Release Version 109

Descript Version 109 features two important changes to terminology that coincide with polish we've added since launching our new Layout picker in the last update. Here's what you need to know:

Canvas becomes Scene Editor

We’ve renamed the main visual editing space in Descript from “Canvas” to Scene editor. This relabeling is to help illustrate the relationship between:

Layouts — the visual content in a section of your video
Scenes — sections of your video that have unique layouts

While the term Canvas may be somewhat common in video editing — we’re asking you once again to rewire your brain a tiny bit: Scenes are like different sets in a play, and the Scene editor is where you stage them up.

Only the wording has changed, this will not effect any existing workflows but it’s an important change to be aware of for navigating the app.

Publish becomes Export

Some users will notice that 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:

The main button is has been relabeled from
Publish
to
Export
.
The
Descript (default)
option will create a Descript share page, if you were mainly using the “Publish” option before, you’ll use
Descript (default)
option going forward. This is the first option on the dropdown menu.
To export the file directly to your device, use the Local download option from the dropdown menu. If you were mainly using the “Export
”
option in the past, you’ll use Local
download
going forward.

This change will be rolling out slowly. As of now, 50% of users will see the new

Export

button, and increase over the next few weeks. If you’re not seeing it just yet, keep any eye out.

Editor updates

We’ve added some helpful decoration to the toolbars to show you how many current effects, animations, or transitions are currently applied, shading over already applied effects in dropdown menus and more subtle changes to make it easier to read your layer setting from the toolbars.

Audio and video effects now both have “above the fold” effects listed, and off by default. This is just to help make these features and other effects easier to find.
We’ve made some backend improvements to Text-to-speech generation. They will now generate faster and produce a higher quality output.

Bug fixes

Fixed a bug preventing transitions from transferring when moving a Scene
Fixed a "Location not available" error that occurred when opening the Timeline Export folder.
Fixed an issue where the error "Cannot call an event handler while rendering" appeared when accessing the Desktop app.
Fixed an issue where text background colors didn't follow fade parameters.
Fixed an issue causing visual artifacts to appear in exported video files.
Fixed an issue where scrolling/zooming in the Sequence editor caused the Composition timeline to zoom unintentionally.
Fixed an issue causing Studio Sound to fail consistently.
Fixed a bug where Rooms/Recording projects appeared successful but remained stuck on "Initializing transcription."
Fixed an issue where effects were not audible in editor playback but were present in exported/published files.
Fixed an "Attempting to Decode Unknown Reference" error when using or opening layouts.
Fixed an issue preventing users from exporting compositions.
Fixed a bug where Green Screen didn't work when Layer Border was enabled.
Fixed an issue where stalled transcriptions were not marked as failures.
Fixed a bug where clips couldn't be created from non-English transcripts.
Fixed an issue where .RTF Transcript exports included unwanted formatting when copied to the clipboard.