Troubleshooting editor performance and playback issues

If you contact support with a performance issue, the support agent will open the project and try to reproduce the issue on their own computer. If it’s reproducible, great! We’ll escalate it to engineering and keep you in the loop about when it’s fixed.

If it’s not reproducible, then it probably means there’s something about the state of your computer or project that’s contributing to the issue. Here are a few more things you can try.

Reloading your project

You can do this by click Shift + Command + R (Mac) or Shift + Control + R (Windows)

Restart your computer

This actually works more than you would think in 2023. So if you haven’t already, try restarting.

Fully delete and reinstall Descript

Follow these instructions to wipe all Descript data from your computer, and then reinstall.

This is the largest cause of performance issues. Projects get slow when they have a combination of:

1. Several GB of files
2. Lots of edits in a composition or sequence
3. Lots of compositions
4. Long compositions and/or sequences

There’s no hard and fast rule here — it is also highly dependent on the age of your computer and availability of its system resources — but if you’re noticing performance declines as your projects gets bigger or more complex, this might be the issue. Try breaking out your compositions and files across multiple projects, or dividing a single complex/long composition or sequence into several and see if that helps.

Try closing other applications, especially apps that use a lot of your computing bandwidth, like your web browser.

Descript gets slow if you have less than 20GB of available hard drive space. Click to learn about managing storage on Mac or to learn about managing storage on Windows.

Make sure your computer meets our recommended system requirements.

Effects (e.g. audio effects like the limiter, compressor, parametric EQ, or flanger) can cause CPU use spiking that result in glitchy playback. Try disabling them while editing to see if it resolves your issue. If it does, you can always edit with effects disabled and turn them on when you're ready to export.

Grammarly has been known to cause issues with Descript. Disable Descript from within the Grammarly app or just keep it closed.

Running McAfee antivirus can cause issues with Descript. To avoid performance issues, consider disabling McAfee while using Descript.

By default, when you add audio or video files to Descript, we create new “proxy” versions that are optimized for playback performance (we also keep the originals and use them for export).

If you’ve disabled optimized assets, then it’s possible that the unoptimized files are causing your performance issues, and you should manually create optimized files for any high resolution and bitrate files.

• Make sure your GPU drivers are up-to-date. If your GPU drivers are up-to-date and still >2 years old, then you’ll probably still have issues and we don’t recommend recording video with Descript.
• Make sure your GPU isn’t busted. Here’s a diagnostic process you can run on your GPU.

Currently Descript only supports using one GPU at a time. Your machine might be defaulting to the slower one. This usually happens when an Intel chip with onboard graphics is being used versus the discreet (not on a CPU) GPU. Generally, this occurs on laptops that use the on-board GPU in low power mode.

• If you see a blank screen in the canvas:
  • Your script layer may not be present. Click in the white space outside the canvas, look at the layer list in the Property Panel, then select the script layer and confirm opacity is toggled on.
  • It could be because no visual layers are present. Once you add a video or visual, it will appear on the canvas.
• If you don’t see the canvas at all, switch to a video composition which you can do from the File menu.

• The canvas uses proxy files, but your exported content should be full quality. Try exporting or publishing to check quality. That said, there’s no option for that at the moment to increase canvas quality.
• If export quality is still low, check your composition's resolution to confirm they are at a high enough resolution

Choppy playback could be caused by a low composition frame rate setting. To resolve, increase your composition's frame rate setting in the Aspect ratio and video settings menu.

Occasionally files with an unsupported or invalid format will cause a playback error. If you run into this error, your best bet will be to re-encode the original file using a third-party application like VLC or Quicktime.

After that, you can use the Replace File feature to swap the source file in your existing project, or re-import the file into a new project.