Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc • Hacker News Board

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#71

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

davezatch wrote: post #59

ced wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the HN comments here are suspicious as well.

I just downloaded it and tested it out. It really is a very cool, polished product. The video cuts when you remove "uh" and "um" are too jarring for anything professional, but OTOH for some internal work stuff I could see a use for this. And as someone who has used 0 video editing software, I was able to start making changes within like a minute, which I think is quite impressive. That said, not sure I have enough us…

If I could revise my previous comment, I didn't want mean to imply the feedback wasn't from a legitimate user. Rather, the comment was very technical in what it had to say about the software.

Presumably, there are technical people that use video editing software. It's fine. But, that type of highly technical person may not be the target persona of this software.

HN discourages calling things shills, so I wanted to provide a clearer explanation of what is my best interpretation.

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#72

Post by suchire » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

Thanks for posting this! It’s great when our users are excited about our product :-)

If anyone is interested, we are hiring engineers and PMs! In particular, we’re looking for senior backend engineers and full stack engineers.

https://www.descript.com/careers

I’m the tech lead for the backend/server team, happy to answer any questions as best as I can

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#73

Post by hienyimba » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 7:02 PM UTC

suchire wrote: post #72

Thanks for posting this! It’s great when our users are excited about our product :-) If anyone is interested, we are hiring engineers and PMs! In particular, we’re looking for senior backend engineers and full stack engineers. https://www.descript.com/careers I’m the tech lead for the backend/server team, happy to answer any questions as best as I can

It would be cool to know the tech stack you guys use to handle such heavy loads.

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#74

Post by xabotage » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

ffpip wrote: post #27

xabotage wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I've never seen hners describe a product as "sexy" as many times as in the comments here.

> I've never seen hners describe a product as "sexy" as many times as in the comments here. There are just 2 comments with the word 'sexy'. 4, if including your comment and mine.

I counted as well, pedant that I am, and I still believe that 2 is an unusually high number of times for hners.

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#75

Post by suchire » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

hienyimba wrote: post #73

suchire wrote: post #72

Thanks for posting this! It’s great when our users are excited about our product :-) If anyone is interested, we are hiring engineers and PMs! In particular, we’re looking for senior backend engineers and full stack engineers. https://www.descript.com/careers I’m the tech lead for the backend/server team, happy to answer any questions as best as I can

It would be cool to know the tech stack you guys use to handle such heavy loads.

Our stack isn’t super novel. We’re trying to make sure we don’t write ourselves into a corner with a stack that no one else uses, so we use Typescript/NodeJS + Kubernetes for much of our backend services, and Python for our ML pipelines

On the client side, we use Typescript and Electron, which allows us to have most engineers work across the entire stack and cross-platform

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#76

Post by simonmales » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #66

tehwebguy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends entirely on who you hire and how much you let them know about your budget. I am confident that I saw a HN post years ago that mentioned Sandwich starts at $250k but again client work is almost always very negotiable.

Wow, it’s good but $250k is a shedload of cash, you could hire 3 people in this field for a year for that (certainly in London). They could do all your training material too...

I'm sure it blows up when you need actors and studios.

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#77

Post by lukestevens » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 11:40 PM UTC

simonmales wrote: post #55

robenkleene wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both this video ( https://sandwich.co/work/descript-video/ ), and their original promotional video ( https://sandwich.co/work/its-how-you-make-a-podcast/ ), were done by Sandwich.

Could anyone spit ball the cost of such a video? I'll try: $100k (USD) Higher or lower?

From their FAQ [0]:

“Typically, $200K is a good starting point, though we’ll also work with a lot more. If you’re a startup with an idea we absolutely have to get behind, we can get creative with equity.“

[0] https://sandwich.co/faq/

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#78

Post by patio11 » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 4:40 AM UTC

ced wrote: post #15

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #4

The user quotes sound almost too good to be true. When I think of the average YouTuber discussing video editing software, the words "best productization of machine learning I've ever seen" do not come to mind.

Some of the HN comments here are suspicious as well.

I described it in multiple calls at Stripe today as "The most impressive demo I have seen in years", and I think you can reasonably understand that I didn't join HN 10 years ago as part of a stealth mission to a) get hired by Stripe and then b) talk up audio editing software to them so that my shadowy masters got that sweet sweet podcast budget.

Here's some work from yesterday where I trained an ML model to simulate me and then used it for a point edit and then full-text-to-speech. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1346238460969959424?s=20

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#79

Post by robenkleene » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 10:50 AM UTC

simonmales wrote: post #55

robenkleene wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both this video ( https://sandwich.co/work/descript-video/ ), and their original promotional video ( https://sandwich.co/work/its-how-you-make-a-podcast/ ), were done by Sandwich.

Could anyone spit ball the cost of such a video? I'll try: $100k (USD) Higher or lower?

The FAQ answer that says $200k should probably be authoritative, but... I'm just guessing Sandwich is actually surprisingly flexible about budgeting.

They do have a series where they shot three videos at three different budget levels ($1k, $10k, $100k) for the same product (https://sandwich.co/clients/wistia/). Take from that what you will...

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#80

Post by andy_ppp » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 10:55 AM UTC

simonmales wrote: post #76

andy_ppp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, it’s good but $250k is a shedload of cash, you could hire 3 people in this field for a year for that (certainly in London). They could do all your training material too...

I'm sure it blows up when you need actors and studios.

I’m not sure you’ve noticed but there are more actors than there are jobs. The actual shoot time for something like this is what 2-3 days. Let’s budget a crazy $50000 for those things (reality - you’d be hard pushed to spend $20k).