My wife loves having subtitles on for all the reasons listed in the article. I, on the other hand, prefer to just listen. I've found since watching with subtitles my ability to lip read and understand tricky accents has no dived.
Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
371–380 of 738 posts
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#372One 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…
> Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
Watch some German shows (notably: Not Netflix’s Dark as that was untypical, I mean actually produced for the German market shows). It’s horrible. Everything sounds super fake. Yes, everything is easy to understand, but I (a German) can’t watch anything because nothing sounds real.
It’s usually claimed this is because German actors do more stage acting, but as Dark (or other German actors in US productions where they don’t sound fake) show, it goes much deeper.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I think I'd rather characters that are truer to life than sound like they're acting on stage, personally. You can have both though. A great example is Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’s never mumbled a line in his life and you can understand everything he says during quiet dialog. You can be true to life, quiet AND understandable.
I recall an episode where it's all going to hell due to the holodeck, and Picard asks what happened. Geordie, I think, explains they asked the holodeck to create a character that could outsmart Data...at which point Picard lowers his head into his hands and mumbles "Merde!" (pretty clear, despite the mumble).
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#374I always have subtitles on in games. Especially since I find it hard to focus on the words being spoken and video game cutscenes are almost always unable to be rewound. During gameplay it's harder to read and play at the same time though, although over the years it's gotten easier. Through my years of watching Anime it's also quite easy for me to watch and read at the same time. I think for watching movies they can b…
I have them on for games so I can read the conversation and skip to the next sentence. For open world RPG games that are 50+ hours long it really helps staying engaged, as some quest lines are not that interesting and I like to complete all side quests.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's true. In fact movie producers are notorious for "phoning in" the 5.1 mixes for the streaming platforms, focusing most of their energy on the theatre mix with Dolby atmos and what not. Usually the 5.1 mix you get on netflix is hurriedly put together as an afterthought.
That's basically the same point though - it's not that special attention is given to specifically 5.1, it's that a) more separate speakers helps in itself; b) it's primarily mixed for such a multi-separate-speaker system.
I have a 5.0 system, and the dynamic range mumble voice + super loud explosion is still very present, even when I artificially boost the center channel. I think voices are actually better on a typical tv speaker 2.0 setup.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#376For how popular this is, streaming providers and major video websites like youtube sure phone it in with subtitle placement. They could do basic shit, like force the subtitles to be within the black bars as much as possible with some basic algorithmic programming, or just spend one person day laying out the subtitles better or just approach an iota of the effort that most fansub groups do.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah; playing 5.1 mixes on stereo equipment make the side and back channels too loud and the center channel too quiet. Also, it is now fashionable for actors to mumble. I'm reasonably sure I am not going deaf, since I have no problem following audio fiction podcasts with the windows down in my car during my commute.
> Yeah; playing 5.1 mixes on stereo equipment make the side and back channels too loud and the center channel too quiet. I thought the equipment selected the stereo mix (or did a perfectly compatible mixdown) when playing back a 5.1 mix in a stereo system. Is that not what happens? If it isn't, is it because user error?
Not a sound guy, and have struggled for a while w/ this for my plex setup @ home, so grain of salt.
If there's not a separate track for e.g 2.0, then the mixing down from 5.1 -> 2.0 will not have a human who validates the output. An automatic conversion can't accurately confirm that "this is legible for human ears at the right levels"
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#378One 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 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 [..]"
On YouTube the ads are the explosions. Ads are so loud compared to the regular videos that I often just turn the volume down and the captions on.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the actor's intention is to mumble instead of enunciatiting clearly (presumably because of some notion of authenticity), then they will also mumble the studio takes. It's not a problem of sound volume/background noise, which ADR can fix, it's a problem of style over ease of understanding the dialogue. This mirrors the problem of TV series sometimes becoming too dark to easily follow the action on a TV screen in us…
Those scenes look amazing on good TVs. Making bad screens show them well seems like a problem for the producers of bad screens to solve.
Dark scenes tend to look better on bad TVs because they tend to brighten everything too much with LCD bloom. I feel like it's an opposite problem with OLEDs, they're the one with scenes that are too dark.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
The slurred dialog is obnoxious and a sign of laziness on everyone's part. The miking, the post processing, the overdubbing (if there's any at all - recent film makers don't seem to know that this is a thing). The actor's speech pattern, where they direct their speech while acting, even how they stand and where. The choice of location and additional preparation of the stage so the speech can be picked up clearly. It'…
Good to know this isn't just my ears or my setup. This was most noticeable to me recently in Dune. So much whispering dialogue, with massive dynamic range and BRAAAM [0]. Using night mode on my receiver and cranking the center channel to +10dB works pretty well for me, though. [0] https://longreads.com/2016/12/08/braaam-inception-hollywood-...
Dune sounds great on my 2.0 system at home (low mid-range receiver and ~$200 yamaha floorstanders). Sicario too, from the same director, I generally think he does a fantastic job with audio mixes.
Strange that article doesn’t talk about the tripod noise from the ‘05 War of the Worlds.