Create clips and repurpose your content

Creating engaging content for your podcast or video channel is crucial, but it's equally important to promote that content effectively. Fortunately, Descript makes it super simple to create promotional clips for social media that can help increase your visibility. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you get started.

Before you start

First things first, you'll need a project open with the original content you’re planning to turn into social clips. This could be a polished, final version or just the raw recordings you've recently imported and transcribed. Either way, you're all set to start crafting those clips.

Option 1: team up with Underlord

Underlord is your AI-sidekick in Descript and is here to help you make clips and highlight reels that pop. With its deep understanding of what makes clips effective, Underlord sifts through your content to pick out the best piece, and also provides a virality score to guide your choices.

Have Underlord create clips

To have Underlord create some clips:

1. Open Underlord: Click Underlord in the sidebar and select Create clips.
2. Adjust your selection settings: choose how Underlord selects clips, including the number of clips, their duration, and what layout to apply.
3. Provide instructions (optional): Enter details in the provided text box to help Underlord better understand the context and your goals for the clips.
4. Generate clips: Click Submit, and let Underlord work its magic. You'll soon have a series of clips selected and rated for their effectiveness on social media.

Review and edit

Underlord will present the selected clips, each with a title, short description, and effectiveness rating.

• Review each clip. If you're satisfied, keep them, or discard any that don't fit.
• These clips are instantly turned into separate compositions for further editing or direct publishing.

Option 2: Craft clips manually 

If you prefer a more hands-on approach or have specific segments in mind, Descript makes it dead-simple to create engaging social clips, even without using Underlord—or just using it when you want to go grab a coffee instead.

1. Create a new composition

Every project you create in Descript starts with a single composition. You can create multiple compositions in a project when you need multiple drafts, different versions, or—in this case—social clips.

1. Create a new composition: Open the Project panel in the sidebar and select Add composition.
2. Set the aspect ratio: in the new composition, you can set the aspect ratio from the Canvas and choose Landscape, Square, Portrait, or choose Advanced... for more options.

2. Select your clips

There are two helpful feels that you can use to effortlessly copy content into a new or other composition: Duplicate to and Copy highlights.

Duplicate to...

Quickly copy sections of your composition to a new or existing composition in the same project. Here’s how:

1. Highlight the region of text you want to copy. Any layers that extend outside the highlighted selection will also copy over to the new composition.
2. Click Duplicate to…
3. Choose the composition where you want to paste your selection.

Copy highlights

If there's a bunch of different sections you want to pull and work with for your social clips, you can use Copy highlights to quickly gather all your favorite bits into a new composition.

To use the copy highlight feature:

1. Go through your project and highlight sections of the script you want to use as clips.
2. Open Underlord and search for Copy highlights
3. Choose to copy a single highlight color or all highlights.
4. Open or create a new composition in your project.
5. Paste your copied highlights into the script.

3. Crafting your clips

While there’s no exact or precise formula for making perfect social clips, there are a few general rules that will help make them more compelling. You can also use a premade layout to speed up your process. Descript offers a range of templates to choose from, and you can create you own and save them for use every time. Check out our guide on using and creating templates.

Captions are essential

Make your video more accessible and boost engagement by adding in custom captions.

Add captions in just a few clicks:

1. Open Captions in the sidebar; at the top of the panel, choose where you want to apply the captions:
   • All scenes: add the captions to your entire video.
   • This scene: display the captions only in the currently active scene.
2. Select the style you want to apply. After adding the captions, you can fully customize them as needed.

Keep it snappy

Social clips tend to be fast-paced. You can manually adjust the timing between words, of you can speed up an entire clip by instantly shortening word gaps in your recording.

Adjust word gaps in bulk by following these steps:

1. Open Underlord and search Shorten word gaps...
2. Set the length of word gaps you want to adjust and how short you want to make them.
3. Click Shorten to adjust them one by one, or choose Shorten all.

Bonus: add visuals, music, and SFX

Descript’s stock libraries contain tons of music, SFX, images, GIFs, and videos you can use to spice up your social clips. Check out our guide on adding stock media to your project.

Write a social post. Or don’t.

You’ll likely need to write a social post and come up with clever hashtags for your clip. If the muse is calling to you, write these yourself, or, summon Underlord to handle these publishing tasks.

Publish and Promote

Now that your clip is ready, it’s time to publish that sucker. You can publish directly to various platforms, or download a local video file.

You can publish or export your work in just a few steps:

1. Select Publish and choose the file type or platform you will be exporting to:
   • The Publish tab allows you to publish directly to various integrated platforms. You can also publish to the cloud, then Download to your computer—it’s super-fast. Click here to learn more
   • The Export tab has various options for exporting to your computer.
2. Adjust your export or publishing settings.
3. Click Export or Publish button at the bottom of the Publish panel.