I watch nearly everything I can at somewhere between 1.8-2.5x speed, this means subs are largely required to maintain comprehension. I prefer watching this way as I can cover far greater amounts of content (or devote less time on the otherhand) just as enjoyably as I could watching at regular speed.
Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
461–470 of 738 posts
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
A little off topic but it’s really surprising how so few of the shows and movies these days give off any vibe of sincerity. From the acting to the writing to the CGI, everything seems to be winking at the audience and trying to tell them that they are all actors and its all make believe. The perfect example is Lord of the Rings vs The Rings of Power. I had no problems believing that Aragorn really lived in Middle Ear…
A lot of the new 4K TVs by default have some 'video enhancement' processing steps turned on by default which ends up making everything look fake. If you go into the TV settings and turn all of those things off it should make the world look more natural.
this processing can create desync issues where the audio is in front of the video by just a bit. this creates a lip sync issue which makes people feel the audio is dubbed over and can tear you out of suspense of disbelief. but i don't think that's what they mean here. rings is just bad acting - or rather, bad direction that forces bad acting. i have no doubt the actors are capable of much more than what they're being confined to.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, we’re living in a world where piracy and exploded budgets mean every movie needs to be a hit. One flop and the studio is gone. So the studios produce movies that are certain to be not flops, like the endless sequels, and that will draw people to cinemas where there is no piracy, which means impressive spectacles with explosions.
I'm sorry but piracy is not to blame for a 100 million movie budget. I live in a small country and we're able to produce very enjoyable films for far less than 10 million.
Pig is a great example because it essentially could have been a student project. The only thing you really needed was one good main actor, and who's to say a student of art couldn't have done a good job just as well. The location shots, the various scenes are all ultra low budget.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#464Earlier 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'…
> Pig ...was terrible, I wanted more screentime with that adorable pig...sorry Nic, you're in the shadow of a real star...
Underrated tweet. I agree fully.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
A massive number of people don't have anything other than the speakers included in their TV. The next massive percentage of people maybe have a sound bar, maybe with an included subwoofer. A tiny, minuscule, microscopic percentage of consumers will have an external receiver. Maybe they'll have 5.1 on that. Maybe they'll have 9.2. An extremely small fraction, practically a rounding error, will have higher than that. M…
What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup. Of course that’s far from the truth, but good sound is so worth it! Being able to truly enjoy music, movies, we live in an incredible era for content, video is regularly available in 4K and people can play that! Why is sound stuck so far behind?
It's a pain though, you have to take the time to setup the extra speakers, cable them and etc and have the space to do this, and of course the extra expense.
Yes, it's cheap to some software developer on HN, but if you are on an average income it's harder to justify.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#466Earlier 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'…
Would a soundbar help the situation or make it worse? With two kids 90% of the time I'm watching kids movies but I still turn on the closed captions. Any background noise and it's nearly impossible to hear the dialogue without cranking up the volume to an undesirable level.
It might to some extent, but it's not the perfect way to go.
Speech reproduction gets muddled by distortion and by masking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking ).
If you have one speaker reproducing both speech and other sound, this is what happens:
1. additional sound output means heightened distortion
2. when two sounds come from two places, our brains can separate them due to phase differences and spatial perception, so those two sounds mask each other less than if the same two sounds come out of a single speaker, even if it's perfect, with no distortion etc
3. the speaker is made for broad range reproduction and not voice reproduction, so it'll de-emphasize speech frequencies, which are exactly those frequencies that also make music sound like it's coming out of a cardboard box. ultimately the applied eq (equalizer) curve will create speech that's slightly muddy, like someone talking from behind a blanket.
4. sound bars use tiny transducers which are woefully underpowered compared to the SPL (sound pressure level) they're tasked with producing. This is done by using multi-band compression and limiting. This sometimes creates situations where the limiting might be recovering after a slightly louder sound, and the very next syllable will be muted.
However, having a dedicated speaker for the center channel is none the less way better than not having one at all. If that's all you can try, you can try your luck. But be aware that getting a cheap one will probably not get you where you want to be - you'll have to spend a pretty penny. At that point if you have the space you might want to get a 3.1 bookshelf speaker setup. They don't have to be very large to provide great value-for-space-used.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup. Of course that’s far from the truth, but good sound is so worth it! Being able to truly enjoy music, movies, we live in an incredible era for content, video is regularly available in 4K and people can play that! Why is sound stuck so far behind?
I think our auditory system just isn't great. Compressed formats with bitrate of 320kbps is borderline indistinguishable from raw formats in audio, while it will be borderline unbearable in video.
That's a really insightful way of putting it. My first reaction was, 'well, duh...', but then I realized that I'd taken for granted the fact that digital video of (arbitrarily defined) adequate quality must have a much higher information rate than audio of the same. But surely there are animals for which the opposite is true!
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Honestly, I disagree with pretty much everything you said. I don’t feel like I get poor service, trains aren’t designed unfriendly, and we certainly shouldn’t strive to make things less functional for some feeling of kindness.
Can’t talk about popular German music, as I don’t listen to that or to other popular music.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#469Earlier 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-...
That article kind of confuses a few different kinds of sounds. Just because there's a staccato ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9v-UpM9flY ) sound happening doesn't mean it serves the same function. The loud meme they're talking about is a loud horn meant to overwhelm. The sound at 0:40 in the video is clearly a meant to create suspense: it's an earlier trope in movies and other media: scary staccato strings backed by all sorts of random sybilant string sounds that create a nervous atmosphere (like starting at 2:52 here https://youtu.be/_nVkHXTeiOg?list=PL7F72E09D4C28FECD&t=172 ). My favourite use of these is in the Dead Space soundtrack. Note that in the clip I linked you first get the sybilant strings building nervous tension, then some overwhelming loud bangs, but then at 3:50 you get slower sounds which are not meant to overwhelm, just maintain a scary atmosphere. You get both of those uses of sound in one passage.
BTW, here's what the timbre of the "BRAM" sound is based on for the most part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32886196
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jzY099ihULs
The '05 tripod noises are meant to sound like V1 bomb scare-sounds, which is originally made to sound like mythical Horns of Jericho:
https://www.factmag.com/2016/10/09/sound-fear-room40-boss-la...
Listen to the V1 bomb sound in the clip on that page - there's no surprise they're being referred to in following works of fiction.