RX 7 Dialogue Contour for Finishing a Sentence

Written by Nick Messitte, iZotope Contributor on April 11, 2019. Here’s his full post.

While working on a podcast, I was given a transcript of the relevant audio, and a bunch of raw interviews from which to pull quotes. Many of the quotes were finished sentences—statements where the person had clearly finished their thought with a period, full stop, end-of-story cadence.

Or so it appeared in the written transcript. The audio, however, told a different story: the person had more to say, hastily jumping into their next thought. This “next thought” wasn’t germane to the original point at all—hence the cut in the script—but human beings aren’t tidy machines. They don’t speak in the same way as writers write. Run-on-sentences are par for the course.

This can sometimes be frustrating for audio editors, for if a person jumps too quickly between one thought and another, you’re left with a most unnatural edit point. That’s what happened on this podcast. I found myself with sentences that just didn’t end clearly.

The solution:

Dialogue Contour came to the rescue many times in this project. Using the module, I was able to close the sentence in a natural way. The operation was simple—I isolated the phrase, clicked in a node at the end of the phrase, and subtly brought the pitch down.

The result? A completed thought. This, combined with fading a bit of room tone underneath the subject as they ended their sentence, solved the problem.

Here’s his full post.

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