The Drive View
When you first open Descript, you'll be in what we call the Drive View on which all your Projects are stored. This provides a birds-eye view of all of the Projects you've created or Projects that have been shared with you.
What is a Project?
A Project is a self-contained space that stores your various source media files and the Compositions where you edit that media.
Projects can have many Compositions (like a Notebook has many pages) and many files, however it's important to note that media files are not shared across individual Projects.
Once inside of the Project, you can view your Compositions, Sequences and source media files on the left side of the app in the Project Sidebar.
What is a Composition?
A Composition on the other hand is the actual work area within a Project where your files and transcripts are edited and arranged. Composition workspaces are non-destructive to your source files, so any edits you make in the timeline do not affect the source media. This means you can have 2, 3 or more Compositions, all referencing the same file, but contain completely different edited versions of that file.
What is a Sequence?
A Sequence should be thought of as a type of virtual container file that allows you to group multiple tracks of audio from the same interview, so that they are displayed as a single clip in the Script Editor and Timeline Editor. Sequences assure that your various source files always stay aligned while editing.
Best Practices
Projects can be very flexible. You can put tons of files and Compositions in a single Project for more complicated Projects that you might be working on, or add a single file to a Project for a smaller scale job.
Some people like to create a new Composition for the various types of edits they may need for a given Project:
- Rough Cleanup
- Full / Final Edit
- Teaser Trailer for Social Media
- Chapter-based Edit for website using Markers
- And more!
One thing we typically recommend against is using a single Project to house all of the Episodes for an entire Season of shows. Project performance can vary greatly depending upon your computer's age and available system resources so users who are adding 10+ Episodes of content with all of their accompanying music, b-roll, effects and images may find over time that editing can become sluggish.
In these cases we recommend creating a single project for each episode, and using Drive Folders to keep things organized.
Related articles:
Adding files to the pinned track (intros, outros, music, sound effects, and ambience)