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Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

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Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#411

Post by orlp »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #400
IgorPartola wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait it isn’t because 5.1 became the norm for recording movies bust most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most? I thought that was the conventional wisedom.

It’s honestly ridiculous how bad the stereo (aka what 99% of viewers will experience) mixes are. The explosions can be heard by my neighbors yet I can barely hear the dialogue at the same volume. Find myself basically doing half the mix work myself with the volume control. Too many audiophiles in the production chain focusing on something that barely matters at the expense of most viewers.

Begs the question: why not ship 2 mixes? Not like audio is a significant chunk of the data of a modern blu-ray movie.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#413

Post by bowsamic »

ryandrake wrote: post #136

One 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…

My wife is also very sensitive to loud or harsh sounds and we have to do a similar thing. Sometimes I set up a compressor in VLC, but it's a pain to get the settings right. Really we need something more like a limiter but I don't think VLC has that. It's not very fun to watch a movie on the TV nowadays

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#414

Post by LAC-Tech »

deltasevennine wrote: post #315
ryandrake wrote: post #136

One 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. Hard disagree. I want realism. The sophistication of modern audiences is now so high that the level of enunciation and clarity in older movies now sounds comical to modern audiences. Believe it or not this old style speak you see in Older movies was Literally artificial and made for acting: https://www.youtube.com/wat…

The sophistication of modern audiences is now so high that the level of enunciation and clarity in older movies now sounds comical to modern audiences.

My mind immediately went to that scene in idiocracy - "You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded"

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#415

Post by zbuf »

Sholmesy wrote: post #377
copperx wrote: post #366

Earlier 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. 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"

The conversion isn't so much as "automatic" or opinionated, but clearly defined in a spec. And it _is_ mathematically correct in terms of sound energy entering the ears. A device may be doing the conversion incorrectly of course.

But there is still an omission, which is the introduction of the centre speaker was (as I understand it) to "pin" dialogue to the screen more effectively. That implies there _is_ some physical phenomenon takes place (eg. phasing/interference) which is not compensated for in the spec.

My own system is set up to deliberately boost the centre channel in the mix and it does help a lot, however I'm interested to know how to define this amount of compensation in terms of an actual physics or acoustics phenomenon.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#416

Post by marginalia_nu »

ryandrake wrote: post #217
least wrote: post #150

Earlier 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 do think Stewart's stage training shines through quite a lot. He does dial it back, but his performance is hardly realistic. (I'd also note how important recurring locations are even set up like a stage -- open with a clear unobstructed focus point for action to happen in; the bridge, ten forward and engineering especially notable).

On the other hand, I'm not sure what hyper-realism would contribute to something like Star Trek. The show confidently embraces the fact that it's basically a bunch of fairy tales for nerds. That's what allows it to be as great as it is.

Not everything needs to be The Wire (even though that was great too, if you enabled subtitles).

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#417

Post by atmosx »

ryandrake wrote: post #136

One 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 thought it was my tv having completely broken audio… Or the broadcaster. I noticed that, the volume goes up when commercials kick in, but also explosions, shootings, etc. the volume has to be adjusted every 5 minutes and we are watching 90% of content with captions on since I can remember…

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#418

Post by knorker »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #328
tsimionescu wrote: post #320

Earlier 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.

On good TVs under perfect lighting conditions only.

Try watching handmaid's tale without blackout blinds.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#419

Post by bowsamic »

Semaphor wrote: post #372
ryandrake wrote: post #136

One 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…

I live in Germany and honestly it just seems to me from speaking to Germans that they have the worst mixture of a lack of sense of quality and also an uncaring-ness/sense of futility about it. I think it is kind of like the "poor service at restaurants" thing. It is a negative point that has become accepted and almost expected by Germans, so there is literally no desire to change it, which would take a lot of effort for very little gain.

Tangentially, it also reminds me of going back to the UK last week to visit a conference. The trains were just so much different to those in Germany, even the crappy "Stansted Express", those here in Germany feel very utilitarian and unfriendly (particularly the Deutsche Bahn "Bombardier Double-deck Coach") while in the UK similarly priced train services are more explicitly friendly and caring in their design.

I do think it is a systematic or cultural "problem", but also it's kind of one of the things I like about Germany. The emphasis is on things that are completely tangible to everyone rather than more removed concerns like aesthetics and friendliness. And, I think this bleeds into the cultural arts too. I have noticed the same thing with a lot of popular German music too. It just lacks the sense of "coolness" that there is in other countries, and feels almost like an cringey imitation of other countries popular music

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#420

Post by Gordonjcp »

atmosx wrote: post #417
ryandrake wrote: post #136

One 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 thought it was my tv having completely broken audio… Or the broadcaster. I noticed that, the volume goes up when commercials kick in, but also explosions, shootings, etc. the volume has to be adjusted every 5 minutes and we are watching 90% of content with captions on since I can remember…

The volume doesn't go up, it goes down when adverts kick in. The peak level is slightly lower than programme material.

The difference is that adverts are very heavily compressed so the quiet bits are much much louder making the whole thing seem loud.

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