Hello, everyone. This is Cristi from Graphicious. In today's video I'm going to show you a little
quick trick for Descript. I've been using Descript for a while, and they have recently added some
video editing facilities into it, some functions to create some simple animations and other things.
So someone asked today a question about how could they add a little progress bar
on top of a video in Descript.. So if I go at the help, I have Descript 17.1.1. and
what I'm going to show you today doesn't work in Sequences, but it does work in Compositions.
So I have a blank project here, I have a composition and I'm just going to add a
video clip to it. Nothing special here, there's no transcription going on, I just have a simple video
clip in my project, and I'm going to show you how you can add a progress bar on top of this video.
So the video is now processing, it's a simple video here with a cityscape,
it doesn't matter what it is. So I want to add a progress bar on top of this video that shows
sort of an area that just shows you when the clip is finishing, for example. This progress
bar is fully adjustable, you can change it any way you like, so this is the way we will do it.
Just expand the bottom area here, where you have the timeline and you can see my script is down
there. So what I want to do is I want to add a new track on top. So I don't actually have to do this,
I just create a new object on top. So what I'm going to use is a rectangle. So go to
this plus sign at the top here and click on it and scroll down until you see Rectangle.
I'm just going to add a rectangle there by default, it's got a bit of a
shadow around it and some handles to resize it. We don't care about these right now,
because what I'm going to do is actually I'm going to resize this.
You can see, you can align it to be in the middle of the screen,
but I want this to be, this rectangle is going to be kind of wide and not so tall.
And it's going to come from off screen into the screen. So it's going to have a width
of a hundred percent screen size screen width, but then we're going to use a cue
to animate it and make it come into the screen and stop at the point we want.
So if you want to scroll out your timeline, CTRL and wheel, I'm on Windows,
CTRL and mouse wheel just scrolls up and down. You can resize this area even further.
So now let's see how we can animate this rectangle.
So this is my video, it's playing like this behind the rectangle. So let's suppose that I want to
have my progress bar last as long as the video clip, but I'm not going to do this upfront.
I'm going to show you how you can resize it later,
with the progress bar on it already built. So this is my rectangle, obviously,
this does not look like a progress bar at all. So I'm going to be making it quite short like this,
and then, you know, you have your fill color, your stroke color, and your shadow color.
You have a shadow here, you can turn the shadow offset off, you can see that the shadows got
the same color, you can change the shadow. If you want to give it a bit of depth, you know,
you can make it look like it's kind of raised a little bit. I have no idea why
this area here shows more than the actual rectangle is.
Again, I'm telling you Descript sometimes is so buggy.
So although I've resized this, you know, you can see it's not actually full width
yet. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a cue to this rectangle. Click on this. It doesn't
matter where you added, you can move it afterwards and I'm going to use the Kitchen Sink cue.
Now you can see that, I think it remembered some of the stuff I did before, because now
look, it's resizing it correctly, I don't know. So you can use your
handles to drag this. You can use the ALT key to resize it from the middle. You can use the ALT
key again to pull the sides apart. So you can do this manually, but it's a little imprecise.
You can use the numbers, so I have added a
cue here. You can see it here, if I zoom in this little green bar here is a cue. This is
what you can use to create a little animations in Descript from objects, you know, you can
make clips or objects move across the screen, scale them, change the opacity, all that stuff.
If you look in the right side there in the Cue properties.
By the way, if you don't see that you may have the rectangle, the actual clip
or rectangle clicked on, you're not going to see that. You see the rectangle properties,
but if you click on the green bar here, you turn to the Kitchen Sink or the Cue properties,
and you can see the key frame one and key frame two, and then in the middle you have a transition.
So basically what this does is you've got the start, which is the left side of your queue
right here. This is key frame one, and this is key frame two,
at the end. You can click to move these about, so if you click on the queue
and slide it in, you can actually see that the duration between them changes.
So what this does is really, this is the basics of animation in Descript. You have a
queue that has a resize position and scale, and you can just say what happens before, and after
the cue. So at the start of the cue your object is in one position, and at the end
of the cue it is in another position and all those other properties you can animate as well.
So what we want to do is we want to make the object start off, off screen, okay. So first of
all, I'm going to change the scale to be 100%, like so if it's not wide enough, of course you
can pull it to match the start, the left and the right side of your screen like this. So this is
100% scale. You notice that the end key frame, the one at the bottom is still 100%, so that's
fine. We don't want to scale this object, right? We want to just move it. So the size of the object
should stay the same for the entire animation. To start, position X says 50%. This is again annoying
because your screen is actually pixel sized, and they're showing percentages here. I don't know.
So basically my position is going to be off screen. So if you pull this slider off,
you can see the object moving off screen. And let me tell you, actually the starting
position should be minus 50%. Okay. So minus 50, you can click on there and type the numbers
minus 50%. And then the position X for the ending of the animation should be,
you can see it there, should be full screen, which means 50%.
What that means is it's the center of the object should be at 50%, which means at
the middle of the screen. So that's what it is because my rectangle is as wide as the screen,
and I want to bring it to the very middle, which is 50% of the entire screen. This is very easy.
So now another thing you need to watch out for. You notice the position Y and position Y
and the at the end are different, which means my object is going to actually move
up and you can see that if I click on here before the animation and press space or click play,
you can see my progress bar is actually moving up.
It is doing what it's doing, what it's supposed to be doing, it becomes wider, but it also moves up.
So again, you want to reset, you click on the cue and you tell it, I want my position Y, my vertical
position to stay at the same point. Now I'm going to put 95%, which is almost at the bottom on both
of them, so 95% for both. That means my object is not going to move vertically. Let's play it
again. So, as you can see now, the progress bar moves across the screen and stops at the end.
Now this is one, the first step. You created the animation. If you want to change other stuff, like
for example, I want to change the shadow color, or I want to take the shadow off completely, before
the animation or after, you know, you can turn it on and off it doesn't animate with the object.
So turn it off now, so there it is. Another thing you can do is you can click on the cue
and you can change the duration, not by using these numbers in the transition,
but you can move it so you can zoom out, and now let's see, how long do you want this progress
bar animation to last? Well, I did say that I wanted it to last as long as my video, right?
So I can first click on the rectangle video clip on the other track and just make it as long as my
main clip, but again, you can see it here before the animation you can't see anything because it's
off screen and after the animation, it just sits there. So that's not correct.
So what I want to do is I want to make my cue, my animation also as long as my clip.
So just hover over this green bar and click on the first, the starting point, the first key frame,
pull it all the way to the left, like so, and then the ending point, move it all the way to the
end here. So now my animation should last exactly this, the length of the video clip I am trying to
show a progress bar for. So if you're watching it right now, you can see my video clip playing
and my progress bar is running alongside of it and it's going to stop at the very end.
I'm not going to let it go cause it's quite long, but look, we are close to the end here and boom,
it's finished. If you're using this in another project and you don't actually stop your video at
the end of the progress bar, for example, you can make your progress bar slightly shorter, so it's
going to probably stop maybe, just click on this line here, here, and maybe you want to have it
fade out and disappear. So here, the animation is going to stop and it's going to stay there for a
couple of seconds more. Well, you can fade it out by dragging this little handle on the top here,
like this, so about here where the animation stops. So now if I click to play the animation,
you see it stops and then it fades out like this. So now if you de-select this let's play it. At the
very end, the progress bar is finishing, and then it fades out. So that's how you create a
animation with a rectangle on top of your video, so you can use this for other things,
but I mean, I'm just giving you the example with the progress bar.
So I hope this was useful, I'm going to do more Descript tutorials on my channel in the very near
future because I'm exploring more functions on how to do things, and I do hope that the people
at Descript are watching this video, and they kind of try and make their updates a little more rare
and test them more, because I think it's quite buggy right now. So, that being said,
thank you for watching. If you find my tutorials useful, feel free to subscribe to my channel and
let me know in the comments, what you thought, if you have any questions, see you on the next one.