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Another enormous gripe I have with modern movies, other than the (lack of) interesting moral lessons from OP, is the sound design. Loud explosions and music, wi
by BoppreH 5y ago
Another enormous gripe I have with modern movies, other than the (lack of) interesting moral lessons from OP, is the sound design. Loud explosions and music, with quiet, mumbled lines[1]. I'm forced to watch every movie with subtitles on, or to miss a good chunk of the dialogue.
And I'd go beyond that, and blame the mumbled lines for our lack of interesting quotes. It's a lot harder to have unexpected turns of phrase, speech patterns, or novel vocabulary choices when the audience is struggling to understand even the most basic, predictable sentences.
[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/ https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha...
Edit: for people mentioning audio mixing and stereo, that's only part of the problem. Even with my (admittedly cheap) 5.1 setup, I sometimes miss most of the dialogue in some scenes. I think the change from theatrical to more realistic enunciation is also to blame.
- civilized 5y agoThis was perfectly satirized a decade ago https://www.mrlovenstein.com/comic/87 https://www.mrlovenstein.com/comic/87 ...and still hasn't been fixed.
- jerome-jh 5y agoGameplay and enunciation look quite standardized in modern movies. I remember a quote from a vietnamese director who said he cannot stand movies where you do not see people breath. Look at blockbusters: you never see people breath. When you do see them breath it is very much overplayed.
- sandworm101 5y agoFemale characters get to breath. Look at marvel movies. Black Widow and Scarlet Witch are seen pausing and breathing, mostly breathing in, but that is more for male gaze than anything else. In the pauses of fight scenes they are mouth agape, almost panting as the male characters stand like stones.
- cvuls 5y agoI'm guessing you're using a stereo setup then, dialogue is usually mixed into the centre channel, downmixing a 5.1 or 7.1 stream to stereo will produce those results. even worse is if you don't downmix to stereo, and all you are hearing is front left and right, which is often just the reverb effect channels for dialogue
- kabes 5y agoI've got the full klipsch THX ultra 2 system (7.2), and I also find dialogues in modern movies much harder to understand than in older releases. I think they should mix in more of the dialogue in the front left and right channels
- mysterydip 5y agoDon't many people have just a stereo setup still (myself included)? Why would a newer standard be backwards-hostile like that?
- willcipriano 5y agoAs a counterpoint, I have both 5.1 via ARC and Dolby Atmos system hooked up via eARC and dialogue is still quiet in some modern releases. Older movies sound great though.
- cvuls 5y agothis will be because more recent movies will be utilising high dynamic ranges for audio, worked around by compressing/limiting but in doing so, you lose quality. trade-offs for everything. there was a time when stereo was seen as unnecessary faff, too. edit: movies are mixed for theatres and no longer are the home releases adjusted to suit.
- RobertMiller 5y agoIn many cases, people ostensibly using stereo sound may as well be using mono sound. Stereo speakers built into a TV that's 20 feet away, or watching a video on their smartphone without headphones; technically these people are using stereo sound but with the speakers so close to each other relative to the listener, it might as well be mono. I think if you want to make widely accessible audio content, you should be taking this into account. Make it intelligible in mono first, then worry about the rest.
- laurent92 5y agoThe “let’s turn luminosity to 0 to drive up the sale of screens with 5000000:1 contrast” got me as much as “let’s make the sound inaudible on stereo to drive up the sale of 7.1 sound systems.” VLC should have a setting such as “flatten sound to 70dB all the time and luminosity to 50% the ability of the display in average”. Even pirated packs are becoming unwatchable.
- masklinn 5y ago> The “let’s turn luminosity to 0 to drive up the sale of screens with 5000000:1 contrast. Pitch Meeting recently gave up the game there. (in the latest video, Ryan jokes that they're making the screen darker and darker until they don't even have to project a video and can just play an audiobook over the speakers)
- loonster 5y agoI've also seen GoT.
- viraptor 5y ago> I'm forced to watch every movie with subtitles The silver lining here may be that people stop treating subtitles as torture and see some non-English titles more often. There are some fun movie cultures out there beyond Hollywood, but I've found the "ugh, I've got to read‽" response common.
- tnbp 5y agoI appreciate your inclusion of an interrobang here, which, like non-English movies, is too often overlooked.
- gonzo41 5y agoI've always found that subtitles for a non english movie actually results in me watching the move an walking away with a more memorable experience than if I'd just been listening. I'm not sure if that's a common experience but it's mine at least.
- dazc 5y agoAs it happens, I was watching a foreign film (Italian) last night with english subtitles but the dialogue was also muffled and I found it just as difficult to watch.
- gcthomas 5y agoIn the UK people prefer subtitles to dubbing, although that is different across parts of Europe. Foreign language programmes are quite popular.
- JadeNB 5y agoI definitely watch all movies, English and foreign, with subtitles, and can't stand dubbed movies. I've found an amusing effect of well subtitled movies is that sometimes I forget that they're on, and, if I walk away and can only hear the dialogue but not see the subtitles, then I have to take a minute to process why I can no longer understand it ….
- glandium 5y agoI have the opposite problem. Subtitles draw my attention, even when I understand what's said just fine. And then it's extra distracting when the subtitles change the meaning of what is said (which happens both when watching Japanese movies with English or French subtitles, or English or French movies with Japanese subtitles)
- squarefoot 5y agoThat problem is due to wrong downmix from multichannel to stereo. both VLC and Kodi have options to compress audio so that louder parts can be lowered. Here's the relevant Kodi wiki page: https://kodi.wiki/view/Settings/System/Audio https://kodi.wiki/view/Settings/System/Audio
- Philip-J-Fry 5y agoThe problem exists in the cinema too, so it's not that.
- Krasnol 5y agoGod...the headache I had coming out of the new Blade Runner...terrible.
- toastal 5y agoI wear earplugs for live music when I go to the movies nowadays
- Krasnol 5y agoI thought about something like that too but than there are dialogues which are already hard to understand because they're not loud enough just before you get blasted with sound effects again...well yeah..one more reason why I don't go to the movies so much anymore.
- Pasorrijer 5y agoA response to your edit, I was on a zoom call with current musical editors / producers and that is 100% part of the problem. Many of today's actors /actresses almost mumble their lines and make it absolute hell for the audio people to pick them up, whereas theatre trained individuals were loud and enunciate the crap out of everything.
- sandworm101 5y agoThey are trying to be authentic. That is what actors are taught these days, to portray "realistic" characters that move and sound as realworld people. The net result is mumbling and tiny little movements that in turn mandate tight closeups and asmr-like microphone placement. Try that on a stage or in any live performance and you will be called wooden. Compare actors like Samuel L Jackson, Percival Ulysses, Jane Lynch or Rowand Atkinson. They dont need closeups and microphones secreted in hairlines. But they also rarely get leading drama roles, more often appearing as side characters who run on stage to tell the team the dramatic news.
- gcthomas 5y agoOne big problem is that US actors have a history of recording adverts, so they are not classically trained, unlike a lot of British actors who have backgrounds on the stage and so have learned to speak clearly. I hate having to watch movies and TV with the subtitles on — the mumbling may be realistic, but I'm paying for escapism.
- sandworm101 5y agoYou probably hate clips like this. Male characters are dramatic, with big movements and loud voices to portray fear and disorder. The three female characters, including a very tough marine, are quiet and docile to engender escapist feelings of worry and protection. So which volume setting do you use? The camera is forced into an awkward zoom to reconcile the two. https://youtu.be/VrVZHxH2O1I https://youtu.be/VrVZHxH2O1I "They mostly come at night. Mostly."
- greggsy 5y agoI’d wager that many engineers are still mixing for the cinema experience, but the vast majority of people are consuming media via their TV’s, laptops, tablets and phones, with an extremely diverse range of audio quality and placement. Findings a happy medium is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. There’s certainly a need for a ‘context aware’ format that can dynamically change the way sound - particularly speech - is delivered based on the device, volume, or even physical setting. (I suspect that this is about as useful as the ‘loudness’ button on many older amps though.)
- elliekelly 5y agoI can’t wait for the day Netflix gives us the ability to adjust volume by category like video games. Different sliders for dialogue, background music, explosions, etc.
- ratww 5y agoThat would be a fair bet, but a lot of modern movies are difficult to understand in a cinema as well.
- driverdan 5y agoCan you give examples? I've heard this before but have never noticed it myself. Is it possible you have hearing loss that you're unaware of?
- bawolff 5y agoI personally don't find this happening as much as OP says, but nolan movies (e.g. interstellar) are an example where i have definitely had this.
- driverdan 5y agoI've watched Interstellar with multiple audio setups and didn't have an issue understanding the dialog. It may have a higher dynamic range than most movies but that's a good thing.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoDefinitely a known Nolan issue. I will go to my deathbed attesting that Tenet was the absolutely worst sound mixed movie of all time!
- bawolff 5y agoI don't think not understanding the dialog matrially changes that movie.
- BoppreH 5y agoAlmost every movie that features Tom Hardy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iSOWRsmibc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iSOWRsmibc And from personal experience, from the last movie I watched: https://youtu.be/AJ0uqAr8Q4E?t=106 https://youtu.be/AJ0uqAr8Q4E?t=106 . I'm not a native speaker, but (1) I've been communicating exclusively in English for years, (2) my hearing is quite good, (3) I'm wearing headphones, (4) there's nothing else happening in the scene apart from dialogue and music. But I still cannot understand Anne Hathaway's two sentences following the time I linked. This movie also had a lot of another pet peeve of mine, which is shoulder dialogue where the foreground character is clearly not speaking, or saying something different.
- hedora 5y agoI've noticed an even newer effect: Making scenes almost all black. It might be a software problem with the HBO Max app's gamma and brightness settings, but it's absolutely the case that, during the day with thin curtains drawn, I had to put a thick blanket over my head and an iPad in order to see the highlights in some of the darker scenes in one of their recent original productions (probably Raised by Wolves Season One; can't remember for sure). These were action scenes with grunting and no dialogue, so the blanket was the only way to follow the plot.
- Cerium 5y agoIn the past I have adjusted the black level on my video player to make movies like this watchable. It won't look good, but you can make the few shades they used visibly different.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y agoThis sounds a lot like "dynamic contrast", i.e. varying the display's light source brightness with the scene brightness. I can't speak to whether or how the iPad implements it, but it's a common behavior of LCD screens. It's configurable on some devices.
- drexlspivey 5y agoYou can just cover the light sensor (right next to the camera) if you don’t want to mess with menus instead of using a blanket.
- thfuran 5y agoBut that would dim the display. Selectively illuminating the sensor would boost display brightness.
- mixedCase 5y agoYep I subbed to HBO to get GoT a couple of hours before "other sources" and immediately cancelled mid-way through last season. Night-time fights were just pitch black and a few smudges moving around the screen. They probably just throw the thing into ffmpeg with the fewest amount of arguments that satisfies a codec and bandwidth cost metric and call it a day. However, I've never had any problems under the same situations on Netflix using a "blessed" 4K HDR10 set-up (Fire TV Cube and a cheap Hisense TV).
- analog31 5y agoIf this were a conversation about mixing for recorded or live music, someone would invariably mention hearing damage. It's a huge problem. Could it be that the technicians are deaf?
- ZiiS 5y agoI certanly also struggle with modern dialog. Another common factor is twenty years ago my hearing was much better.
- seanp2k2 5y agoIt’s also because producers and directors make more use of the “dynamic range” that theatre sounds systems are capable of today. They paid a ton of money for that music and they’re going to make sure you hear it. In surround setups, most of the dialogue is mixed into the center channel, which is behind the screen in theaters. At home, if you don’t have a center channel, you’re either relying on the stereo mix and however they decided to balance the speech on that, or if you play the surround version on a nice processor, it’ll probably let you adjust the center channel. An audio compressor would also help here on consumer devices, as that would allow a variable degree and ratio of dynamic range flattening. Basically, it can form a band of volume and ensure that quiet sounds and loud sounds both fit into that. Sadly, most consumer gear, although already equipped with all the DSP they need to implement this in software, thinks consumers are absolute morons and/or that this wouldn’t be a selling point, so we get watered-down poorly-implemented dialogue boost features or largely no option at all except for the consumer to “ride the fader” and constantly adjust the volume. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/soundbar-can-help-hear-dialogue/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/soundbar-can-help-he... has some info on what’s out there today to address this, but yeah: it’s mostly fixable if consumers had control of the center channel mix + a configurable compressor + configurable EQ. There are ways to do this in consumer-friendly ways for folks who don’t know of care to learn about mastering audio for film, but the current situation is pretty bad and it really makes me wonder why so much mixing targets home theater setups vs built-in crap TV speakers. At very least, streaming companies could provide an alternate audio track [algorithmically] mixed specifically for built-in audio devices that has more clear dialogue. I personally watch with subtitles because I don’t want to miss a word.
- commandlinefan 5y ago> I'm forced to watch every movie with subtitles on Me, too… but my kids say they can hear everything just fine and please turn off the subtitles. It’s possible we’re just getting old.
- lleb97a 5y agoCould it be we are use to media/news reporting so we struggle with movies?
- zeruch 5y agoI agree with you on the former, not the latter. I find the "mumbling" more realistic dialogue (often in scenes where the script is supposed to be cramped and confusing) and feels more like natural human interaction. But the imbalance of dynamics makes it problematic.