Interview Audio: Making a mid-sentence sound like a closing thought

[QuickHitRecord]

Let's say you are editing an interview clip. From a story perspective, the subject delivers a good closing statement. It would be a good place to end their segment. However, at the end of their line their inflection rises instead of falling, like they are asking a question or getting ready to follow on with something else. Are there any techniques for doctoring the last word or words to make the inflection go down? I think the term is "closed intention". Ideally this would be on a curve.

I've been trying to use Premiere's pitch shifter tool to do this. The problem is that I can't push it very far before it starts sounding comical (helium or Darth Vader). There must be a better tool or technique!

[ozmorphasis]

Let's say you are editing an interview clip. From a story perspective, the subject delivers a good closing statement. It would be a good place to end their segment. However, at the end of their line their inflection rises instead of falling, like they are asking a question or getting ready to follow on with something else. Are there any techniques for doctoring the last word or words to make the inflection go down? I think the term is "closed intention". Ideally this would be on a curve.

I've been trying to use Premiere's pitch shifter tool to do this. The problem is that I can't push it very far before it starts sounding comical (helium or Darth Vader). There must be a better tool or technique!

It's definitely not a silver bullet, but Izotope does have a dedicated tool for this within their RX8 suite. I've used it in many situations. It's one of those things that will never sound as good as an actual decisive close to a thought, but it can improve things in a lot of situations.

https://www.izotope.com/en/products/...e-contour.html

[QuickHitRecord]

Very cool. I will check it out. Thanks for the link!

[Jim Feeley]

iZotope RX is great. But the version with Dialog Contour is $1200 (though sometimes on sale). Totally worth it if you work with audio a lot.

But lots of audio tools have decent and controllable pitch-correction tools these days. The key thing is to make just subtle changes. Here's a seven-minute video showing how to do something like this in Adobe Audition. It's from a few years ago, and the basic approach can be used in a lot of tools. There are probably better tutorials and there are more techniques (e.g., stretch the last syllable, add a touch of reverb to the dialog track, drop the level on the last one or two syllables), but this will get you headed the right direction.

[QuickHitRecord]

Thanks, Jim. I tried both techniques in that video and Manual Pitch Correction was a big step up from the Pitch Bender. I'm pretty happy with the results I got. It sounds mostly okay to my ear but I've listened to that clip a thousand times at this point. My client will have fresh ears and will be the final judge.