Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on? • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by jakzurr » Sun, Sep 18, 2022, 9:40 AM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #416

ryandrake wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 li…

... it's basically a bunch of fairy tales for nerds.

omg that's embarrassing, but I guess it's true

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

#452

Post by jclardy » Sun, Sep 18, 2022, 9:40 AM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #185

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…

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…

I had this issue recently watching Rings of Power, so much so that I have to keep the remote nearby to change every few minutes. Dialogue volume is so low you have to turn it up, then action scenes happen and the house is shaking.

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

#453

Post by radicalbyte » Sun, Sep 18, 2022, 9:42 AM UTC

zbuf wrote: post #415

Sholmesy wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a 3.1 set-up with the center boosted by the maximum amount allowable. Will eventually upgrade to 5.1 once the kids are old enough to not climb on the rear speakers.

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

#454

Post by watwut » Sun, Sep 18, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

Godel_unicode wrote: post #357

tsimionescu wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.9% of the audience will strain to see what is going on, but let's blame their screen buying acumen (and their viewing practices - even the best screen will not make those scenes easily watchable in a sunny room, which is how most people watch TV) instead of making them actually watchable.

What part of “seems like a problem for the producers of bad screens to solve” makes it seem like this is blaming the people who buy the screens and not the people that make the screens. Don’t make the art worse, hold the manufacturers accountable for selling terrible products.

The screens and sound setups are fine. The movies are bad products here.

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

#455

Post by branon » Sun, Sep 18, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

mgdlbp wrote: post #438

OJFord wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X.Y (e.g. 5.1) means X wide range speakers and Y subwoofers. You also sometimes see it like S/T.Y where S+T = X, and it refers to front/surround speakers. There are standard values and configurations, such as 2.0 (aka stereo) both at the front, 2.1, 3.1 adds a centre channel mostly for on-screen dialogue positioned close to screen, 5.1 (3/2.1) adds a second stereo pair behind you, 7.1 - adds an extra surround stereo…

For real enthusiasts, also X.Y.Z, adding ceiling/bounce speakers for vertical spatial audio. The real "stuck so far behind" that I don't get is why we use speaker arrays at all -- instead of binaural stereo tech. That virtual haircut demo, apparently from the 90s,[0] sounds incredible on my cheap headphones, yet the technology seems to have gone nowhere since. Is there even spatial audio in VR setups? If the difficul…

Wondered this too. That video along with the millions of ASMR videos on YouTube have very nice binaural stereo sound, but I don't see this being done anywhere else.

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

#456

Post by boltzmann-brain » Sun, Sep 18, 2022, 9:45 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #296

boltzmann-brain wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually close to another very important point. Most movies come with a 5.1 mix nowadays, and people watch them on a stereo system. Most players use a very simple formula when converting 5.1 to stereo, something like say Lout = 1/2 Lin + 1/3 SLin, Rout = 1/2 Rin + 1/3 SRin, and leave out the center channel completely. This is also done inside of TVs etc. The center channel gets dropped completely! And sometime…

This sounds too stupid to actually be true, but it also seems to correspond to my experience. It makes me sad that there's an engineer or produce designer out there, anywhere, who would intentionally pull something like this. It's sadistic. Why ruin your product?

The issue is that most programmers think there's nothing to know about the non-programming-related engineering they're encoding into their programs. So we get crappy audio, we get cars driving into bollards, delivery robots driving over crime scenes, home automation destroying houses, smart locks that can be picked without tools, etc. People severely overestimate their knowledge of what's going on, and underestimate how much complexity there is to the phenomena they're dealing with.

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

#457

Post by formerly_proven » Sun, Sep 18, 2022, 9:45 AM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #243

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…

While we are teaching actors to enunciate can we do the same with musicians? When I listen to music in German, I can almost completely understand it despite speaking German at a kindergarten level. When I listen to music in English, despite being fluent, it is almost impossible to discern the lyrics they are mumbling.

Honestly I've often thought that many songs are only popular because you can't really understand the (trivial, vulgar, gross) lyrics.

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

#458

Post by jldl805 » Sun, Sep 18, 2022, 9:45 AM UTC

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.

You're 100% correct and also brave for saying it out loud on the internet. Prepare for gnashing of teeth from people with subpar picture quality.

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

#459

Post by boltzmann-brain » Sun, Sep 18, 2022, 9:46 AM UTC

PcChip wrote: post #285

boltzmann-brain wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually close to another very important point. Most movies come with a 5.1 mix nowadays, and people watch them on a stereo system. Most players use a very simple formula when converting 5.1 to stereo, something like say Lout = 1/2 Lin + 1/3 SLin, Rout = 1/2 Rin + 1/3 SRin, and leave out the center channel completely. This is also done inside of TVs etc. The center channel gets dropped completely! And sometime…

Are you sure? I thought a lot of people were successfully running "phantom centers" by just using L and R

If the information from the C channel is dropped, and the speech information was only in C or for the most part in C, it won't be in L+R, or it will be to some insufficient extent because it'll get obscured by whatever else is happening.

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

#460

Post by RichardCA » Sun, Sep 18, 2022, 9:47 AM UTC

stevenwoo wrote: post #118

ecshafer wrote: post #96

I started using captions as a teen because of watching anime, and then I started doing it with normal tv. I am not in my 20s but I think a big part of it is that most tv shows and movies have become absolutely impossible to hear what they are saying. I think speakers on TVs have gotten really bad with the transition to flat screen, and even with a sound system the mixing of audio has gotten really bad. Music and soun…

With the heavy accents I can barely understand every other word in shows like Brassic or sometimes an English word that means one thing for Americans but with a period/place specific meaning so I am not sure what I just heard like in Derry Girls (1980's Northern Ireland) without captioning.

I remember when "The Wire" came out, I started turning on captions because the Baltimore vernacular was so thick. And the Caucasian and African-American characters spoke separate dialects of it. Especially the constant use of "a'ight" as a contraction for "all right".

Derry Girls is interesting in that the actresses sound mostly like trained Brits doing an Irish accent. I've never been to Ulster, I don't know how people actually talk there, maybe the Irish have a softer brogue from having to interact with the British/Protestant people they share the region with.