40yo here. I turned the subtitles on the help my little kids learn words as they watch. Now I love them. I’ll watch old movies - ones I’ve seen dozens of times - with the subs on and pick up things I never heard before.
Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
141–150 of 738 posts
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#142Not being 20-something, I can't speak for them, but for me: A lot of dialog is mixed way down in relation to the music and background noise, actors tend to speed up and drop the volume at the ends of their sentences, and of course there are those pesky accents. I'm seeing a lot of other good reasons in this thread, too.
I think it’s this, if you want to have the volume at a level where conversations are understandable, the action scenes or other “high tension” moments are way too loud, and you spend your evening ride the volume control…
Yea, this is our family too. Volume button up and down, up and down, for 3 hours. I don't recall this being a problem with older movies, either. I feel like maybe modern moviemakers have access to sound pipelines with crazy vast dynamic range, and audio engineers feel they have to use every setting from "mouse quiet" to "nuclear bomb" in order to do their jobs right.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#143One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog. Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the…
Does your TV have dynamic range normalization (may be called "sound leveling" in the menu)?
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#1441) The reason TikTok etc. have closed captions on is that audio is off by default. If you want people to listen to your words but audio is off, put it into closed captions.
2) With closed captions you can watch a movie on low volume without disturbing others and still understand every word even of the girl in the corner of the room barely utters a word.
Source: I'm a "20-something".
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the volume levels vary so much. If you don’t want hearing loss or angry housemates you turn it down and then can’t hear the normal dialog. If I am watching very closely I will incessantly fiddle with the volume, but otherwise then captions are nice. I agree tho I miss visual side of the film while reading the captions. But I also tend to watch stuff I really like more than once so I get the body language second r…
Buy a sound system. I now have a 3.1 setup and can hear the dialogue. A dedicated center channel makes a huge difference. Its amazing. Many AVRs can also adjust it so the dialogue is louder, but I haven't found a need.
It's definitely better but I still find mixing inconsistent enough that I have to cycle through profiles on my AVR(denon)/system(performa3) to find a mixing that works. Mostly seems to be an issue with stuff in the last couple of decades.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#146The fact that there's a claimed generational gap here speaks more to the values of the generations re: passive vs active entertainment. I could also ask: "Why do all these 60-Somethings have the TV on as background noise while doing other tasks?" To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption. People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertain…
This aligns pretty well with McLuhan's concept of cool and hot media [0]. The younger generations prefer it cool - perhaps their hotness is found in newer forms like video games.
[0] https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/MIDDMedia/Hot_versus_cool_m...
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#147The fact that there's a claimed generational gap here speaks more to the values of the generations re: passive vs active entertainment. I could also ask: "Why do all these 60-Somethings have the TV on as background noise while doing other tasks?" To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption. People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertain…
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Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up watching anime with subs and at a certain point it just became natural to have subtitles on even when the content is in English.
For the longest time I couldn't follow anime with subtitles, it kept me from watching the action. I think practice helped, but so did reducing the size of the video frame. Turns out having the whole frame in my field of view was a big deal.
Depending on the title you're watching, the subs are easier to read. Like one of the episodes from DBZ.
Goku: AHHHHHH!
Vegeta: ARGHHHH!
Goku: OOOMPH!!!
Vegta: HMMMMM!
The visuals were just as simple. For like most of the episode
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#149One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog. Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the…
I have the same issue but instead of using subtitles I've embraced not knowing what's going on with the show. If it was important that I know for my enjoyment then I'm probably not watching the show anymore. Like if what the actor said was unintelligible I'm going to go with that's part of the plot, a puzzle for me to figure out on the show subreddit or something, but I'm not going to deal with the shitty blinding subtitles some shows display on blinding white over pitch OLED black, it's impossible.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#150One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog. Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the…
The Apple TV has a setting called "reduce loud sounds" which helps with this problem. I'm sure you can find it on other devices too. My Sony TV also has a sound setting for enhanced dialogue which might help as well.
Can't really help with the actors thing, though I think I'd rather characters that are truer to life than sound like they're acting on stage, personally.