Release Version 98

Ken Burns animation

That smooth, documentary-style presentation for b-roll and still images is finally here. Put on your PBS hat and add the Ken Burns animation to any visual media for a smooth zoom and pan.

It comes with 8-directional settings and a center zoom option.

A random zoom and pan setting will be selected when you initially apply the effect so you don’t necessarily have to choose them yourself if you just want to quickly spice up your background content.

The zoom/pan can be set to:

In
- Zooms into the image
Out
- Zooms out on an image
None
- Image will only pan, with no zoom effect (this cannot be combined with the center-only zoom setting.)

The Ken Burns effect has 3 speed settings:

Slow
Moderate
Fast

Please note: this effect currently cannot be applied to a Script track, as it's designed specifically for images and b-roll.

Edit for clarity w/ AI speech

You can now use your AI voices directly in conjunction with the Edit for clarity tool. This is great for times where you’re unable to re-record anything based on the suggestions you receive using Edit for Clarity. Just toggle the option labeled

Use AI speech

, and check off the speakers you’d like to have eligible for edit-for-clarity based word or phrase replacement.

Any parts of the script that will be replaced will be marked in blue.

Note: This currently does not work with

Sequences,

but they should be supported in an upcoming release.

Corner rounding and wrapping on text backgrounds

You can now add rounding to the corners on the background of your text elements.

Corner rounding helps make your visual layout more distinct, clear and professional. Backgrounds can also help make your text easier to read and rounding provides a cleaner look especially when overlaid against contrasting colors in your background.

You can add rounding using this icon:

In addition, there are two new settings under the background option in the layers menu:

Hug lines - Background will tightly wrap around your text when it spans multiple lines.

Box - The background boundary will always be as wide as the longest line.

Editor updates

Deleting a scene boundary will now also delete layers that are anchored to that scene boundary. This makes removing full scenes easier in most use cases. Layers that are not anchored to a scene boundary will remain in place.
We’ve brought the Supertoast over from the web version of Descript into the Desktop app. This puts all the notifications and progress meters for your file processing, exports, transcription etc. into a handy pop-out so you can keep them hidden until you need to check. Note: This is rolling out slowly, so if you don’t see it just yet, you should see it by the end of the week.

This is one for the advanced users: In the past users importing video with non-square pixel aspect ratios would encounter unexpected results during editing. These file types are now supported, and you can import than without having to do any sort of file re-encoding.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug preventing recordings from appearing the Import from Zoom menu
Fixed a bug causing layers to paste with incorrect placements when copying to a separate composition
Fixed a bug causing layer clips to shift unexpectedly after applying a layout
Fixed an issue blocking Green Screen adjustment from the Layer menu