Currently-Known Bugs in Descript Storyboard (And Possible Workarounds)

Here is a summary of current bugs in Descript Storyboard. If the application behaves in a weird way, something doesn't seem to work as intended or you get unexpected side-effects to certain actions, it's possible it's a bug.

So here are the bugs I'm currently aware of and I can reproduce. I'll try to keep this list updated to the best of my knowledge. 

They are hopefully going to be fixed soon. You can subscribe by email for free if you wish to get notified of new ones, workarounds, Descript updates and quick tips and tutorials.

March 2023

Upgrading to a paid plan works but still shows you on FREE plan

Resolved March 14th, 2023

Many users are reporting this week that they are upgrading from the FREE plan to a paid plan, the payment goes through and their cards are being charged but the account still seems to be on the FREE plan. Since Descript doesn't work weekends, a lot of users are annoyed.

I suspect this is to do with a recent Stripe problem where new payments were not reported and didn't appear in the dashboard or APIs. Stripe claims to have fixed it but maybe the consequences are now rippling to Descript (Descript uses Stripe to process payments).

 

Another symptom of this is the length of your composition will show with a weird extended number:

Workaround: At the moment, exporting such a problematic composition to the cloud seems to work in my tests.

 

Workaround: Use the item in the right-click menu. That one performs the desired operation.

February 2023

Batch Export Aspect Ratio Bug

Batch-exporting compositions that have different aspect ratios will lead to the exported videos being squished. The resulting aspect ratio of the videos will be that of the composition that was selected at the time of the export operation initiation.

Workaround: Export each composition individually to respect the aspect ratio, or create a duplicate copy of the project, delete all compositions you don't want to export, and export 'All compositions'. Sounds like overkill but that's the only way at the moment.

Template "Update app to use this template" bug

Update: This has been resolved in version 58.1.4. Update your Descript and you shouldn't have this issue.

When you attempt to apply a template you created in the past (or just created), version 58 shows a message requiring you to "Update the application and restart" when you try to apply a template (despite the fact that you may be using the latest version anyway):

Workaround: If you have that template applied somewhere else in the project or in a different project, it's usually to a scene. You can right-click on that scene's thumbnail, Copy, then right-click the scene you want to apply it to and Paste. It will replicate that scene's layout without using the template.

Workaround 2: Open that template, make a small change to it, doesn't have to be much, and then republish it. This seems to solve this for some users.

Re-ordering the first scene causes it to disappear

The new Scene Rail was added in February 2023 and along with it came a few functions to help scene management, namely, reordering scenes by dragging them.

A bug I've discovered was that the scene reordering generally works, except when dragging the very first scene. In all my tests, dragging the first scene (to make it second for example), causes the scene to disappear and the content in it to be deleted.

Workaround: If you need to move the content at the beginning of a composition, use Cut and Paste instead. You may have to manually apply the layout changes or any other assets you may have on screen in that scene until this bug is fixed.

January 2023

Corrections in a transcript are not applied

This one is hard to reproduce but it's happening nonetheless, particularly when there's crosstalk or conflicting transcripts. I've mentioned this before in a different post along with some fixes:

Workaround: Use the solutions in the article above, but the one way I've fixed it most of the time has been to delete the portion of audio from the conflicting track in a multisequence (even if it's 'silent').

December 2022

Punctuation is lost when applying mic-bleed removal

Weird bug that happened to me a lot is when removing 'duplicated transcripts' due to mic bleed in a sequence. If you have a sequence with audio on separate tracks that have mic bleed, you will typically hear the audio of the other person on your track and vice-versa. If that's the case, Descript will have transcribed most of those files twice, because it can 'hear' the words being said by both people on both tracks.

This leads to duplicated transcripts and Descript will identify that as 'mic bleed' and offer to fix it.

It should work (generally) but for me, I've often found that the mic bleed removal also removes ALL punctuation from the combined composition. Obviously, it's not usable that way if you care about your transcript, and I'm not going to manually put in the punctuation either.

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