Exactly why I use subtitles.
This could be because your TV sucks, or at least the audio, a lot of companies push for big Bass like would be in an explosion because it sells TVs which would be fine if they didn’t skimp on the highs and mids making speech suck.
This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.
If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they’re shouting, that’s not adding realism, they’re doing bad acting.
If the sound engineers can’t get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that’s not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they’re bad at mixing.
If the director can’t keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that’s not artistic choice, they’ve made a bad film.
For the sound engineers, your not wrong, but they don’t have the power you think they do. Asking for another take is an annoyance but accepted by the camera team and visuals, but audio is often overlooked, and you can’t just keep mixing a bad take. But, directors are on a time crunch and so a sound guy saying “actually I know that take was perfect but we can’t hear anything” is usually ignored.
This is a fair point. If people demanded their money back when a film has bad audio, I wonder if that might incentivise the industry to care more about this.
Nah, I have a good sound setup and I don’t want to be watching movies with less dynamic range because some people are using their shrilly built-in TV speakers with their children screaming in the background or $5 earbuds.
If you don’t want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup, it’s not the director’s problem, it’s the media player. Audio compression, center channel boosting, and subtitling are things that media centers have been able to do for decades (e.g. Kodi), it’s just that streaming platforms and TVs don’t always support it because they DGAF. Do look for a “night mode” in your TV settings though, that’s an audio compressor and I have one on my receiver. If you are using headphones, use a media player like Kodi that allows you to boost the center channel (which is dedicated to dialogue).
WHY are you getting down voted despite giving clear suggestions on how to get around this problem for people without a 5.1 surround sound setup?
people don’t like spending money, and it’s the entire problem. Visuals people will shell out money for a great TV, but then complain that the audio is terrible. Really people need to invest in both. If you are watching a movie on an expensive TV but didn’t do anything for audio, well then of course it won’t sound good. TVs aren’t designed to have good audio. They give you a speaker to be able to listen to something, but it’s a small cheap one or two in the back.
Fact is that for movies it’s a video and audio, and people should be thinking about both. People don’t need to go spend another 500 bucks on a 5.1 system, but even a cheapo sound bar for 150 is going to sound better - because they made it for audio. It’s an audio device. I have zero surprise that people can’t hear things well from a device that is meant to display visuals first.
I had a 5.0 setup before I even bought my first TV. I was just using my PC monitor until then.
It’s counter-intuitive but decent sound comes first. I’d much rather watch Interstellar in 360p with 5.1 audio than in 4K OLED HDR with built-in speakers.
But when you say that people get mad because they spent a grand on a TV that sounds like shit and they feel they have to defend their choices.
Agreed. In computer terms it’s similar to using integrated graphics when you bought everything else to be a gaming computer. I mean, the integrated graphics will work, but it feels like you’re missing a curcial component there. Or buying a computer with a spinning hard disk as it’s main drive now. You have to go into the purchase thinking of the whole usage in mind, not just what’s on the screen.
So the excuse you are making is that the performer on stage does not need to speak clearly and loudly, because the people in the first few rows can hear them fine.
Good tip on night mode though.
Even if I had the money and desire for a setup like that, I would not want a high audio range in media because I hate loud noises and am very sensitive.
In my opinion the big explosion can be a little bit louder than the footsteps but there doesn’t have to be a huge difference. I’ll sacrifice some realism for my eardrums.
And why can’t all dialogs be about the same volume either?
I guess it’s a hot take, but dynamic range is a very useful tool, not limited to movies but also music and almost any audio that isn’t just “talking heads”.
I do want explosions to be significantly louder than whispers.
Not everything is a podcast / video essay that needs to be mixed to minimal dynamic range.
Right?! A track like Spanish Sahara by Foals that uses the full dynamic range is such a pleasure to listen to. Then there’s In the Air Tonight which IIRC has a digital release with super compressed dynamic range. The whole point of that song is that it slowly builds up to a genre-defining drop, so it had better stand out!
But people want to listen to movies on their built-in TV speakers with children crying in the background, and they don’t want to understand how or why things are the way they are, they just want to complain that the world doesn’t revolve around them.
Does night mode fix mumbly american actors who are unintelligible at any volume?
It should reduce the difference between the quietest sound and the loudest sound in a movie, but if an actor doesn’t speak clearly in the first place, I don’t think it helps much.
Yeah, that’s what I was getting at - many new / recent movies have such poor election that it’s hard to tell what they’re saying.
Well, you gotta try it first to know if it helps or not. A lot of the time, it really is just the problem of the movie having an audio dynamic range that is too much for the sound system to handle. In those cases, it really helps when you compress that range to better fit your speaker’s capability.
I spent $400 on headphones to address this and despite having had enough issues with build quality to not recommend Bowers & Wilkins specifically, they sound damn good.
I’ve noticed that some of the best enuciators are people that have a lisp and have obviously either taken speech classes or have self taught themselves how to overcome their lisp with better enuciation.
I present to you the master orator and renowned pugilist philosopher Mike Tyson.
I feel like the real issue, is that we only get one volume bar. If it was normal to define both the minimal and maximal volume setting and have the players stretch the given dynamic range into that then it would all be good.
I have dabbled in video editing and it is SO easy to manipulate and level the audio track so that dialogue is louder than music and sound effects. This has led me to believe that movies where this is a major problem like Tenet are absolutely mixed this way on purpose, and the only reasonable conclusion to draw from that is that Christopher Nolan is insane.
How can we set volume of music, SFX and voice separately, in games but not in movies?
In games these categories of audio are calculated and mixed locally in real time, for movies they are mixed down to a single track and compressed ahead of time.
These days having three audio tracks would not be a significant problem, compared to the high resolution video track. But I guess the industry never changed.
I could already hear the forums filling with desync complaints
You could on laserdisk, but dvd got more popular
Because a video game is a program that can change it’s behavior as it’s running.
A video is a recording. It’s already been recorded.
incorrect. movies are streams of multiple layers of content.
- video
- environment audio
- effects audio
- vocal audio
environment audio are things in the background like cars, birds, children playing.
effects audio are sound effects like breaking glass, car crashes, explosions.
vocal audio is just that, the dialog between characters.
streams MUX these together into a playable movie on the fly and is how it’s possible for them to use the same movie with different language dubs.
it’s completely in the realm of possibility for them to create a control to manage the volume of each of these layers before muxing. that would break their caching strategy though.
physical media like Bluray should be able to do it though. BD players never implemented such a feature that I am aware of.
You can record multiple channels, you already have left and right recorded separately. Other channels could exist for different things, it would just need a standard to follow to be useful
It’s called compression, and most players have it in the settings somewhere. Quick and dirty is to up the volume in vlc to like 120% and lower it in system.
Have no shame in using subtitle, because american movie is either horribly sound balanced or spoken in unintelligible accent.
Commercial: DO YOU OR A LOVED ONE HAVE MESOTHELIOMA!!!
Yes. And stop fucking mumbling. And use a proper lighting for fuck sake, I don’t care if it is middle of the night in a forest, I want to be able to see what’s going on.
And please stabilise the camera. I’m not in this car chase, I’m trying to watch it without getting a migraine.
Shakey cam to cover up a limited budget for a car chase, instead of getting creative … so if the rapid cuts and wobble wasn’t there you’d see that they only had one street and couldn’t exceed 30mph
I swear there was a phase where shakey-cam had just become the in-thing.
I remember watching a TV series or a movie or something where shooting had clearly wrapped before shakey-cam was popularised. And it looked like they had just added it in post. It was unnatural movement (so, not like someone was holding the camera), and there was too much of it. I had to skip a lot of the shakey-cam scenesMe when I feed the false memories of strangers and myself onlineI swear I’ve made that exact same complaint about a show or movie! I like when I can see whats going on when I’m watching something
Good luck getting actors and directors to understand hyperealistic and method acting are not ideal on every instance.
I prefer for actors to mumble then their character is supposed to mumble, and just use subtitles. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten too used to subtitles from all the anime I watch but I always enable it for anything on YouTube or any other video content I consume.
Agree on the lightning part though, at least for action scenes, bad lighting is often used to cover for bad CGI. For narration scenes of the place is actually dark, I don’t really mind for me to basically only see silhouettes, it’s appropriate.
This is perfect lol. Now we need one for absurdly loud motorcycles ruining an evening’s cool.
Sometimes there’s also a random high pitched buzz in the background that’s louder than anything else for one whole scene. How heard would it be to just remove that frequency range or maybe see that it is louder than every other scene?
Solve guy went to music school instead of law to add that in there. He’s keeping it in there if it’s the last thing he does
Adjust the audio stream settings. It’s probably on 5.1 surround sound if you have this issue, and that means terrible audio on stereo speakers.
Sure, modern stereo mixes are still awful, but in a lot of cases, switching to an audio stream appropriate for your setup fixed a lot of ambiguity.
Watching a Christopher Nolan movie I see.
Or films from Spain. They whisper in a mumbled accent, then all of a sudden they start SCREAMING at each other.
¿que?
¡Mis oídos están muertos!
Just run the audio through a dynamic range compressor. Then everything will be just as loud as the commercials.
Exactly why I use subtitles. Seem to recall Interstellar was horrible like this.
It was great in cinema. It’s terrible at home.
Frankly annoying as hell that shows and movies can basically only be enjoyed in a cinema or with headphones.
Where’s the audio equivalent of HDR?
It’s funny because I understood what you meant, but I think it’s the exact opposite of HDR. You want to reduce the range with a compressor.
And some home cinema receivers do offer this option. Often labeled something like “night listening mode”.
I’ve found upgrading my front center speaker has greatly improved dialogue. I had my speakers from a home cinema kit and the center front was a puny crappy speaker.
There’s HDR for displays, which increases the dynamic range, but there’s also HDR for photos, where the dynamic range is compressed. So maybe they meant the latter? Very not confusing naming…
What about the HDR on my HDR TV that just makes all colors darker when enabling HDR?
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It’s called dynamic compression, often labeled as night mode. Makes quiet stuff louder and loud stuff more quiet. My AVR has it as a feature and probably most TVs as well.
192kHZ/24bit audio vs 44.1kHZ/16bit
It is why I enable “Loudness Equalization” on every audio device in Windows.
It makes soft sounds louder and loud sounds softer.
Can’t stand it otherwise either.
You can get an audio compressor extension on most browsers too. It functions by reducing volume above a threshold and increasing overall output to compensate.
On the flip side, if a poor audio mixer overly does this to make their track sound louder, services such as YouTube penalize the volume of the entire audio track.
Human ears are more sensitive to certain sounds, so boosting certain frequencies can make something sound louder without necessarily increasing the overall amplitude of the sound waves (air pressure).
Subtitles on, dumbass.
Some of us can’t use subtitles. I want to actually watch the cinematography and the actors. If text is on-screen I can’t not read it
Well since you’re obviously into film, you should invest in a proper Dolby Atmos/DTS:X surround setup to give you options. You can either turn up the center channel, put it in “dialog” mode, or enable dynamic range compression (night mode).
Regardless, tou’re not getting the full experience if you don’t have a surround sound setup. Ideally you should buy a receiver and hand pick your component speakers, but even a sound bar is better than TV speakers, so long as it’s from a well-known brand and has up firing drivers in both the front and rear. If the third number in the number of speakers is 4 or higher (ex 5.1.4), then you’re good to go.
This applies to everybody reading this, not just lagoon8622. All your dialog problems are being caused by your TV speakers.
I shouldn’t have to invest hundreds of dollars into a whole separate sound system just because the sound designers of a movie can’t properly balance to audio for stereo sound, the single most common audio set up in the entire world.
It would be nice if TVs came with a proper sound system, but since they don’t, you should factor audio into the cost of your home entertainment system. That’s like going to a restaurant and ordering food without a drink.
Blind people don’t exist.
If subtitles are on I may as well be deaf because I’m no longer watching with those damn words getting in the way. That’s what books are for.
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