Under certain conditions, Descript projects can get slow, or laggy. This article will help you troubleshoot those issues, and offers some tips on structuring your project to avoid performance issues in the first place.
Reduce the size and complexity of your projects
This is the largest cause of performance issues. Projects get slow when they have a combination of:
- Several GB of files
- Lots of edits in a composition
- Lots of compositions
- 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.
How to move a composition to a different project
Click here to learn how to copy a composition to a different project.
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.
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 that’s contributing to the issue. Here are a few more things you can try.
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.
- 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.
- Open Activity Monitor and navigate to Window > GPU History
- Start exporting a composition.
- Observe in the Activity Monitor which GPU is being used.
Apple Silicon chips have integrated GPUs, so they should always default to the correct and fastest GPU
Once you have determined the which GPU is in use and if it is not the discrete GPU in the machine (usually an AMD) you can manually override this by turning off Automatic Graphics Switching.
- Open Task Manager (ctrl-alt-delete) and open the Performance tab.
- Start exporting a composition.
- Observe in the Task Manager which GPU is being utilized.
- If the GPU being used is not the one you want, you can switch it via the Graphics Card’s Settings.
- Open the NVIDIA control panel. One way to do this is by right-clicking on an empty space on the desktop and selecting NVIDIA control panel.
- Navigate to 3D settings > Manage 3D settings.
- Open the Program settings tab and select your app from the dropdown menu.
- Select Preferred graphics processor for this program from the second dropdown menu. Your NVIDIA GPU should appear as "High-performance NVIDIA processor"
- Save your changes.
- .Open the AMD Radeon settings. One way to do this is by right-clicking on an empty space on the desktop and selecting AMD Radeon settings.
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Navigate to System > Switchable graphics.
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Locate your app using the search bar.
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Select the app and choose High performance from the drop-down menu. The change will take effect the next time you load the app.
- If they see a blank screen in the canvas: It’s possible the user’s script layer is not present. Ask them to click in the white space outside the canvas, and look at the layer list in the property panel, then select the script layer and confirm opacity is toggled on.
- If the canvas itself is blank, ie, no viewfinder, it is because there are no visual layers present. Once the user adds a video or visual, it will show up.
- If they don’t see the canvas at all, they probably need to switch the composition to a video composition which they can do from the File menu.
- Else, nothing we can do to help at the moment, file a Linear if it looks like a bug or a problem ticket if it looks like feedback/feature request trend.
- The canvas uses proxy files, but the exported file 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 composition dimensions to confirm they are at a high enough resolution
- Else, nothing we can do to help at the moment, file a Linear if it looks like a bug or a problem ticket if it looks like feedback/feature request trend.
None of that worked? Contact support
Most performance issues are resolved by addressing one of the above issues (in particular the first one about big projects), but if they don’t fix your problem, contact support and we’ll take a look!