How Descript uses AI to fix your eye line and rough audio cuts

Welcome to VideoBrand.

Got some exciting updates from YouTube, a new AI image generator, and some mind-blowing tools from Descript that make editing videos a whole lot easier.

But first – would you like a daily email in your inbox to keep you up to date on the latest trends and tech that are shaping the way we make videos?

Then sign up for VP Land, our daily email for media pros:

Now let’s jump into it.

Joey

🎨 Stability AI rolls out SDXL 1.0, their biggest update yet to their image generator Stable Diffusion (and the closest competitor to Midjourney when it comes to output quality).

📸 Sony might be rolling out two new cameras with AI features to help with framing and autofocus.

✂️ Wisecut, an AI editing app, raises funding. Looks like podcasts are their target market – take an hour interview and condense it into 60 highlight clips.

🧗‍♂️ DJI released a new version of their action camera, the Osmo Action 4. New sensor, 10-bit and D-Log M color support. Plus, some new accessories.

📺 Few updates from YouTube. They’re testing out AI summaries to help viewers make watch decisions (seems useful for Google Search, not so much for YouTube Search). AI voice dubbing is rolling out. And I just noticed a new Promotions tab in studio. Looks like an easier way to run ads without dealing with Google Ads, which can be complicated.

🪄 Wonder Studio: AI tool that automatically animates, lights, and composes computer generator characters into live-action scenes

💬 Viral Loops: Create your own referral program

🦄 UnicornAds: Scope out the top 1% of e-commerce ads

Now you can script out and record your videos without a teleprompter

Descript, one of our favorite video editing apps, just released a bunch of really ingenious features that should speed up how you make YouTube videos.

It’s also one of the most practical implementations of AI and machine learning that has instant utility.

If you’ve never used Descript before, check out all of our tutorials to get up to speed.

Here are the new features:

Eye Contact

This one keeps blowing my mind. One click and your eye line will automatically shift from wherever you’re looking right into the camera.

Obvious use case: read right from your script on your computer screen and edit the video so it looks like you were using a teleprompter the whole time.

We just dropped a video demoing this:

Replace Selection

With Descript being a text-based editor, it’s long had a feature to write out a script inside a Composition.

But you were limited with what you could do with that text – the only options were to convert it to audio with Overdub, their AI voice generator.

But if you recorded audio or video for the script, you’d have to go through a whole cycle of importing it and deleting your temp script.

Not anymore. Now you can just highlight the section you want to record, hit Replace with, and Descript automatically replaces the temporary script.

Regenerate

This is an audio cleanup tool I can see all NLEs adopting. If you’ve done any type of documentary editing, you’re definitely familiar with frankenbiting – using bits of audio clips to clean up a statement or change an intonation so it sounds natural.

With Regenerate, Descript will use ML to automatically do that. Smooth out any jumpy or awkward audio cuts by just hitting Regenerate.

What do you think of these new editing tools and do you see major NLEs adopting them?

How else I can help you:

Check out our YouTube channel with lots of free tutorials (and let me know what else you’d like covered)

Join our free community to level up your video skills and connect with other founders, marketers, and creators.

Get our YouTube & Video course, which has had over 4000 students

If you have a specific project in mind and would like to potentially work together, just hit reply