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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?

#651

Post by lebuffon »

galangalalgol wrote: post #586
lebuffon wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

Right, that is how we do it. But isn't all the phase information present in two channels of audio to know how to map all the signals to an arbitrary number of angles? You'd need to know the spacing of the mics, but that could be a standard. About the pinna, a fun way to demonstrate this is to have someone close their eyes, then you snap or jangle keys at various locations and have them point. Then tape their ears to…

No. The phase differences for FULL localization are not in the incident sound. (There are phase and amplitude differences for left/right only)

3D phase changes occur and create comb filters at you ear and your ear is unique to you.

This is why Kunstkopf(dummy head) recordings were never as successful as anticipated.

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

#652

Post by Sugimot0 »

esharte wrote: post #49

Why don't cinemas have them then? It's because people are listening to shows through terrible audio setups by default

This!! Most speakers/soundbars suck, and if you don't have a center channel in your sound system, voices will wash out with the background noise/music since the speaker (as in person speaking) is usually the focus of the shot and mostly audible in the center channel.

There's supposed to be sound engineers on every show/movie to make sure it sounds good but the gap lies between your audio system and the reference systems they use. A good analogy is the infamous Game of Thrones battle that was too dark. They edited that episode on reference grade monitors where you could see what was happening, but the average lower end tv and viewing environment couldn't translate the same black levels and details that the editor's had seen when they worked those scenes (they were also intemtionally edited to look dark and chaotic on the reference grade monitors*, which added to the problem)

That being said I still use cc with a lot of content. I think it would be less prevalent though if it were not for the gaping holes in most audio setups.

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

#653

Post by vivegi »

Slightly off topic, but one thing that annoys me is most movies made in the last 15 years that end up showing smartphones and text messages or the actors typing on their phone and most of the time the text is too small, or the camera cuts too fast and I end up pausing/rewinding to check it again.

Very few movies actually put an overlay and show such conversations using legible text. If the messages are important for the plot, it would be great if the filmmakers took care of this aspect.

This is quite bad with many streaming shows.

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

#654

Post by aviditas »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #313

I have auditory processing difficulties. Among many other sensory challenges. Sitting at a table in a restaurant, I struggle to understand what my friends are saying to me over the din of background chatter, a bartender shaking a drink, back of the house clinking a pan. I similarly struggle to understand what actors are saying when they’re backed by theme music or other physical things going on as part of (or behind)…

As one of the younger but not young crowd, I have a form of auditory dyslexia which is why I've used CC and subtitles most of my life. Good sound mixing and actor enunciation helps to a small degree, but my brain garbles the first part of conversation starts and when dialog happens without visual cues.

My hearing is good, but the delays in processing dialog to content make watching movies or tv very frustrating when I can't see the actor's face to lip read or don't have CC to catch what I miss.

On the other side of things, I have a very high level of internal voice so when I am reading text I can 'hear' the dialog in my head. I can listen to the first 20 minutes of a movie or episode or two of a tv show, then watch it muted with subtitles and will hear the actor's voices. It's nice because I can watch shows with my own background music or without disturbing anyone with the audio.

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

#655

Post by xerox13ster »

wildrhythms wrote: post #475
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 always thought it's the same problem as modern web design: razor thin fonts, "stylistically" low contrast ratios, hieroglyphic icons that don't show properly low resolution screens, slow loading times... because the designers and developers that made the thing are using maxxed-spec iMacs with 5k IPS color-accurate displays, so they never experience the "real world usage". I imagine the sound engineers have the "max…

When I was working at a transcription company I had to build my test kit with spare parts from the Bin. The Bin was full of old discard parts, early Celeron and Pentium machines with PS/2 KB/M.

Everything had to compile and run on that machine before I could ship builds to any of our transcriptionists. Our website needed to be able to load on it and so on.

What you say rings true, sound engineers are also mixing audio at 24 bits uncompressed, and while DVDs and Blu-Ray have the ability to play it back, I doubt the streaming services are sending it in full bit depth and also that most people buy hardware capable of decoding it if they did.

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

#656

Post by azemetre »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #583
azemetre wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons why I bought an Apple TV was the ability to pair it with my airpods. Makes is super convenient to hear everything if you live in an apartment, also some shows take advantage of the spatial audio which is neat if you don't have a proper sound setup. I still turn on subtitles tho. On that front I've been noticing some subtitles will not match the english dialogue at all. This is noticeable on the Net…

Roku has that feature; you can enable remote listening via the app and pipe sound to your earphones.

Good to know! I love this feature a lot and only thought apple did it. Does it also work for game consoles too? Like playing switch on the tv but feeling audio to your earphones?

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

#657

Post by crazygringo »

SilasX wrote: post #631
crazygringo wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the contrary, it is realistic -- no, you wouldn't understand them in real-life either. Movie speakers aren't slurring anything, as any audio engineer could easily prove to you. My mother complains about how she can't understand anything when there are Irish or Scottish or even northern English characters in a show. Decades ago, in an American TV show those characters would have been speaking an understandable Amer…

>To the contrary, it is realistic -- no, you wouldn't understand them in real-life either. Yes, I absolutely would, because, in practice, people speak in a way that others can understand them, or else they have to quickly adapt. (If they’re not comprehensible, there will be a contextual reason why.) >Movie speakers aren't slurring anything, as any audio engineer could easily prove to you. That wasn’t what I was sayin…

I don't know what to tell you... but in real life people misunderstand each other all the time. And don't adjust.

Listening to dialog in a movie theater is generally crystal clear in terms of audio engineering, coming from dedicated center speakers with very little audio artifacts due to the space. Directional sound waves are directional sound waves, and no there's nothing our ears are optimized for that isn't reproduced by speakers, for dialog coming from a few feet or more away. Muddiness is introduced when downmixed into stereo on crappy TV speakers in living rooms with a lot of sonic reflection from hard surfaces. If you listen with spatial audio AirPods with noise cancellation, for example, you'll get something much clearer akin to a theater experience.

My point is that subtitles help people who have trouble understanding similar dialog in real life, or in bad acoustics. It's an accessibility option.

When I listen to content with my AirPods, I never need subtitles at all. The audio is perfect. When I watch a movie in a friend's living room with kids running around, we absolutely put on subtitles. Because it's a terrible audio environment. So it all works out.

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

#658

Post by zzo38computer »

pnut wrote: post #423
zzo38computer wrote: post #388

I use captions too, even though I can (usually) hear the TV. There are many reasons for this: - I think it makes it somewhat easier to understand than audio only, for one thing. - If you do not know what they said, because you have missed it, possibly due to other noise in the room (telephone, other people speaking, etc). - Sometimes the speech of the movie is difficult due to e.g. you do not understand the accent of…

Those worthless captions are audio description for the hearing impaired.

I think they are not very useful even for someone who cannot hear them, though. The picture should be obvious what it is meaning and the captions might cover up the words in the picture (I have seen that happen before).

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

#659

Post by cratermoon »

cratermoon wrote: post #621
hrbf wrote: post #483

Unless I’m missing something major, the article does not answer its headline question in any way. It just presents a bunch of examples but does not come to any conclusion.

Par for the course with question titles. Betteridge's law of headlines says: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."[1]. That rule, however, doesn't apply to "why?" questions because they are not yes/no constructions. Nevertheless, there's an aspect of Betteridge's law at work here. Running a story that doesn't really have anything to it yet needing to meet production targets – in…

Forgot the reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226202006/http://www.techno...

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

#660

Post by jjulius »

hot_gril wrote: post #170
19h wrote: post #144

1) The reason TikTok etc. have closed captions on is that audio is off by default. If you want people to listen to your words but audio is off, put it into closed captions. 2) With closed captions you can watch a movie on low volume without disturbing others and still understand every word even of the girl in the corner of the room barely utters a word. Source: I'm a "20-something".

> The reason TikTok etc. have closed captions on is that audio is off by default. If you want people to listen to your words but audio is off, put it into closed captions. I can't believe that whole dramatic article missed this very obvious reason.

It didn't. When I downloaded it the other week to see what all the hubbub was about (spoiler alert: I killed it with fire lol), audio was on by default and I had to change that setting. I'd wager that OP forgot that they set it themselves.
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