Agree. Dolby Atmos releases tend to have a lot of noisy background sounds all around you, and then people silently mumble on the center channel. My English is really good, but some movies are still difficult to watch without subtitles. For example, Hawkeye jumped in between "painfully loud effects" and "barely audible dialog".
This is actually an improvement over stereo soundtracks, as you can just raise the relative volume of the center channel!
This would be a lovely option to have and I find it hilarious that anyone imagines that subtitles are some kind of problem we are trying to get out of. Adding text to movies has a huge array of advantages: it preserves the original performances, it makes the dialog accessible to people with hearing or auditory processing disabilities, they can be multiplexed in a way that audio cannot, etc. Obviously it would be wond…
After a decade of training their model Youtube can't even produce meaningful subtitles for ordinary words in English (let alone my native language, french) and we're supposed to trust these fucked-up AI overlords are going to produce any better dubbing?
I have no doubt these solutions will be popular, because many people have difficulty reading and will prefer audio when given the option. I'm just confident they won't reach any measurable quality and the translations will be full of non-sensical/anti-thetical statements.
What’s really surprising to me is that synching subtitles isn’t a solved problem. Why can’t someone just loosely transcribe without time stamps and sync it to the video?
What's the market for this? Very small.
Every movie, every show ever produced? Subtitles are required even for domestic markets for the hearing impaired, even if we disregard the audience that prefers to have subtitles.
Maybe a system of always pandering to the lowest common denominator isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?
That's the most profitable system. It certainly doesn't produce the most quality. Just like making a tool that lasts a lifetime is not as profitable as making something that breaks. Maybe crowdfunding media content is the way to go for quality but I can certainly understand how public companies make decisions in their search for infinite profits.
> But I can certainly understand how public companies make decisions in their search for infinite profits.
Well yes because it's not exactly novel or complex. My point isn't that there is no rationale it's whether we should just blindly go along with it.
I wonder if that’s something you could get better at with practice? When I watch subtitled movies or shows I watch the show and read the text with my peripheral vision. But I watch a lot of foreign media, so I may have gotten used to doing that. I can say for sure though that my eyes are not focused on the text while watching.
Absolutely! I grew up in a country with fairly high rate of literacy, which derived subtitles usage almost 100%, and reading them while enjoying the original voices behave second nature, and what's never fully translatable led to learning foreign languages specifics. Even today, so many years later, I like my movies with subtitles, and even when spoken language is same with the subtitles one.
I highly recommend original language + subtitles in original language when you try to get better at that language.
I am very surprised more people watched the dubbed version of Squid Game over the subtitles. I saw a friend watching the dubbed version and to me it didn't "preserve the original performances" as you say. Surprised subtitles are a barrier, I enjoy them personally, but I guess they have the data to know. I have tested out services that translate your "own voice" to another language and it was pretty cool, although I c…
I started watching Squid Game with my brothers' girlfriend and gently suggested that we should use subtitles and the original audio. It took a couple of episodes, but some of those dubbing performances are pretty rough and when she did decide to switch she immediately agreed how much better it was. The only downside is you have to actually _watch_ the show rather that staring at your phone most of the time...
I tried both seasons of Neflix's Ragnarok in original (Norwegian) and dubbed. The first season had a decent dubbing (I still kept the original+subtitles) but the second season the dubbing was simply unbearable, bad voice acting, echo chambers, incredible... So the experience can be very mixed even within the same show.
I am very surprised more people watched the dubbed version of Squid Game over the subtitles. I saw a friend watching the dubbed version and to me it didn't "preserve the original performances" as you say. Surprised subtitles are a barrier, I enjoy them personally, but I guess they have the data to know. I have tested out services that translate your "own voice" to another language and it was pretty cool, although I c…
Knowing what was intended to be said is great, and subtitles, for whatever reason, seem to convey this better than dubbing. Also, I feel like I can hear the emotion in the original actors' voices better with subtitles and no dubbing, despite being incapable of understanding the language. In that way, I agree it preserves the original performances. However, moving pictures will always be an artform that are heavily re…
Yeah watching a movie in a language you can at least a bit understand is huge (even if you use also subtitles to help).
> There's an artistry there that no AI can match. This has been said a few times already and been proven false. The quality of GANs is moving at a staggering pace.
How can something that can't be proven true be proven false? "Artistry" has no concrete definition and is entirely based on the opinion of the viewer.
It's easy. Blind test humans and ask them which one they find more "artful". Once the average person can not tell between an AI and human creators, the AI is complete.
That's the most profitable system. It certainly doesn't produce the most quality. Just like making a tool that lasts a lifetime is not as profitable as making something that breaks. Maybe crowdfunding media content is the way to go for quality but I can certainly understand how public companies make decisions in their search for infinite profits.
> But I can certainly understand how public companies make decisions in their search for infinite profits. Well yes because it's not exactly novel or complex. My point isn't that there is no rationale it's whether we should just blindly go along with it.
AI is also able to create sub titles. So, people will have a choice. Many people prefer subtitles. Dubbing movies is common in big countries where the locals speak nothing else than their own language. Here in Germany, you have to pay attention if you go to the cinema but they do have original language movies as well. Lots of Germans go to see those instead of the badly dubbed versions. I tossed out my TV ages ago be…
> Netflix solves this by offering German sub titles. This is my pet peeve about streaming services. Why would they have only German subtitles in Germany? The licensing costs of all major languages can't be prohibitive. I only watch content that has English subtitles -- Netflix has thankfully improved on including them, but otherwise you're mostly out of luck. Even Blu-rays need to be imported if you want to have Engl…
> The licensing costs of all major languages can't be prohibitive.
It's not the cost, it's that their removal is a disincentive for people to use VPNs to hop outside of their usual residential territory.