.

If Descript looks like something you’d like to try out, I’d be super grateful if you used my affiliate link:

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