Descript is a collaborative audio/video editor, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that works like a doc. It includes transcription, a screen recorder, publishing, full multitrack editing, and AI tools.
$12
per month
VideoScribe
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
British company Sparkol offers VideoScribe, a video editing application supporting whiteboard style animations and presentations.
Descript is well-suited for fast editing of training videos, tutorials, podcasts, and screen recordings, where transcript-based editing and quick cleanup save time. It works best when you need a simple workflow to record, transcribe, remove filler words, tighten sections, and apply basic enhancement tools like noise cleanup. It is less appropriate for high-stakes projects where losing edits would be very costly, or when you need strong guarantees around long-term project history, backups, and recovery. Based on our experience, if you are doing many hours of edits and expect to revisit projects months later, you may want an additional export/archive process outside the platform.
If you need to spice up your presentations but don't have the money/budget/team for full video production or animation, this software is for you. In skilled hands it can also look as good if not better than productions that would cost 5-6x more, including turnaround time. I think the basics of video still apply here, you want to have a story, a narrative, some storyboarding and an idea of where you want to go, but the tools this software provides will help you achieve that (and edit it later) quickly and efficiently
It's fast and customizable! You can import your own vector graphics and PNGs to utilize or take advantage of their huge library of resources, from graphics to icons and sound
You don't have to have a background in animation or graphics (though it doesn't hurt) to utilize the program, really expanding who in your company can take advantage of it
The support and resource documentation is amazing. From multiple series of videos to text-based help and I believe if i remember correctly even emails when I first signed up, it's hard to feel frustrated or lost with how to start with all the support available
UX Performance. Because it's synced to the cloud, there can be some delay or lag in the UX when editing.
Editing Transcriptions. Machine-based transcriptions always need some post-editing. While Descript makes it pretty easy, I still think there is some room for improvement. For instance, I would like to be able to automatically update for all occurrences of a word after fixing it in the transcript.
Automatic importing of YouTube and hosted video files. I often have to download a video from YouTube to be able to import it into Descript. Would be nice to be able to just paste in the URL to the video and have Descript automatically import it.
Some of the vector rendering for imported pieces could still use work, I've discovered a workaround for adding a stroke to images to help smooth the edge but this can be tiring
The PNG rendering often seems to be under a super heavy compression and can pixellate even higher-res images that are brought in. I utilize almost exclusively custom created graphics to use in this program so seeing that fixed would be great
It would be nice if there was a super-basic audio editor in the program, even something that didn't do much but let you edit the start and end of clips
It's pretty user friendly, has a easy-moderate learning curve. However during updates they do change the features in different panes / sections that make them harder to find. The text editor is near perfect, some of the other tools such as colour, templates, audio etc. are arranged in a slighlty less intuitive manner
We had a very frustrating experience with Descript and their support.
We used Descript to record and edit several videos. The edits were done around May, mainly using the web app. When we opened those same projects in December, many of them looked like raw recordings again. Cuts were missing and effects were missing.
Support and engineering told us they checked their logs and only saw “creation → recording → transcription,” and they said they could not find proof the edits were ever made. That explanation does not match what we saw in the app. The affected videos show two project backup files. In Descript, backups only appear after you start editing (the app even says so). But when we checked other projects that we know are raw, those do not show any backup files. We asked a simple question: if backups appear only after editing, why do the “raw” affected videos have two backups while truly raw videos have none? They did not answer this clearly.
One rep also said they noticed a spike in network errors in May. That is exactly when the edits were done, which makes it very likely the edits did not save or sync correctly. Instead of admitting this could be the cause, support kept pointing to “no logs of edits” and that it was our fault.
They refunded one month, but called it a “courtesy.” That was disappointing. We also stopped using Descript while they were investigating because we did not feel it was safe to keep working in the platform. If that one-month refund was meant to cover the time we could not use the service during the investigation, that still does not address the real damage. We lost many hours of work, we paid our editor hourly, and we paid for the subscription for convenience and reliability. For the amount of inconvenience and loss we experienced, one month is clearly not enough.
Descript is by far superior to the other editing software you can get on Apple computers. It's able to do a lot more and really save us tons of time. Other Adobe apps are great, but take a while to learn. Descript is very user-friendly, making it easy to start from day one with very little training.
Every video or graphics program has its own purposes, VideoScribe is very specifically for taking images, moving them around with nice visual transitions and having something come together quickly. I've also used it to animate infographics in far less than half the time it would have taken me in Premiere. It definitely has serious limits in the type of animation you can do, which is important to be aware of, but if that works within the framework and scope of your budget, then it's incredible.
Remember - the only limits to how sophisticated you can make this look are how creative you are, to begin with. I did things with this program I don't think I'd seen in any of their samples, simply because I have a background in it all and had a new set of tools to play with.
I can get video completed much more quickly and cheaply
We can produce more video content because of the speed with which we can have a finished product
We can have shorter timelines for example I record on Monday and we publish on Tuesday which wouldn't be otherwise possible with other methods I've used
Won over $300k+ in new biz by changing from an old PowerPoint deck to a short (4-5 min) video and reframing how we shared the information
Modified the same deck to be shown at annual conventions as a less "pitch" and more "informational" way of educating the audience, and never saw as many people visiting our booth for information. Likely could attribute additional new biz leads to this effort as well
Got to save a LOT of money in the time and production of the deck which was then able to be utilized instead on other things to make future decks better, like a new microphone and better monitors. Seriously I can't believe how inexpensive this program is
