Creator Toolset

I paid Descript €30 a month for four years.

Not because I was captioning all day. A few videos a month. Same talking-head, six slightly different cuts, captions that have to sit in a box in a specific place on a 9:16 frame - and then I want those captions as a transparent layer I can drop on the real edit in Premiere. That's the job.

Descript can do "captions." It cannot do that job without a fight. The box would be off. Karaoke would glitch. Something that worked last month would break after an update. And I was paying every month whether I captioned two videos or twenty.

Four years. Then I got fed up and made a better version myself. For this specific job it is better. I use it. I don't think about Descript anymore.

And then I kept going, because once you start refusing to rent tools that almost work, you notice how many of them there are.

That's the pile. creatortoolset.com. Caption Studio, Audio Enhancer, Clips, Documents. One login. I use this stuff constantly. It's my own freakiness - I just don't see a lot of things in other software, I want it my way, and when it isn't, I build it.

the job Descript never did

The job is a batch.

You don't caption one video. You caption six versions of the same reel. Different hook, slightly different cut, same words, same spelling mistakes, same caption cadence. If you fix "acrobatics" on clip one and then do it again on clip two, the tool has already failed.

Drop the files. MP4, WebM, MOV. Several at once, one project. Whisper runs on the machine if I want it private, Deepgram in the cloud if I want it now. That's the front door. The editor is where the four years of annoyance actually got answered.

Look at this. Transcript on the left - words are glued to the audio, so you're not fighting timings while you fix text. Click a word, you're there. C to re-spell. Enter to split a caption.

The box on the video is a real box. You drag it, you resize it, and that box decides placement and how many words fit. That was the thing that used to be wrong. Every. Single. Time. Font, size, color, highlight, a background box with opacity, the Baby Acrobatics preset because that's what I actually post with. Save your own if you want.

Waveform at the bottom. Drag caption edges. Fill gaps. Re-match cadence if the line breaks don't sit on the speech. A text layer if you need a title on top. Fine. Whatever. The part I actually built this for is the row of clips.

Six files. story_1 has the crown. That's the master. I fix that one - the spelling, the line breaks, the cadence I already decided - and I hit Apply master. It copies onto the ones I selected. You are not doing the same corrections six times.

Descript never gave me that cleanly.

Then you export. Burned-in MP4 if I'm just posting it. H.264, or H.265 if I want a smaller file. This clip, the ones I picked, or the whole project. Renders in the background so I can keep working.

That's not why this exists though.

I want captions as a layer. A transparent overlay I can drop on the real edit. Not a baked file I have to live with.

ProRes 4444 for Premiere / Resolve / FCP. VP9 WebM if I want the same alpha smaller. PNG sequence if something in the pipeline is being difficult. SRT / WebVTT for YouTube. ASS if I need the karaoke styling to travel.

Alpha export is the whole point. Descript was never good at that. I stopped paying.

then I needed to send a Loom

I didn't have a Loom membership.

I needed to send somebody a screen recording - camera bubble, mic, the page I'm looking at - and I was not going to start another €30/month for a video I was going to send once.

So I recorded it myself.

Clips is that. Record the screen, camera in the corner, or drop a file you already have. It gets a thumbnail, a transcript, a title. It sits in a list I can find later.

The recording is the easy part. The reason I kept it is what happens after, because a Loom link is not a review. It's a video. You watch it, you pause, you try to remember the thing they said at 4:20, you write it down somewhere else.

This is the same recording with the thing I actually needed underneath it. Chapters down the side so you can jump. Takeaways. An action plan with checkboxes and timestamps - click the task, you're at 01:18. Transcript with a clean-up pass if the raw one is unreadable.

I record reviews, walkthroughs, SOPs. The clip is the source. The blocks are what you can act on.

And then I needed three of those, in order, on one page, with notes. "Please watch these four links" is not a document. Notion is a document and I don't like Notion.

So Documents is my Notion for this one job. Pick the clips, put them on a page, write around them, share an unlisted link. You can prompt it to draft the page from the sources or you can just write.

This is the thing I send. Videos in order. Notes under them. Share button. Not a Loom folder. Not a Notion database. A page.

Open a clip from there and you get the same takeaways / action plan / chapters without leaving.

That's one job that used to be two subscriptions. Record it, put it on a page, send the link. I don't sit on a call and narrate it twice.

the one that's on hold

I also wanted a better Adobe Podcast. Denoise, de-echo, level - studio sound from a normal recording.

It is not better than what Adobe has. It cleans things up, you can flip Before / After on the waveform while it plays, you download an m4a. Fine for a pass. I would not take someone off Adobe Podcast and put them on this. So I stopped. It's sitting there until I care enough to make it actually better, or I don't.

Caption Studio I still open every time I have captions to do. That's the difference.

what it changed

Before: €30 a month to fight a caption box, plus whatever I was going to pay Loom the next time I needed to send a video, plus a Notion page I didn't want to look at, plus the same spelling fix six times.

Now I drop the batch, fix the master, apply it, export the alpha, and I'm in Premiere. If I need to send a review, I record it, it lands on a page, I share the link.

I caption a few videos a month. I send screen recordings. I write up reviews. None of that is worth four subscriptions that each do 80% of what I want and then get in the way on the last 20%.

The footage those videos come out of lives in a different tool - the Media Catalog. Search, censor, match the Instagram post back to the master. Same impulse, different job.

This one is just: if I'm going to spend the afternoon annoyed at a tool, I'd rather spend it making the version I can stand.

If you want to try it - Caption Studio, Clips, whichever - send me a message. I'll set you up with a login.