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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?

#321

Post by skydhash »

coliveira wrote: post #259
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…

If you know a foreign language, an option that works is to watch the dubbed version. I sometimes do this, especially for action movies: the foreign dubbed version is often easier to understand than the original english, because people doing the dubbing want to be understood.

French version are always so clear (friends and family watch movies on laptop and phones). But I know enough English to notice that the movement of the actor's mouth does not correspond to the sound.

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

#322

Post by graton »

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…

Why I have been doing this to the movies I have:

   ffmpeg-normalize -v --progress -c:a aac -b:a 768k -ar 48000 -t -14 *mkv
To normalize the audio levels so that they don't get too loud or too soft. Though I wouldn't use it if you have less than 64 kbit/second/track.

https://github.com/slhck/ffmpeg-normalize

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

#323

Post by Upgrayyed_U »

lttlrck wrote: post #289
octobus2021 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much outside of the age range mentioned in the article but +100 for crappy audio mixing. When my family was going through all the Marvel movies at first I tried to control the volume by making it higher during the dialog and lower during the battles etc but it was an exercise in futility, as I'm only human and there would be some delay in volume change and we would still miss what the guy/gal said or my hous…

Have you tried night mode? It compresses the dynamic range.

The problem with night mode is that it compresses the dynamic range of the audio which undermines one of the main benefits of having a home theater system. It's a poor compromise for bad audio mixing.

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

#324

Post by ttjjtt »

One aspect that’s under recognized is the widespread use of ADR (automatic dialog replacement) https://filmlifestyle.com/what-is-adr-in-filmmaking/

In the 80s and 90s this was an occasionally used process to fix problematic scenes, now it’s used for 70-100% of a full, particularly high budget.

The actors sit in an anechoic sound recording room and whisper their lines a few cm from a microphone

They’ll do this even if the camera POV is meters away from the character in a busy environment, where the any human would be talking loudly straining to be heard over the background noise.

ADR makes all dialog recording sound like soft pillow talk.

Add incessant overproduced over compressed music score to the mix, a 5.1 to stereo downmix, and you have an incomprehensible movie.

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

#325

Post by aix1 »

adwi wrote: post #26

Tangential: I’ve found subtitles to be a very useful tool for learning a language. In order of challenge, I’ll at least watch everything in English with Spanish subtitles, then Spanish SAP with English subtitles, then Spanish SAP with Spanish subtitles, then just in Spanish.

Language Reactor is an absolutely incredible tool along these lines: https://www.languagereactor.com/

I've been using it with Netflix and YouTube to study a couple of languages, with really good results.

The gist is that it adds dual-language subtitles, translation/dictionary tools, precise subtitle-based playback controls etc to the player UI.

It can also colour-code every word based on its frequency in the language and on whether I already know it or am actively trying to learn it. This makes it very easy to identify common words I don't yet know and make them the focus of my vocab learning.

The main shortcomings (for me) are:

  1. Word translations are sometimes weird (but then I can get to a real dictionary with two clicks).
  2. It does not understand grammar (e.g. separable prefixes in German).
  3. Different forms of the same word are sometimes treated as unrelated words for the purposes of colour-coding (e.g. the infinitive and Präteritum for some verbs).
  4. Word frequency highlighting (e.g. highlight the 1500 most common words) is configured globally rather than per-language.
  5. TurtleTube sounds cool but I find the contents a bit meh and the levelling inconsistent.  I have found a couple of great YouTube channels through it though.
  6. Local file playback requires an SRT file and can only play the default audio track.  The former is no biggie but the latter completely breaks the feature for me (since the default audio track is usually English and not the language I'm learning).
  7. Plex integration would make it even more useful.
But overall, what an amazing tool.

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

#326

Post by hardwaregeek »

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 a lot of podcasts with egregiously bad audio mixing. Which...c'mon guys it's a podcast. You should get that right. I've wondered if there's a way to use an algorithm to make people's voices a little easier to understand, like slightly exaggerating consonants or something.

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

#327

Post by Too »

imgabe wrote: post #284
IgorPartola wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would it not be possible to have multiple audio mixes available and play the one that is appropriate for your setup?

Yes, on Netflix you can choose. Choosing the stereo mix does offer a significant improvement on hearing dialogue. Regrettably, it has no idea of sensible default or even choice of default, so it always goes to 5.1 even if your setup doesn't have it.

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

#328

Post by Godel_unicode »

tsimionescu wrote: post #320
derefr wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, it is now fashionable for actors to mumble. Why does it matter that actors are mumbling, though? Don't most lines in Hollywood movies (that aren't already recorded on a soundstage with a boom mic inches from the actor's face) get ADRed these days?

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.

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

#329

Post by Sylamore »

ninkendo wrote: post #131
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…

I wish there was a CC mode for “I’m not deaf, I just don’t catch the quiet mumbly dialog sometimes so give me captions only of the dialog.” Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.) Because it’s the CC descriptions of music swells and things like “[laughs] and “[crying]”, et…

Roku with captions on replay is my goto way of dealing with muddy dialog

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

#330

Post by whatevertrevor »

IgorPartola wrote: post #249
Klonoar wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's true. In fact movie producers are notorious for "phoning in" the 5.1 mixes for the streaming platforms, focusing most of their energy on the theatre mix with Dolby atmos and what not. Usually the 5.1 mix you get on netflix is hurriedly put together as an afterthought.
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