441–450 of 738 posts
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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.
I would like to believe that, except that the dialog is almost always too quiet in a movie theater.
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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.
I agree. In my case I had a huge problem with eg. the music in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knives_Out being a lot louder then the rest (source blue ray). The only fix I found was to rip all tracks, apply normalization + compression filters to the audio tracks in Audacity, finally to repackage everything as MKV.
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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 physic…
Having dialog in a center speaker means it comes from a different location than the music/fx, so it's easy to hone in on it even if it's a little quieter than the music/fx. Having dialog in the same speakers as music/fx makes it much harder. The specified 5.1 to 2.x mixdown ratios might be good or might be inadequate depending on how correlated the original left track is with the original right track. A ridiculously loud blast only on the 5.1 left means your brain can hear dialog from your 2.1 right unimpeded. A medium volume explosion on the 5.1 left and right (but not center!) leaves you with no 2.1 speaker producing dialog without it being masked by the explosion, especially if the explosion sound is mono-ish.
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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.
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Christopher Nolan is one of the biggest offenders in this regard, often having barely audible dialog drowned out by music or background noise by stylistic choice. I understand the intent is to let it wash over you but I can’t help but struggle to understand and it ends up just making me feel frustrated and taking me out of the film.
I would have paid extra for subtitles when I saw Tenet at IMAX. The audio mix made it extremely difficult to follow.
As others have said, sometimes actors mumble stuff, dialogue is hard to hear and explosions and other side noises end up too loud.
Shame but someone thought this was a good idea…
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> [CC] complements the audio & visual nicely. I don't have any evidence for this but I'd wager that plot synthesis and comprehension of television shows is greatly improved by CC As you say, you don't have any evidence for this, so I'll just add that my subjective impression is the absolute opposite. I find it impossible to concentrate on what is happening visually on screen in a film when closed captions are on. I a…
As non english-native speaker I watched so much stuff with captions it's second nature for me. But for any language that I understand well I only turn them on when the accent is so thick I can't get what the actors are saying. Similarly I always turn on all subtitles in video games because it's easy to miss something if say ingame explosion or other sound effect covers the voice, or it is just too silent (say NPC tal…
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There's an article that's been floating around that notes this phenomenon started after Nolan's movies became the style to emulate, and there are various sound engineers who state they would like to do what you want but they have to produce what the paying entity asks for. Someone should feel free to link it here - I'm mobile at the moment so can't dig it up. But anyway, I just wanted to jump in and say... all the ti…
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.
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…
31 but yeah, I've had subs on for almost a decade now? Maybe only 6-7 years? For me I find I miss things without the subs on. Whispered/background dialog that I'm unsure how anyone is supposed to hear/understand being top of list but also sound mixing seems to be terrible by default and it's hard to hear/understand characters even in a quiet room sometimes. I read quickly so subs have never been an issue to me, I can…
That's interesting - I have subtitles on at all times (I am Swedish, we never dub adult content so I have used subtitles for a very long time), but when I do watch children's movies with my kids, they are dubbed, and then I find having subtitles on is extremely annoying. I cannot stand having subtitles in the same language as the dialogue, but which differs in phrasing/content. It is very distracting to me.