I hate having to watch movies and TV with the subtitles on — the mumbling may be realistic, but I'm paying for escapism.
"They mostly come at night. Mostly."
"It would be extremely painful"
"You're a big guy!"
"For you."
hmm, you're probably right.
When the whole thing is clearly exaggerate comedy, then it don't bother me. But, if I am supposed to immerse myself in the story, it does not work.
Instead, actors are often chatting in front of green screens without any of the appropriate ambient sounds or emotional context.
I am not saying intense emotions universally result in yelling, but people very rarely whisper when say calling 9/11. Even just kids playing tag get lauder.
They don't whisper to the phone, they will put more conscious effort to talk into 911 call ... or the shaken mute person won't be the one making call.
You seriously never had to ask people to talk louder in noise environment? The "people yell" assumption is artifact of movies, not reality.
As to going mute, some people do completely shut down in an stressful situation, but that’s associated with for more than their voice. I have no issue with an actor in a war movie endlessly stacking ammo from point A to B. But if their having a coherent conversation, activity and productively responding to stimulation, that’s very different.
English is a rather unusual language that the meaning is mostly carried only by consonants, while vowels are almost meaningless.
What actors seem to be doing is that they focus too much on their accent, and the vowels that define it, and mostly ignore the consonants. Which means you can only hear the accents, but not what is being said.
Sorry but this sounds like nonsense. Vowel distinctions absolutely matter in English. Think of how many words would be indistinguishable otherwise: bout, bought, bet, bat, bit, beet, boot, boat, bite, but, and bait are all distinguished from each other only by a vowel.
(And, yes, these all sound quite different to me, an American, though non-native speakers often have trouble making or recognizing some of the distinctions. Some native speakers further distinguish “bot” from “bought”, but I don’t.)
Generally this is in English's favor, I pronounce button differently than my NZ friends, but they still understand me.
English has 5, and no real consensus on how they are used, let alone the tone of voice that you need to use to indicate a specific word.
In tonal languages a rising vowel note is different than a falling, rising and then falling, falling then rising, flat or tumbling tone. The closest English has is the rising tone one makes when asking a question, but that doesn't change the meaning of the words entirely, just the context.
Again, we are not talking about “letters” or the writing system here. Yes, there are many distinct vowels that are written the same, and conversely many different ways of writing the same vowel, but that’s irrelevant to the discussion of spoken language.
And, yes, I know what a tonal language is, and you’re right that English isn’t one. It’s hardly unique or special in that. Most languages aren’t tonal.
My previous example of how to pronounce 'button' varies depending upon where you're from...but is still recognized by the most English speakers. Some folks pronounce it but-ton, others but'n.
Water can be pronounce in a variety of ways. Actually the list is endless...I'm surprised you're arguing the opposite. Compared to Spanish, or any number of languages where the vowels are very specific (disregarding the Castilian ascent), English is very forgiving. Bringing up Khmer's letters was to show that the vowel sounds have been formalized in that language, where English allows for much more variance.
Listen to any non-native English speaker, they can be all over the place and still understood.
This is a distinction in consonants! Different realizations of the /t/ phoneme. The whole claim that started this thread was that English expresses information almost exclusively in consonants, not vowels. Your example directly contradicts that very claim.
Anyway, English is _far_ from the only language where different dialects have a different set of vowels. Quebec French for example has completely different ones from French French.
No. Have you tried understanding someone who can only pronounce consonants but also whose dialect is foreign? It's unintelligible. Vowels absolutely serve a purpose. You're just used to hearing your own words spoken back to you in the same way you've always expected them.
There's zero correlation between how loud someone says their lines and how loud they are in the resulting mix when ADR is used.
There is a limit to how far you can push this for lines recorded live because of environmental noise, but in that case there's more control than ever before because of software like iZotope RX (which is close to magic).
The technical term for this is “Dialogue LRA” measured in LU: https://s3.amazonaws.com/izotopedownloads/docs/insight200/en... - this link also mentions some of the standards around this and now to use their software to adhere to those standards.
LUFS is also relevant here as a measure of loudness: https://blog.landr.com/lufs-loudness-metering/
https://auphonic.com/blog/2020/10/08/dialog-loudness-normali...
and
https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2018/11/10/is-dol...
Give some insight into how this works.
Sorry, but I work with a lot of Hollywood production companies and have been on plenty of sets, and this is a load of crap.
Today's actors and actresses speak their lines just fine. The problem is the trend toward louder audio f/x and music, which can drown out voices if not mixed correctly. See, e.g., Tenet for a horrific example of audio mixing, and the characters can barely be heard even when yelling; compare to The Batman where Pattinson rarely speaks above a whisper but is audible and understandable in every scene.
Are modern movies shot in reporting style instead, with all the visuals and sounds recorded once and simultaneously? That would surprise me.
Seems much more likely that, as other posters have said, movies are edited to play on the big screen at high volume.
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.
Also, though with less frequency, sometimes when the subtitles are in the same language as the speech, which I agree is distracting. (I am monolingual, so do not experience it otherwise.) But I had rather experience that dislocation than dubbing, which to me reliably ruins even a beautiful movie. Of course à chacun son goût!
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.)
These were action scenes with grunting and no dialogue, so the blanket was the only way to follow the plot.
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).
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
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.
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.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-fix-movies-that-are-really-qui...
https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#acompressor
https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#dynaudnorm
To use them with mpv you'd do something like `mpv --af=lavfi="[dynaudnorm=param1=value1:param2=value2:param3=value3]" ...`
(make sure the first parameter is preceded by a '=', not a ':' because reasons)
If that's commonly the case then whatever is doing the downmix isn't fit for purpose.
I found on Kodi you can boost the centre channel when downmixing, this helped quite a bit for me but I still watch with subtitles.
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.
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)
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-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.
...and still hasn't been fixed.
And from personal experience, from the last movie I watched: 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.
I will go to my deathbed attesting that Tenet was the absolutely worst sound mixed movie of all time!
But the imbalance of dynamics makes it problematic.
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.
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-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.