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As a native English speaker, I struggle with many modern movies. I find the speech very muttered and scripts full of quick, short retorts. English /can/ be perf

As a native English speaker, I struggle with many modern movies. I find the speech very muttered and scripts full of quick, short retorts. English /can/ be perfectly clear. There must be other explanations.

Mithaldu 11y ago
Maybe it's a bit of both? If you're curious, try having a listen to this and transcribe some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpawK7gm2tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpawK7gm2tM I'm sure you'd get most of it correct.
nommm-nommm 11y ago
I know quite a few non hard of hearing native English speakers who watch movies with the closed captioning on for that reason as well. Movies are unique in that sense, not sure what it is about them.
- DrScump 11y ago
  Heck, I leave CC on all the time, even as a native speaker. There are enough mumbled lines or poor audio or varying volume (thanks a lot, Comcast) to make it useful. I found "The Following" to be one show I relied on captioning a lot. I bet it would be helpful for children learning to read, too, with the constant matching of text with corresponding dialog or narration. It's a funny metric for engineering sloppiness as well. For example, many programs (especially sports) make poor choices with respect to placement of the CC lines; most major sports networks end up covering the scoreboard insert with CC, for example. One bizarre botch going on now is that our local CBS affiliate (KPIX) is sending captioning from the wrong program in the 10PM hour more often than not -- clearly a news program. Sometimes, it will be back to the correct show upon return from a commercial break, then fail back again later. It's happened the last 2 weeks in a row during Elementary, for sure. Anybody else seen this?
- cooper12 11y ago
  Yeah this perplexes me too because my hearing is otherwise decent but I almost always need subtitles. I've looked into it a bit and some people are surmising that it has to do with poor audio engineering for home release. Films audio is recorded to be played back in a spacious theater with surround sound, good acoustics, and speakers with high range. Then you have people's home audio setups: noisy listening environments with people right next to the audio source, poor acoustics and stereo sound, and poor speakers from laptops, smartphones, or those built in to flatscreen tv's. The sound mixing also relies on these factors as well as the theater experience so explosions are super loud and quiet moments are eerily silent. (Not to mention that dialogue takes a backseat in many modern films) The audio might be poorly remixed, if at all for home release and the poor playback equipment exacerbates the issue. It's similar to developers saying "works on my machine", where in this case the machine is properly calibrated, thousands of dollars, and top-of-the-line.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    This is what the Dynamic Range Compression setting is for on Dolby Digital decoders. Do the new Blu-Ray formats have a similar option? If you aren't in a quiet home theater with no neighbors to bother, you want DRC on maximum compression.

Mithaldu 11y ago

Maybe it's a bit of both? If you're curious, try having a listen to this and transcribe some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpawK7gm2tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpawK7gm2tM I'm sure you'd get most of it correct.

nommm-nommm 11y ago

I know quite a few non hard of hearing native English speakers who watch movies with the closed captioning on for that reason as well. Movies are unique in that sense, not sure what it is about them.

DrScump 11y ago
Heck, I leave CC on all the time, even as a native speaker. There are enough mumbled lines or poor audio or varying volume (thanks a lot, Comcast) to make it useful. I found "The Following" to be one show I relied on captioning a lot. I bet it would be helpful for children learning to read, too, with the constant matching of text with corresponding dialog or narration. It's a funny metric for engineering sloppiness as well. For example, many programs (especially sports) make poor choices with respect to placement of the CC lines; most major sports networks end up covering the scoreboard insert with CC, for example. One bizarre botch going on now is that our local CBS affiliate (KPIX) is sending captioning from the wrong program in the 10PM hour more often than not -- clearly a news program. Sometimes, it will be back to the correct show upon return from a commercial break, then fail back again later. It's happened the last 2 weeks in a row during Elementary, for sure. Anybody else seen this?
cooper12 11y ago
Yeah this perplexes me too because my hearing is otherwise decent but I almost always need subtitles. I've looked into it a bit and some people are surmising that it has to do with poor audio engineering for home release. Films audio is recorded to be played back in a spacious theater with surround sound, good acoustics, and speakers with high range. Then you have people's home audio setups: noisy listening environments with people right next to the audio source, poor acoustics and stereo sound, and poor speakers from laptops, smartphones, or those built in to flatscreen tv's. The sound mixing also relies on these factors as well as the theater experience so explosions are super loud and quiet moments are eerily silent. (Not to mention that dialogue takes a backseat in many modern films) The audio might be poorly remixed, if at all for home release and the poor playback equipment exacerbates the issue. It's similar to developers saying "works on my machine", where in this case the machine is properly calibrated, thousands of dollars, and top-of-the-line.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  This is what the Dynamic Range Compression setting is for on Dolby Digital decoders. Do the new Blu-Ray formats have a similar option? If you aren't in a quiet home theater with no neighbors to bother, you want DRC on maximum compression.