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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?

#571

Post by elteto »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #570
elteto wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could turn subtitles on for this comment. I have no idea what you are saying.

SUBTITLES: The film industry makes high art as well as common fare. The high art is what the artists want to make and enjoy but it has a very small market. The common fare is what pays the bills, because it sells like 100x more tickets than high art. High art = caviar, Shakespeare "caviar for the general" whereas common fare is hamburgers, flipping burgers, which is a real business, many more servings of hamburgers t…

Thank you.

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

#572

Post by lebuffon »

galangalalgol wrote: post #559
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you recommend a good explanation of the different types, how they are recorded encoded etc.? From a naive sonar perspective it seems like two mics one on each side of a head sized camera would do fine for encoding all the angle information. But then you would have to register and apply that knowledge to each boom mic input, and synthesize it for every sound effect that wasn't there at recording. Tl;dr Why isnt tw…

Left/right sound localization is partially a function of "shadow" created by the head. However more important to localization is the pinna, the outer ear. Sound enters the earhole directly AND reflects off the folds in the pinna. This causes complex comb filtering. (cancellation) Our brain learns how to correlate sound direction with these complex filterings. It's quite amazing.

Some audio workstations (Logic) have "binaural" processing to try and emulate this effect. It can never be perfect because everyone's ears are shaped a little different.

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

#573

Post by crazygringo »

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 know I'm in the minority here, but let me explain why it's not terrible audio mixes or bad actors.

The overall trend in TV and movies has been towards greater realism in all aspects. Less stage-audience sitcoms, more single-cam. Less "look at this actor" and more "look at this real person".

Actors aren't mumbling, they're speaking how real people speak. Trust me, screen actors have more stage training than ever -- they know how to enunciate but if they do, the director tells them to stop because they seem like they're giving a fake theatrical performance rather than being a slice of real life.

And because more and more people have huge TV's with great contrast, 5.1 surround systems, or are watching with AirPods with spatial audio... TV is becoming more film-like both in range of brightness and loudness. For many people (like myself) this is a godsend. It's like I'm at the cinema every time I watch an hour-long drama. It's amazing.

We could go back to low-contrast everything and overly enunciated actors, the way sitcom TV was, designed for small screens and terrible speakers. But that just feels so... backwards and limited and fake.

HOWEVER, I do firmly believe that modern TV content should be made more accessible, and that it's high time to build adjustable "end-user compression" into all TV's and video players. Let the user apply automatic volume equalization so quiet parts are just as loud as the loud parts when you're watching TV in your living room with lots of activity around. (And with 5.1 signals, you can even always keep dialog louder than sound effects and music.) And brightness equalization so you can see what's happening in the dark scenes of Game of Thrones when you're in a sunlit room.

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

#574

Post by jejeyyy77 »

extragood wrote: post #17

> Captions can also facilitate multitasking I have a hard time believing this. Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read. I think that the phenomenon described in the article may actually be a symptom of a much deeper social change. Listening and auditory comprehension were critical skills for communication and preservation o…

I can browse my phone/watch instagram videos with a NFLX show playing. If something interesting happens I can look up and quickly catch up on the dialogue by reading the caption.

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

#575

Post by least »

b112 wrote: post #499
least wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those people that mumble and/or struggle with speaking in real life, so I'm probably placing that burden more on other people than the other way around. I just find that stage acting sounds very unnatural. So do news anchors and you will find the same sort of unnatural voice in older classic films. No one talks like that in real life so of course it's something that is going to detach the tv show or movie…

When you are sitting at home, with perhaps a friend on your couch, do they constantly say "What?" Or, if standing with a few people you know outside, is every sentence you speak replied to with a request to repeat yourself? I bet not. Maybe it happens sometimes, but my point is, being able to understand what someone says, regardless of how they say it, is the key part here. Yet it sounds as if you believe most people…

The person I originally responded to was basically calling for actors to homogenize their speech in order to make them easier to understand. I disagree with this notion because I think that both altering how you enunciate things and how you "project" your voice alter them drastically and are not realistic for everyone to speak that way. They are inherently inauthentic, especially if you consider the speech patterns of various English accents and dialects. Certain accents are intrinsically linked to "mumbling." Certain types of voices are inherently not projected.

A great example is this video of Baltimoreans attempting to say "Aaron earned an iron urn." [1] The same person says it how they would naturally and with "proper" enunciation. With "proper" enunciation he was very easy to understand, but it was also not authentic to how he actually speaks.

> Beyond that, many of the characters we watch in media, are top tier of their professions, even if that profession is 'thief'.

Yes, but there's just as many, if not more, that aren't. I'm not saying it's unrealistic for say, a CEO or a news reporter to have adapted a "General American" accent. I don't think it's weird for even most characters to have an accent that is very understandable to most Americans. I just don't think you can or should expect that actors always speak in a certain way just to make it understandable to the most amount of Americans.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Oj7a-p4psRA

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

#576

Post by astura »

bscphil wrote: post #83
perrygeo wrote: post #45

The fact that there's a claimed generational gap here speaks more to the values of the generations re: passive vs active entertainment. I could also ask: "Why do all these 60-Somethings have the TV on as background noise while doing other tasks?" To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption. People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertain…

> [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…

>I find it impossible to concentrate on what is happening visually on screen in a film when closed captions are on.

This is a skill. I would have agreed with you 20 years ago but at some point I started putting them on because I could only afford a shitty audio setup and dramas got really mumbly. Took a while, but I learned to not be distracted by the subtitles.

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

#577

Post by charlieyu1 »

AI caption sucks, not closed to the real captions.

Is a 38 years old who watched anime since at least 20 years ago. There were people who delicates into translating new anime episodes with captions every week. The best teams have it done within 3 hours after the episode is aired in Japan.

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

#578

Post by strunz »

mihaaly wrote: post #519
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…

Exactly!! Things became worse in the past 10 or something years (I am a 40 something btw.). As the article states we used subtitles in movies to learn language and to understand thick accent. However throughout time while we got better and better in comprehension the use of subtitles remained the same in overall. But very uneven too. Old movies (not yet seen) and movies for children are never a problem. Also some pro…

I use that feature on Apple TV (normalize audio levels) and it's STILL too dramatic for watching unless you want to wake everyone in the house up. I have a 5.1 setup with the center channel even increased (to try and boost talking) and I still have to play the volume game at times.

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

#579

Post by mihaaly »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #570
elteto wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could turn subtitles on for this comment. I have no idea what you are saying.

SUBTITLES: The film industry makes high art as well as common fare. The high art is what the artists want to make and enjoy but it has a very small market. The common fare is what pays the bills, because it sells like 100x more tickets than high art. High art = caviar, Shakespeare "caviar for the general" whereas common fare is hamburgers, flipping burgers, which is a real business, many more servings of hamburgers t…

Sounds like a parallel topic to the poor sound mixing trouble to me. High art existed before muffled conversations mixed with loud sound effects or music. Also high art can coexist with balanced sound and articulate conversation. Or balanced sound can be used for 'burger' movies for their benefit.

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

#580

Post by lo_zamoyski »

hindsightbias wrote: post #283
mattnewton wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nolan is just trolling us, he knows we’ll pay good money for crap we can’t understand or hear.

If you can't hear it, you can't criticize it.

"But he said it with such an air of gravity..."

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