We're excited to introduce a new Home screen in Drive view, making it easier than ever to start your next project. When you open Descript, you'll find a streamlined landing page with quick-start options for all your creation needs - whether you want to edit a video, make a podcast, create social clips, transcribe a file, clean up audio, or remove backgrounds.

The new Home screen is designed to help you find what you need faster, including a Recent projects view. You'll also discover our popular features front and center, including Translation & dubbing capabilities. These will rotate over time as new features are introduced.

The hope with this update is to remove the uncertainty of a blank page project and putting the full power of Descript at your fingertips from the moment you open the app. The new Home screen is rolling out to all users in version 112.

A few weeks back we created a new AI Video maker in the ChatGPT store. This tool automatically generates a video explainer on a topic of your choosing, with customizable style and tone. Now, we’ve brought this experience into the app, available from the new Home screen, so you can create narrated, illustrated video with just a few clicks. It’s a great way to experiment with the tools Descript has to offer, or make a quick piece of content for easy sharing.

We're introducing a redesigned Editor recorder experience in version 112. The recorder now lives in the play dock instead of the sidebar, making it more accessible within your workflow. When recording with an empty script, the recorder takes up your full screen for better focus. If there's content in your script, you can see it while recording - the recorder will only occupy the Scene Editor area. The redesign aims to make recording more intuitive and accessible, integrating seamlessly with your workflow while maintaining visibility of important content during recording sessions.

Stable frame is a new feature that intelligently positions the playhead to show the most representative frame when selecting scenes or layers. When clicking on scenes from the scene rail or script boundary, or layers from the canvas, the system accounts for animations and scene transitions to display the most stable and useful frame (i.e. one that is not in the middle of animating.)

These stable frames will also be used for the Scene thumbnail to make scene rail more useful as a visual representation of the storyboard or through line of your project.

This enhancement addresses a common user pain point where the playhead might land mid-animation, resulting in a confusing or unclear view of the scene.

We’ve added two new placeholder layer types to the Elements panel for Camera and Screen video. These will to help you keep your project organized as you’re assembling layouts, and make it easier to remember where you will eventually place your content.

The three placeholder layer types are now labeled:

You can adjust these layers like any other Scene element, applying animations or transitions. Once you're ready to add your media, you can do so from the Scene-editor → Add media.

Here's what's new in Rooms:

Check out our video Roundup for March, hosted by the Changelog itself.

Smart transitions are now enabled by default for all scene-to-scene transitions. This feature automatically adds polished animations between your scenes, with improved stability for animated elements during transitions. You can disable this setting in the Settings menu → Advanced section if you prefer to set up transitions manually.

Additionally, Wordless media is now disabled by default for all new projects. This is because we’ve encountered a larger number of errors caused by or related to Wordless media. While you can still enable this feature in settings, we're actively working on a new and improved version that will address previous issues.

For users on the Web, or the upgraded Desktop app, recordings will now be available for playback instantly when you hit stop. If you're not sure which version of the Desktop app you're using, you can check in the Settings menu under the Labs heading. If you're on the older version of the app, you'll see an option to Upgrade.

There is a new Record button accessible from Drive view. This will open a project with the recorder open, or take you to Rooms when you select Record with others. We added this to make it easier to find our recording capabilities and give users an even faster way to get started.

We’re reposting this from version 109 as we have ramped this change up to 100% of users. A few of the details have also changed so it is worth taking a quick review:

The "Publish" button has been renamed to Export and the selection panel has been rearranged. All of the available options work as they did before but the names are slightly different, for reference:

We unfortunately had to remove the Import from YouTube option due to changes on Google's end. We are not yet sure if we will be able to bring this feature back but we will keep you updated when we know more.

Here are the updates we made to collaborative recording with Rooms in v110.

We will soon require all users to verify their email address in order to continue using Descript. This should not effect as vast majority of users, who have already verified their email address. However, if you have not yet verified, you’ll receive a banner warning asking you to verify your email address. Please do so a quickly as possible to prevent any interruption when we do eventually enforce this requirement.

Many users have already been moved to an upgraded version of the Desktop application. This newer version provides a host of benefits that improve performance and playback speed. It also completely eliminates the need to store project files locally.

When the upgraded version is downloaded, any files that haven’t finished uploading will be stored for you in a local folder so you can retrieve them as needed.