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For me-- I rarely watch movies without subtitles nowadays; can't understand half the dialog. Part is the too many audio tracks being mixed in, that the article

For me-- I rarely watch movies without subtitles nowadays; can't understand half the dialog. Part is the too many audio tracks being mixed in, that the article talks about. Also, I've noticed American actors seem to mumble their lines a lot, I dont know why. British actors (usually) speak clearly. Maybe its a cultural thing, like Americans prefer method acting more? Also, I've noticed that stage actors like Patrick Stewart , speak clearly, maybe because on stage you have to enunciate properly. The end result is: If a movie doesn't have subtitles, we don't watch it. (And havent been to a cinema for 2+ years, obviously, in cinemas you rarely get the option). On an unrelated note: I dont know why so many movies are shot in the dark. It might make sense when viewed in a theater, but when viewing at home, I can't see anything. The last few scenes of Edge of Tomorrow were impossible to understand because of this. My impression is: The "arteestes" have taken over Hollywood, and making stylish movies take precedence over making movies that are easy to watch and hear.

Brajeshwar 5y ago
Few years back, India theaters started adding subtitles in Hollywood/English movies. It increased viewership dramatically.
mnw21cam 5y ago
Patrick Stewart is Royal Shakespeare Company trained. You won't find an actor trained by the Royal Shakespeare Company that mumbles their lines.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  If you mumble on the stage anywhere the director will (or should!) kick your ass.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  It's interesting to note that Patrick Steward might be responsible for changing the way people commonly pronounce the word Data. If so, I wonder how much impact his stage training had on how he chose to pronounce the word.
  - redwall_hp 5y ago
    "One is my name. The other is not." - Lt Commander Data
whartung 5y ago
When I'm alone, I watch most everything with subtitles. Not just for this reason, but because the vocal track tends to be really low and the MUSIC and GUN FIRE track really high, so I need to crank the overall sound down. (And, yes, I've turned up my center channel on my sound system to try and compensate for this.) My Apple TV has a "tone down the explosions" setting, which helps a lot. Even still, at times I wish I had a volume knob on my remote to swing one way or the other as the scene change in the thing I'm watching. The remote is too slow. But it's annoying to have these wide ranges. Then you watch a news or talk program or something like that, and the voices are front and center and everything is peachy. Later, we can talk about how dark things have become on screen as well.
- Causality1 5y ago
  I would use subtitles all the time if it didn't ruin dramatic and comedic timing. I often find myself wishing movies and video games had "proper nouns only" subtitles.
  - skydhash 5y ago
    I got so used to subtitles (learning English + anime). That I can put them in the background when I focus on the movie and quickly check them in case I did not understand something. Kinda like when you blur out the surrounding controls when watching YouTube.
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    > I often find myself wishing movies and video games had "proper nouns only" subtitles. This would be an excellent idea! Oftentimes I'll watch something, then in the middle turn on the subtitles and learn that I was misunderstanding the name of someone/something. Even if I hear it correctly the spelling may be different and can give better context and cultural flavor.
  - throwaway803453 5y ago
    Simply adding a delay to ensure the sentence doesn't appear after it is spoken would fix this. It's something that unavoidably happens with Saturday Night Live's transcript, for example, and I prefer it for comedy.
nonameiguess 5y ago
I think the dark thing is to hide crappy CGI, which doesn't blend well with physical sets and costumes under good lighting. The actual article content here about the reasons for dialogue getting worse is interesting. I'd have suspected it's mostly about the actors no longer being predominantly stage-trained, but apparently that is part of it but a small part. I don't really notice it personally, though, since my wife is deaf, so ever since marrying her, I've watched everything with closed captioning on.
- drcongo 5y ago
  I gave up watching Ozark because I couldn't see a damn thing that was happening, and that has no CGI at all. Sometimes it really is just a (bad) stylistic choice.
  - yurishimo 5y ago
    I think it's probably more related to the move to HDR content. Modern movies/tv are shot and edited with HDR in mind. HDR usually has much more granular control over the brightness within a scene, not just that one part can get super bright. That's great for people with TV's capable of that type of playback, but for everyone else, tough luck unless you have a blacked-out home theatre room to watch all you casual TV in. I saw a great example of this in a recent LTT video[0] of a cheap "HDR" TV. The shadows all blended together and the highlights just looked like a flat white instead of a very lightly shadowed sparkle. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGHwYMwXX88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGHwYMwXX88
elliekelly 5y ago
I’m not hard of hearing at all and since switching to subtitles I’ve come across several scenes where conversations were taking place off-screen and I had no idea but for the captions.
- svachalek 5y ago
  Yeah my wife is not an English native speaker so we tend to leave subtitles on all the time. It's amazing how often they refer to a bit of off-screen sound or dialog that's relevant to the plot, that I didn't even notice at all.
vlunkr 5y ago
Same. I started turning on subtitles because of noisy kids, but now I have them on most of the time. I hear lots of people say they are distracting or they ruin comedic or dramatic timing, but you quickly get used to it. You learn to read them only when you need to.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  Yeah, you definitely get used to it. I still laugh at a lot of things and I think it's a good way to broaden your watch choices significantly because it opens up foreign films/tv. Netflix has been slowly pushing more international content in the US as many of Americans are starting to become more comfortable with reading subtitles. I do think there is some room for improvement though in that subtitles should absolutely have standardized options for how they display on screen. Some people really like the yellow, others find that much more distracting compared to a bold white lettering on a semi-opaque black background. Let the viewer decide which one they are most comfortable with unless you have some specific art directed reason why they need to be formatted a certain way.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  I can't help it, I always cheat and ruin it for myself by reading before they've finished saying the line. :-) I should try delaying the subtitles so I can only read things that I've missed.
foobarian 5y ago
I do enjoy subtitles as well, but for me I have the most trouble with accents I'm not used to. My favorite examples are scifi/fantasy/historical shows where for some reason the "way the peoples talk" is invariably a heavy English, Irish or Scottish accent that is very hard to follow for me, used to American accents, even if enunciated properly. Add in the other sounds and it becomes even more difficult. The other nice feature of subtitles is sometimes there is helpful metadata there, like identifying the song playing in the background or some words not intended to be heard like a whisper or voice coming from a phone receiver.
- circlefavshape 5y ago
  It's always such a relief to me when someone speaks with an Irish accent - my cognitive load goes right down
  - DnDGrognard 5y ago
    As some one originally from Birmingham I found the accents in peaky blinders oddly relaxing. Though I could see full "yam yam" being hard - that's the rural dialect from the black country.
- rebuilder 5y ago
  The Expanse went really thick on the Belter creole, to the point that it was genuinely hard to understand, although subtitles helped. For the latest season they changed it into more of an accent rather than a new language, which I understand the reasoning for, but ultimately the show suffered for it IMO. So I guess I’m saying sometimes less understandable can still be better!
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    I have tried starting the expanse twice. Both times the dialogue compared with the overall darkness of the scenes made me stop watching. I think I’d like the show, but I want to be able to see and hear what’s happening!
mikro2nd 5y ago
Flashback to "Interstellar", where the first 40 minutes involved this guy speaking in some deep-south US accent with a mouth so full of marbles that he was incomprehensible. At some point later in the movie, I bailed. Apart from the black-hole CGI it was utter crap. Perhaps the incomprehensible dialogue was a deliberate attempt to hide the paucity of plot, logic or story.
- handrous 5y ago
  Interstellar is a bunch of neat and well-realized space sci-fi situations stitched together by a mediocre-at-best unjustifiably-proud-of-itself plot and a solid 30 minutes too much runtime.
- 1_player 5y ago
  Nonsense. The black hole CGI was made with the help of Kip Thorne, a friend of Nolan and a theoretical astrophysicist, who ever published a paper from his research on what supermassive black holes actually look like. Why do you say it looks utter crap then?
  - globalise83 5y ago
    Apart from the black-hole CGI it was utter crap.
    - 1_player 5y ago
      My bad.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Was it that movie with the universe in the bookshelf?
Tagbert 5y ago
“British actors (usually) speak clearly” Until the last couple of decades, most British movies/TV tended to use a lot of “Received Pronunciation” English (the Queen’s English) which has very crisp enunciation. Other accents were usually relegated to very specific character roles that highlighted the rustic “cockney” or “Yorkshire” character. More recently, other British accents have been used more and many of them are the opposite of crisp enunciation. Some seem to be talking with marbles in their mouths. This seems to represent a greater democratization of the characters represented with less of an emphasis on upper classes.
- j_not_j 5y ago
  British actors are usually better actors too. Some US programs used British actors to "raise the game" for their US co-workers. Examples: The Americans, The Wire, Homeland, Deadwood, etc etc. And as a side-effect, the dialogue was generally more understandable.
  - fireflash38 5y ago
    The Wire & understandable dialogue? Sheeeeeiiit. In all seriousness, Baltimore has a pretty heavy accent, especially in the inner city & Dundalk. It's rather comical to say that they got English actors because they were more understandable, to then turn around and make them less understandable.
  - pier25 5y ago
    Doctor House too
- giobox 5y ago
  This is by design to some degree over the last few decades for much of the UK television landscape too. Successive UK governments have directed the BBC (state run broadcaster responsible for huge amount of UK TV) to incorporate more regional content/actors/accents. Historically the BBC had often been accused of a London/“Received Pronunciation” bias. This has been accomplished in a number of ways - opening more regional TV production studios, commissioning more content from regions outside London, hiring presenters/actors with regional accents etc, the net effect of all of which has been to broaden BBC talent pool beyond the usual cadre of “Received Pronunciation”-style presenters. As one example, I personally find the presenter Freddie Flintoff to be almost impossible to understand on any BBC show he appears on, but he has exactly the sort of accent you would never have heard on BBC 40 years ago.
emsy 5y ago
On the other hand German TV/movie acting is heavily influenced by theater so you will have dialogues that are easy to understand but sound completely unnatural. This combined with bad cinematography makes German films unwatchable for me. (German dubs of foreign movies on the other hand are usually quite good)
- drcongo 5y ago
  In a lot of European movies the dialogue is added in post rather than recorded live.
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    The Hollywood term for film recorded without synchronous audio is MOS. One of the many alleged origins for the term is a German director (which director varies according to the story) declaring that a scene should be shot "mit out sound".
  - cafard 5y ago
    Anthony Burgess, who wrote English dialogue for Italian movies--whether for subtitles or dubbing I forget--said that Fellini had his cast say sequential numbers; that way, he could just order them to start again from 10. I do recall seeing someone credited with Michel Piccioli's lines on an Austrian film.
  - emsy 5y ago
    I don’t (just) mean with regards to audibility but also lip sync and intonation. It depends on the original language of course. The lip sync in squid game was noticeably off for example (Watched it with my family who dont like subs).
greatwave1 5y ago
> My impression is: The "arteestes" have taken over Hollywood, and making stylish movies take precedence over making movies that are easy to watch and hear. Based on what? In my experience, most of the worst audio experiences are middle-brow action movies (such as Edge of Tomorrow and Nolan's movies), not auteur.
psyc 5y ago
I’m in an endless cycle of watching without subtitles until I reach max frustration with understanding the dialogue, and then with subtitles until I reach max frustration with darting my eyes up and down. Upgrading my headphones did help a lot, but hasn’t completely solved the problem. The fact that so many people feel compelled to use subtitles for a language they speak is kind of absurd.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  I use subtitles all the time because I can't filter out the sounds easily. There's a baseline assumption with a lot of "high quality" movies and television that every member of the audience has perfectly working senses. The sad fact is "low quality" reality TV is much more accessible. Sporting events are also a lot easier because you can hear the people talking clearly. For a more concrete example Star Trek: Discovery is difficult for me to hear and follow everything, whereas the older TV series and the new the animated ones are much easier.
caskstrength 5y ago
> On an unrelated note: I dont know why so many movies are shot in the dark. It might make sense when viewed in a theater, but when viewing at home, I can't see anything. The last few scenes of Edge of Tomorrow were impossible to understand because of this. Actually after re-watching BladeRunner 2049 on my q95t I came to conclusion that I like watching dark scenes on my TV as much or even more then in cinema.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  Me too. I often watch movies on my OLED and think, "this is so dark it only just looks OK on this TV - it would definitely look like crap if we were at the cinema". Honestly I'm surprised that there are so many dark scenes in movies for that reason alone.
  - caskstrength 5y ago
    Yeah, but my point was that q95 is not even an OLED screen. FALD=high together with filmmaker mode do the job just fine.
    - brokenmachine 5y ago
      I wasn't specifically talking about OLED but the (lack of) quality of cinema projection, probably projection in general. I bet the q95 is very good as well. Last time I went to the cinema (a long time ago now), it was terrible how little contrast it had. Half the time I was thinking how crap it looked and I'd rather just watch it at home.
BunsanSpace 5y ago
>I dont know why so many movies are shot in the dark. Your TV is not doing HDR properly, cannot get bright enough, or is not calibrated correctly. If it's 4k, it's done in HDR which requires a TV to get bright enough, otherwise you will have to do tone mapping and turn up the gamma which can't be done in many setups. >For me-- I rarely watch movies without subtitles nowadays; can't understand half the dialog. try enabling dynamic range compression on your TV/Sound Receiver. Many movies are mastered for Cinema, which means voices are whsiper quiet and other sounds are loud af, this compresses it down to a more reasonable range for a home setup.
- wffurr 5y ago
  Dark scenes don't compress well. You get tons of banding and blocking and artifacts in dark scenes. You also have to control the ambient lighting around the TV which can be a pain in the ass. If directors want movies to be seen, they should consider the home viewing environment. Just as the article says many films consider the home sound environment and mixing for non-pristine environments.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    Having watched all of Game of Thrones on Blueray, when the final season came out I was stuck with a UK streaming service called "nowtv", which my router reported was pulling in at 4mbit a second. The entire battle of winterfell was just mush. Needless to say nowTV get no money from me.
    - wffurr 5y ago
      Given that was specifically filmed to be streamed, it's amazing how poorly the director considered what the streamed, compressed version would look like. Or that HBO didn't insist on something that would stream better.
      - iso1210 5y ago
        Was it? I thought HBO was a cable channel, which of course is streamed and compressed, but TV has always been streamed and compressed (even in analog days - 422 is compression standard as it throws away a ton of chroma, interlacing is compression as it throws away half the data, both rely on the brain to recover), so I assume you're talking about unicast streaming. I'm sure it would have looked fine if it was streaming at 20mbit. In the UK, the DPP sets contribution bitrates for close-to-tx programs* HD are 45mbit h264 or 60mbit mpeg2 for live contribution, if you have to compress it (clearly 1.5gbit is preferred), and for UHD I think it's 90Mbit h265. Those bitrates are set to assume another compression layer, but I suspect if that episode had gone out on say BBC One HD it would have been running at 15mbit+ for the entire time. * Game of Thrones I suspect would be classed as a close-to-tx delviery to reduce chances of leaks - certainly I know a broadcaster in Austrialia was receiving it on an NTT decoder over an MPLS from their LA office rather than as a file)
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hardwaregeek 5y ago
If only the artists have taken over Hollywood... Do you genuinely believe films like Edge of Tomorrow are works directed by a genuine auteur with full control? That is almost certainly not the case. The director is Doug Liman. He's not a bad director by any means but if you look at his filmography—Mr & Mrs Smith, Jumper, Bourne Identity—he's not exactly Francois Truffaut. Besides, artists do not behave consistently. Some may care less about comprehension, while others may care deeply. Lumping them all into one category and making a false dichotomy between style and comprehension are both vast oversimplifications.
nvarsj 5y ago
Video sounds like a calibration issue, streaming issue, or just a poor TV. Generally only OLED and Plasma are good at showing dark scenes due to very high contrast ratios. On everything else dark scenes just become a washed mess. Another issue is bitrate - dark scenes need very high bitrates to preserve detail. Streaming services almost across the board destroy dark detail (for a counter-example, see Meridian on Netflix, but most of Netflix's streams are not great in this regard). If you care about it, Blu-ray and OLED should give you excellent dark scene detail.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  I think the onus is on the movie+software to display right on my hardware, not on me to buy special hardware so I can see what's going on. This kind of hubris (most famously seen in the battle scenes from the last season of Game of Thrones) is really incredible.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    If you want to have a good experience, the solution is to buy a good TV. If you want to have a bad experience or don't care, buy a shitty TV. I agree lots of shows nowadays are too dark overall, but I don't agree that they shouldn't have dark scenes at all because some people bought shitty TVs.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      If I want to have a great experience, I need a great TV (and sound system, connection etc) - that much is on me. If I want to see and hear what is happening in the movie/TV show, that should just be guaranteed for the home release of the movie/TV show for any kind of popular TV/sound system - this is on the film. The gaming industry, for all its faults, has this right. Any game has some recommended system requirements, and as long as your machine meets these, it's the game's fault if it's not working well. No one will say "X is stuttering at low graphical settings on my system" "obviously, you need to buy the best GPU money can buy if you want to enjoy that game". Of course, the way to achieve this is to give consumers the ability to trade off visual (and audio) fidelity for usability on the system they have. Apparently Hollywood is entirely allergic to this idea.
sph 5y ago
> I rarely watch movies without subtitles nowadays Thank you. I've been in England for 8 years now and I've become fluent with any type of accent, yet I've still been watching movies with subs at home and it's been a crutch hard to get rid of; it made me second guess my ability to understand spoken English. I have no issues in real life, or when watching YouTube, but movies, man... there's times I miss some words or I don't understand what's going on and I am unsure if I missed some kind of plot-crucial idiomatic joke whispered 30 minutes ago. And let's not speak of Tenet. Nolan is one of my favourite film-makers, but I hated that movie because I couldn't understand half the dialogue and the plot. I'm happy to know it's not me, nor my ears failing.
- pitspotter2 5y ago
  For me it's not an issue of perception, but sheer lack of working memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2FXfFeRtJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2FXfFeRtJo
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    This is brilliant. I need to show this to anyone wondering what having a short-term memory issue feels like. I need a whiteboard and subtitles to figure that one out.
  - SilasX 5y ago
    Haha, so relatable. That's what it's felt like every time someone has tried to onboard me to a project at work, without giving me a chance to ask (enough) follow-up questions and build up a clear domain ontology as they go. On top of that, said explainer will complain that their work is "super difficult" and "hard to explain", but then, if by some miracle I can get them to sit still long enough and get up to speed, "miraculously" I'm able to onboard others. I swear it's not a super-power! I just don't assume a ton of context!
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  > And let's not speak of Tenet. Nolan is one of my favourite film-makers, but I hated that movie because I couldn't understand half the dialogue and the plot. This one is definitely not just you... I'm not sure Christopher Nolan himself understood the plot beyond "Inception, but for time machines".
laurent92 5y ago
> dark. The last few scenes of Edge of Tomorrow were impossible to understand because of this. My impression is: The "arteestes" have taken over Hollywood 1. I thought movie firms were paid to sell more modern screens with contrast ratios 3000:1, so they made it look pitch black for everyone with an older screen. Didn’t occur to me that it could be for art. 2. Oh, in terms of unwatchable shooting style, there was the hype of shoulder cameras in the 2010s, with its apogee in Bourne Legacy (4th). Most shots were 0,5s to 1 second for 20 minutes in a row, unbearable. Especially when it’s a dialog with someone expressing feelings, feels like the director is surfing on the view selectors.
brokenmachine 5y ago
>I dont know why so many movies are shot in the dark. It might make sense when viewed in a theater, but when viewing at home, I can't see anything. I can't recommend OLED TVs enough. Worth every penny. But I agree that way too many movies nowadays are too dark.

Brajeshwar 5y ago

Few years back, India theaters started adding subtitles in Hollywood/English movies. It increased viewership dramatically.

mnw21cam 5y ago

Patrick Stewart is Royal Shakespeare Company trained. You won't find an actor trained by the Royal Shakespeare Company that mumbles their lines.

PaulHoule 5y ago
If you mumble on the stage anywhere the director will (or should!) kick your ass.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
It's interesting to note that Patrick Steward might be responsible for changing the way people commonly pronounce the word Data. If so, I wonder how much impact his stage training had on how he chose to pronounce the word.
- redwall_hp 5y ago
  "One is my name. The other is not." - Lt Commander Data

whartung 5y ago

When I'm alone, I watch most everything with subtitles. Not just for this reason, but because the vocal track tends to be really low and the MUSIC and GUN FIRE track really high, so I need to crank the overall sound down. (And, yes, I've turned up my center channel on my sound system to try and compensate for this.) My Apple TV has a "tone down the explosions" setting, which helps a lot. Even still, at times I wish I had a volume knob on my remote to swing one way or the other as the scene change in the thing I'm watching. The remote is too slow. But it's annoying to have these wide ranges. Then you watch a news or talk program or something like that, and the voices are front and center and everything is peachy. Later, we can talk about how dark things have become on screen as well.

Causality1 5y ago
I would use subtitles all the time if it didn't ruin dramatic and comedic timing. I often find myself wishing movies and video games had "proper nouns only" subtitles.
- skydhash 5y ago
  I got so used to subtitles (learning English + anime). That I can put them in the background when I focus on the movie and quickly check them in case I did not understand something. Kinda like when you blur out the surrounding controls when watching YouTube.
- bentcorner 5y ago
  > I often find myself wishing movies and video games had "proper nouns only" subtitles. This would be an excellent idea! Oftentimes I'll watch something, then in the middle turn on the subtitles and learn that I was misunderstanding the name of someone/something. Even if I hear it correctly the spelling may be different and can give better context and cultural flavor.
- throwaway803453 5y ago
  Simply adding a delay to ensure the sentence doesn't appear after it is spoken would fix this. It's something that unavoidably happens with Saturday Night Live's transcript, for example, and I prefer it for comedy.

nonameiguess 5y ago

I think the dark thing is to hide crappy CGI, which doesn't blend well with physical sets and costumes under good lighting. The actual article content here about the reasons for dialogue getting worse is interesting. I'd have suspected it's mostly about the actors no longer being predominantly stage-trained, but apparently that is part of it but a small part. I don't really notice it personally, though, since my wife is deaf, so ever since marrying her, I've watched everything with closed captioning on.

drcongo 5y ago
I gave up watching Ozark because I couldn't see a damn thing that was happening, and that has no CGI at all. Sometimes it really is just a (bad) stylistic choice.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  I think it's probably more related to the move to HDR content. Modern movies/tv are shot and edited with HDR in mind. HDR usually has much more granular control over the brightness within a scene, not just that one part can get super bright. That's great for people with TV's capable of that type of playback, but for everyone else, tough luck unless you have a blacked-out home theatre room to watch all you casual TV in. I saw a great example of this in a recent LTT video[0] of a cheap "HDR" TV. The shadows all blended together and the highlights just looked like a flat white instead of a very lightly shadowed sparkle. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGHwYMwXX88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGHwYMwXX88

elliekelly 5y ago

I’m not hard of hearing at all and since switching to subtitles I’ve come across several scenes where conversations were taking place off-screen and I had no idea but for the captions.

svachalek 5y ago
Yeah my wife is not an English native speaker so we tend to leave subtitles on all the time. It's amazing how often they refer to a bit of off-screen sound or dialog that's relevant to the plot, that I didn't even notice at all.

vlunkr 5y ago

Same. I started turning on subtitles because of noisy kids, but now I have them on most of the time. I hear lots of people say they are distracting or they ruin comedic or dramatic timing, but you quickly get used to it. You learn to read them only when you need to.

yurishimo 5y ago
Yeah, you definitely get used to it. I still laugh at a lot of things and I think it's a good way to broaden your watch choices significantly because it opens up foreign films/tv. Netflix has been slowly pushing more international content in the US as many of Americans are starting to become more comfortable with reading subtitles. I do think there is some room for improvement though in that subtitles should absolutely have standardized options for how they display on screen. Some people really like the yellow, others find that much more distracting compared to a bold white lettering on a semi-opaque black background. Let the viewer decide which one they are most comfortable with unless you have some specific art directed reason why they need to be formatted a certain way.
brokenmachine 5y ago
I can't help it, I always cheat and ruin it for myself by reading before they've finished saying the line. :-) I should try delaying the subtitles so I can only read things that I've missed.

foobarian 5y ago

I do enjoy subtitles as well, but for me I have the most trouble with accents I'm not used to. My favorite examples are scifi/fantasy/historical shows where for some reason the "way the peoples talk" is invariably a heavy English, Irish or Scottish accent that is very hard to follow for me, used to American accents, even if enunciated properly. Add in the other sounds and it becomes even more difficult. The other nice feature of subtitles is sometimes there is helpful metadata there, like identifying the song playing in the background or some words not intended to be heard like a whisper or voice coming from a phone receiver.

circlefavshape 5y ago
It's always such a relief to me when someone speaks with an Irish accent - my cognitive load goes right down
- DnDGrognard 5y ago
  As some one originally from Birmingham I found the accents in peaky blinders oddly relaxing. Though I could see full "yam yam" being hard - that's the rural dialect from the black country.
rebuilder 5y ago
The Expanse went really thick on the Belter creole, to the point that it was genuinely hard to understand, although subtitles helped. For the latest season they changed it into more of an accent rather than a new language, which I understand the reasoning for, but ultimately the show suffered for it IMO. So I guess I’m saying sometimes less understandable can still be better!
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  I have tried starting the expanse twice. Both times the dialogue compared with the overall darkness of the scenes made me stop watching. I think I’d like the show, but I want to be able to see and hear what’s happening!

mikro2nd 5y ago

Flashback to "Interstellar", where the first 40 minutes involved this guy speaking in some deep-south US accent with a mouth so full of marbles that he was incomprehensible. At some point later in the movie, I bailed. Apart from the black-hole CGI it was utter crap. Perhaps the incomprehensible dialogue was a deliberate attempt to hide the paucity of plot, logic or story.

handrous 5y ago
Interstellar is a bunch of neat and well-realized space sci-fi situations stitched together by a mediocre-at-best unjustifiably-proud-of-itself plot and a solid 30 minutes too much runtime.
1_player 5y ago
Nonsense. The black hole CGI was made with the help of Kip Thorne, a friend of Nolan and a theoretical astrophysicist, who ever published a paper from his research on what supermassive black holes actually look like. Why do you say it looks utter crap then?
- globalise83 5y ago
  Apart from the black-hole CGI it was utter crap.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    My bad.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Was it that movie with the universe in the bookshelf?

Tagbert 5y ago

“British actors (usually) speak clearly” Until the last couple of decades, most British movies/TV tended to use a lot of “Received Pronunciation” English (the Queen’s English) which has very crisp enunciation. Other accents were usually relegated to very specific character roles that highlighted the rustic “cockney” or “Yorkshire” character. More recently, other British accents have been used more and many of them are the opposite of crisp enunciation. Some seem to be talking with marbles in their mouths. This seems to represent a greater democratization of the characters represented with less of an emphasis on upper classes.

j_not_j 5y ago
British actors are usually better actors too. Some US programs used British actors to "raise the game" for their US co-workers. Examples: The Americans, The Wire, Homeland, Deadwood, etc etc. And as a side-effect, the dialogue was generally more understandable.
- fireflash38 5y ago
  The Wire & understandable dialogue? Sheeeeeiiit. In all seriousness, Baltimore has a pretty heavy accent, especially in the inner city & Dundalk. It's rather comical to say that they got English actors because they were more understandable, to then turn around and make them less understandable.
- pier25 5y ago
  Doctor House too
giobox 5y ago
This is by design to some degree over the last few decades for much of the UK television landscape too. Successive UK governments have directed the BBC (state run broadcaster responsible for huge amount of UK TV) to incorporate more regional content/actors/accents. Historically the BBC had often been accused of a London/“Received Pronunciation” bias. This has been accomplished in a number of ways - opening more regional TV production studios, commissioning more content from regions outside London, hiring presenters/actors with regional accents etc, the net effect of all of which has been to broaden BBC talent pool beyond the usual cadre of “Received Pronunciation”-style presenters. As one example, I personally find the presenter Freddie Flintoff to be almost impossible to understand on any BBC show he appears on, but he has exactly the sort of accent you would never have heard on BBC 40 years ago.

emsy 5y ago

On the other hand German TV/movie acting is heavily influenced by theater so you will have dialogues that are easy to understand but sound completely unnatural. This combined with bad cinematography makes German films unwatchable for me. (German dubs of foreign movies on the other hand are usually quite good)

drcongo 5y ago
In a lot of European movies the dialogue is added in post rather than recorded live.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  The Hollywood term for film recorded without synchronous audio is MOS. One of the many alleged origins for the term is a German director (which director varies according to the story) declaring that a scene should be shot "mit out sound".
- cafard 5y ago
  Anthony Burgess, who wrote English dialogue for Italian movies--whether for subtitles or dubbing I forget--said that Fellini had his cast say sequential numbers; that way, he could just order them to start again from 10. I do recall seeing someone credited with Michel Piccioli's lines on an Austrian film.
- emsy 5y ago
  I don’t (just) mean with regards to audibility but also lip sync and intonation. It depends on the original language of course. The lip sync in squid game was noticeably off for example (Watched it with my family who dont like subs).

greatwave1 5y ago

> My impression is: The "arteestes" have taken over Hollywood, and making stylish movies take precedence over making movies that are easy to watch and hear. Based on what? In my experience, most of the worst audio experiences are middle-brow action movies (such as Edge of Tomorrow and Nolan's movies), not auteur.

psyc 5y ago

I’m in an endless cycle of watching without subtitles until I reach max frustration with understanding the dialogue, and then with subtitles until I reach max frustration with darting my eyes up and down. Upgrading my headphones did help a lot, but hasn’t completely solved the problem. The fact that so many people feel compelled to use subtitles for a language they speak is kind of absurd.

kayodelycaon 5y ago
I use subtitles all the time because I can't filter out the sounds easily. There's a baseline assumption with a lot of "high quality" movies and television that every member of the audience has perfectly working senses. The sad fact is "low quality" reality TV is much more accessible. Sporting events are also a lot easier because you can hear the people talking clearly. For a more concrete example Star Trek: Discovery is difficult for me to hear and follow everything, whereas the older TV series and the new the animated ones are much easier.

caskstrength 5y ago

> On an unrelated note: I dont know why so many movies are shot in the dark. It might make sense when viewed in a theater, but when viewing at home, I can't see anything. The last few scenes of Edge of Tomorrow were impossible to understand because of this. Actually after re-watching BladeRunner 2049 on my q95t I came to conclusion that I like watching dark scenes on my TV as much or even more then in cinema.

brokenmachine 5y ago
Me too. I often watch movies on my OLED and think, "this is so dark it only just looks OK on this TV - it would definitely look like crap if we were at the cinema". Honestly I'm surprised that there are so many dark scenes in movies for that reason alone.
- caskstrength 5y ago
  Yeah, but my point was that q95 is not even an OLED screen. FALD=high together with filmmaker mode do the job just fine.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    I wasn't specifically talking about OLED but the (lack of) quality of cinema projection, probably projection in general. I bet the q95 is very good as well. Last time I went to the cinema (a long time ago now), it was terrible how little contrast it had. Half the time I was thinking how crap it looked and I'd rather just watch it at home.

BunsanSpace 5y ago

>I dont know why so many movies are shot in the dark. Your TV is not doing HDR properly, cannot get bright enough, or is not calibrated correctly. If it's 4k, it's done in HDR which requires a TV to get bright enough, otherwise you will have to do tone mapping and turn up the gamma which can't be done in many setups. >For me-- I rarely watch movies without subtitles nowadays; can't understand half the dialog. try enabling dynamic range compression on your TV/Sound Receiver. Many movies are mastered for Cinema, which means voices are whsiper quiet and other sounds are loud af, this compresses it down to a more reasonable range for a home setup.

wffurr 5y ago
Dark scenes don't compress well. You get tons of banding and blocking and artifacts in dark scenes. You also have to control the ambient lighting around the TV which can be a pain in the ass. If directors want movies to be seen, they should consider the home viewing environment. Just as the article says many films consider the home sound environment and mixing for non-pristine environments.
- iso1210 5y ago
  Having watched all of Game of Thrones on Blueray, when the final season came out I was stuck with a UK streaming service called "nowtv", which my router reported was pulling in at 4mbit a second. The entire battle of winterfell was just mush. Needless to say nowTV get no money from me.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    Given that was specifically filmed to be streamed, it's amazing how poorly the director considered what the streamed, compressed version would look like. Or that HBO didn't insist on something that would stream better.
    - iso1210 5y ago
      Was it? I thought HBO was a cable channel, which of course is streamed and compressed, but TV has always been streamed and compressed (even in analog days - 422 is compression standard as it throws away a ton of chroma, interlacing is compression as it throws away half the data, both rely on the brain to recover), so I assume you're talking about unicast streaming. I'm sure it would have looked fine if it was streaming at 20mbit. In the UK, the DPP sets contribution bitrates for close-to-tx programs* HD are 45mbit h264 or 60mbit mpeg2 for live contribution, if you have to compress it (clearly 1.5gbit is preferred), and for UHD I think it's 90Mbit h265. Those bitrates are set to assume another compression layer, but I suspect if that episode had gone out on say BBC One HD it would have been running at 15mbit+ for the entire time. * Game of Thrones I suspect would be classed as a close-to-tx delviery to reduce chances of leaks - certainly I know a broadcaster in Austrialia was receiving it on an NTT decoder over an MPLS from their LA office rather than as a file)

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hardwaregeek 5y ago

If only the artists have taken over Hollywood... Do you genuinely believe films like Edge of Tomorrow are works directed by a genuine auteur with full control? That is almost certainly not the case. The director is Doug Liman. He's not a bad director by any means but if you look at his filmography—Mr & Mrs Smith, Jumper, Bourne Identity—he's not exactly Francois Truffaut. Besides, artists do not behave consistently. Some may care less about comprehension, while others may care deeply. Lumping them all into one category and making a false dichotomy between style and comprehension are both vast oversimplifications.

nvarsj 5y ago

Video sounds like a calibration issue, streaming issue, or just a poor TV. Generally only OLED and Plasma are good at showing dark scenes due to very high contrast ratios. On everything else dark scenes just become a washed mess. Another issue is bitrate - dark scenes need very high bitrates to preserve detail. Streaming services almost across the board destroy dark detail (for a counter-example, see Meridian on Netflix, but most of Netflix's streams are not great in this regard). If you care about it, Blu-ray and OLED should give you excellent dark scene detail.

tsimionescu 5y ago
I think the onus is on the movie+software to display right on my hardware, not on me to buy special hardware so I can see what's going on. This kind of hubris (most famously seen in the battle scenes from the last season of Game of Thrones) is really incredible.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  If you want to have a good experience, the solution is to buy a good TV. If you want to have a bad experience or don't care, buy a shitty TV. I agree lots of shows nowadays are too dark overall, but I don't agree that they shouldn't have dark scenes at all because some people bought shitty TVs.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    If I want to have a great experience, I need a great TV (and sound system, connection etc) - that much is on me. If I want to see and hear what is happening in the movie/TV show, that should just be guaranteed for the home release of the movie/TV show for any kind of popular TV/sound system - this is on the film. The gaming industry, for all its faults, has this right. Any game has some recommended system requirements, and as long as your machine meets these, it's the game's fault if it's not working well. No one will say "X is stuttering at low graphical settings on my system" "obviously, you need to buy the best GPU money can buy if you want to enjoy that game". Of course, the way to achieve this is to give consumers the ability to trade off visual (and audio) fidelity for usability on the system they have. Apparently Hollywood is entirely allergic to this idea.

sph 5y ago

> I rarely watch movies without subtitles nowadays Thank you. I've been in England for 8 years now and I've become fluent with any type of accent, yet I've still been watching movies with subs at home and it's been a crutch hard to get rid of; it made me second guess my ability to understand spoken English. I have no issues in real life, or when watching YouTube, but movies, man... there's times I miss some words or I don't understand what's going on and I am unsure if I missed some kind of plot-crucial idiomatic joke whispered 30 minutes ago. And let's not speak of Tenet. Nolan is one of my favourite film-makers, but I hated that movie because I couldn't understand half the dialogue and the plot. I'm happy to know it's not me, nor my ears failing.

pitspotter2 5y ago
For me it's not an issue of perception, but sheer lack of working memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2FXfFeRtJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2FXfFeRtJo
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  This is brilliant. I need to show this to anyone wondering what having a short-term memory issue feels like. I need a whiteboard and subtitles to figure that one out.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Haha, so relatable. That's what it's felt like every time someone has tried to onboard me to a project at work, without giving me a chance to ask (enough) follow-up questions and build up a clear domain ontology as they go. On top of that, said explainer will complain that their work is "super difficult" and "hard to explain", but then, if by some miracle I can get them to sit still long enough and get up to speed, "miraculously" I'm able to onboard others. I swear it's not a super-power! I just don't assume a ton of context!
InitialLastName 5y ago
> And let's not speak of Tenet. Nolan is one of my favourite film-makers, but I hated that movie because I couldn't understand half the dialogue and the plot. This one is definitely not just you... I'm not sure Christopher Nolan himself understood the plot beyond "Inception, but for time machines".

laurent92 5y ago

> dark. The last few scenes of Edge of Tomorrow were impossible to understand because of this. My impression is: The "arteestes" have taken over Hollywood 1. I thought movie firms were paid to sell more modern screens with contrast ratios 3000:1, so they made it look pitch black for everyone with an older screen. Didn’t occur to me that it could be for art. 2. Oh, in terms of unwatchable shooting style, there was the hype of shoulder cameras in the 2010s, with its apogee in Bourne Legacy (4th). Most shots were 0,5s to 1 second for 20 minutes in a row, unbearable. Especially when it’s a dialog with someone expressing feelings, feels like the director is surfing on the view selectors.

brokenmachine 5y ago

>I dont know why so many movies are shot in the dark. It might make sense when viewed in a theater, but when viewing at home, I can't see anything. I can't recommend OLED TVs enough. Worth every penny. But I agree that way too many movies nowadays are too dark.