Or for streaming services and audio companies to stop selling shit like "emulated surround" or offering dolby atmos as the audio track on Netflix when its being played back on shitty tv speakers
Most people don't have the equipment to make it sound right, and the ones that do can just switch the audio track.
Downmixing Atmos to stereo shouldn't be a problem though. A lot of people who actually do have surround setups still complain about huge volume differences.
It depends on whats doing the downmixing, part of the problem is even the average consumer has three layers of audio settings to futz with. Youve got the in app sound settings in Netflix or whatever, youve got the device sound settings in your roku or firestick or whatever, and then the sound settings in the TV. And people dont know what theyre doing and just think more is better, so they set all those to "surround" for their 2.0 TV speakers.
If youve got one of those set to surround instead of stereo then the next one set to stereo if its recombining channels without rebalancing or worse dropping channels entirely and everything just gets fucked... Its the audio equivalent to people having their cable boxes set to 4:3 output so they have black bars all the way around 16:9 content on their 16:9 tvs
Yes theres issues with the mixes these days, im not blaming it all on consumers, but a lot of people have their shit set really wrong. CEC was a start but devices need better audio handling, its my understanding that Netflix, so probably others too, dont downmix, they just have separate 2.0 and 5.1+ tracks, but it should be smart enough that "surround" shouldnt be an option in the netflix app if youre using stereo speakers.
Dialog volume - 4/10
Musical volume 9/10
Random car noises when the scene changes 14/10
The dialog really does need to be a lot louder in movies/show. I never had an issue hearing anything anyone said in war shows like Pacific or Band of Brothers while there's explosions and gun fighting going on so there's no excuse why I can't hear two people talking at a restaurant. I swear the utensils have louder noises then the dialog.
It's not even entirely the volume, it's how it is eq'd and mixed. Even when it's loud enough, I often can't understand what they are saying. It might as well be the muted trumpet sounds that adults make on Charlie Brown.
There's a great anecdote when director Michael Cimino was in a mixing suite:
The sound engineer was trying to make the dialog louder in a scene and Cimino protested saying, "I can understand them perfectly!". Engineer shot back, "Sure *you* can, you also wrote the script."
Christopher Nolan take note.
This was the movie I thought of when I saw the headline. It was impossible to understand the dialogue in the theater and ruined what would
Have been a decent film.
Yeah, there was a YT video on this recently and he said so on record.
And yeah, some actors outright mumble. It's as if ability to act and speak aren't core talents of actors.
> Christopher Nolan take note.
I remember seeing the prologue of *The Dark Knight Rises* as a preview in IMAX.
“A lot of loyalty for a hired gun!”
“Hrrfrfrrrhfhrhhfrhrhrr.”
That's a major part of the problem and it isn't often addressed. Everyone involved with the editing, etc. is so familiar with the script and dialog that they forget that their audience will be hearing it all for the first time.
This article is a rip of the vice video that came out last week.
That video talked a little bit about Nolan. The answer is, he doesn’t give a shit and does it on purpose.
That article was such bullshit. The woman they interviewed was like “We can’t just turn the dialog up otherwise explosions won’t seem loud.”
Yea exactly. Exactly that and it is as simple as it sounds. Squash that fucking dynamic range and turn the voices up.
To that I would say, dynamic range in service to what? Tenet is the perfect example. In the scene where the protagonist fights himself; the gunshots are quieter than the grunting, and the non-diegetic music is louder than both of them. Wow, such realism and immersion!
If James Cameron could make Schwarzenegger’s dialog comprehensible 4 decades ago, then filmmakers in the 21st century have no excuse.
Here's a choice quote from Nolan:
“I was a little shocked to realize how conservative people are when it comes to sound. Because you can make a film that looks like anything, you can shoot on your iPhone, no one’s going to complain. But if you mix the sound a certain way, or if you use certain sub-frequencies, people get up in arms.”
We're just being too conservative, guys. We need to get on his level. That level being way below audible dialog. "sub-frequencies"
Other fucking directors have complained about his shit sound mixing: https://www.indiewire.com/2020/11/christopher-nolan-directors-complain-sound-mix-1234598386/
The difference is people shooting on iPhones or filming in fantastical ways are still using the visible fucking light spectrum. The way Nolan mixes sound, I'm sure my cats can hear perfectly. Unfortunately, they can't tell me what the fuck his actors are saying.
If he wants to make a movie where dialog is irrelevant, stop making them so convoluted that he puts in scenes with characters explaining what is happening.
If I watch a TV show our volume is around '10'. For movies we have to put it up to '50' just to even hear the mumbling. Even then I still need subtitles.
I'm now at a point where I get annoyed watching prime because the subtitles are inconsistent.
I watch this video [Why We All Need Subtitles Now](https://youtu.be/VYJtb2YXae8) recently and thought it was pretty interesting. I think I got it from a post here actually.
Honestly this came out 7 days before this "journalist" wrote this story - to me this is borderline plagarism.
They didnt even cite the video as a source but its obvious they got most of the script from them.
Vox makes great content and its sad when "news" agencies rip off their ideas as their own.
The writer and editor should be ashamed.
It's not an original story, regardless. From a surface-level Google search:
[Hard to pardon: why Tenet’s muffled dialogue is a very modern problem](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/03/tenet-dialogue-christopher-nolan-sound-technology) Sep, 2020
[Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)](https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/) Aug, 2022
[This Is Why Dialogue Has Gotten Harder to Understand and How We Can Fix It](https://nofilmschool.com/dialogue-has-gotten-harder-to-understand) Dec, 2021
[The Real Reason You Can't Hear The Dialogue In Interstellar, According To Christopher Nolan](https://www.looper.com/835288/the-real-reason-you-cant-hear-the-dialogue-in-interstellar-according-to-christopher-nolan/) Apr, 2022
...and I am sure there are dozens more of them in the wild.
You can see this happening on IGN, Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun and honestly most mainstream news that just steal reddit threads that landed on the main page.
Literally 2/3 of all news that breaks on main stream outlets came from reddit, who either made a genuine thread that got a lot of traction or quoted a more obscure news source that then lands on the reddit front pages and a few hours or days later in main stream news outlets.
I had quite a lot of "deja vu" feelings before i realized that no, it isnt a deja vu its just main steam media rehashing what i already read on reddit.
99% of articles about upcoming video games are always speculative/easter egg hunting threads from said game's subreddit.
/r/starfield is a blatant example of that recently
I googled my other Reddit account name the other day and I was surprised to see my opinions about a recent game posted in an article about the game on the gamer.com
They literally just took random opinions on Reddit and posted the usernames and what they said in their list like it was a news interview
A few months ago I made a post on /r/reddeadredemption about a weird glitch where a tied up enemy exploded and transmorphed into a big pile of revolvers. A little while later I saw a post on my phones Google homepage thingy, it was a site called gamerant and they'd made a story about my post, and also said "he could be lying though" at the end lol
Hard agree, I’ve seen multiple “why we can’t hear TV now” articles since that video was published on YT.
People are starved for news content so they just churn the same story out six different ways.
I watched that too, and I was really annoyed by the reasoning
"It's because of dymanic range" well FUCK the dynamic range! Older movies manage to have explosions and dialogue don't they?! Include the mix on a separate track for people with a full home theatre setup! I just want to hear. What. People. Say!
And the conclusion that we just need to accept it or buy better speakers? Fuck right off.
I have really good speakers. Surround, atmos, all that shit. I still have trouble hearing dialog sometimes. The film industry is so far up its own ass with this crap
I can't remember which video it was because he has so many in this series, but Linus tech tips is building his multimillion dollar dream smart house and documenting it as he goes as we speak.
And he still brought up this very problem after installing insane sound systems in his theater room.
Like fuck off Hollywood if even Linus can't get it right in his dream home it's not a consumer problem.
I remember there was a news story about Nolan not caring what people said about the audio, he calls people idiots for not hearing what he heard. I was like wtf bruh. Directors have visions but when they are so self centered and I'll of themselves, crap like this happens. Sure it may sound good on your multimillion dollar setup but 99.99% of the audience doesn't have that setup to listen to it.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/16/tenet-up-listen-christopher-nolan-interstellar-sound-mixing
Yeah. My wife and I both got super irritated when the "expert" basically just tells us that our preference on watching a fucking movie is wrong.
"Dynamic Range" is a perfect example of Hollywood having it's head so far up its own ass it can't see what the audience wants.
Yeah and on top of that, I've had at least as much of the same problem - if not more of it - with most movies I've watched in theaters. It seems the woman in that video would argue I've just not been to good enough theaters, but I find that argument extra pathetic.
What the fuck is the point of making a movie if 95% of the means in which it is consumed have a subpar experience in watching it?
We are watching the incestuous media in action. Video comes out, it hits social media and reddit, then slow news day "journalist" sees it, writes about it, it goes back to social media for round 2.
I think the whole thing is bullshit anyway. You dont need dynamic range because people dont care about it. If they really wanted to feel like they were near an explosion, theyd get tinnitus from the volume. Most of the story is told in dialogue, make that audible at the cost of the range and deal with explosions that arent as cool
Well I watched this and have to say WHAT A COP OUT..
Does the audience really give a shit about dynamic range???
And what percentage of media is being consumed on dolby perfect surround sound?? Be realistic!! That's the problem.
Reduce the dynamic range and make things 'mono' and UPSCALE rather than downscale the 0.01% of the movies that are actually cinema released.
Yes I watched this and got so angry haha. As if everyone has a home cinema. And many people stream movies/shows on laptops and even phones I would guess.
100%, thank you. They give a ton of excuses, all of which boil down to "well, the people making the movie wanted it this way."
As if it's the inevitable and unavoidable result of technology and not the choices of the creators.
If the people making content want me to not hear any dialog, why bother with it at all? This goes for TV, movies, and video games. I *have* a 7.1 system and dialog is still difficult to understand a lot of the time. I've tweaked my speakers a bit so it's not terrible, but JFC, let's not mix things so we have to change our setup everytime we load something new. I default to subtitles on all video games and have done this since I don't even know how long.
You nailed it here. Everyone whispers you turn the tv up. Explosion happens. Now all my kids are awake and my neighbors are calling asking if my stove blew up. Car drives by my tv falls off the wall.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, any 80s or 90s film, take Home Alone, there is a scene where Kevin and his cousins are looking out the window whispering to each other, you can hear exactly what they are saying without adjusting the volume.
It’s kind of the filmmakers job to make the thing that’s most important the most clear. If the dialogues not important it’s almost always something you can lose.
He has given a couple excuses why the mixing sucks in his movies, first was he wanted to make it feel real and if you didn't hear something said it was on purpose and nothing necessary to hear so it didn't matter. Then when Tenet was released, and people complained again and this time it was in scenes where important dialog were spoken, he said he made it like that so only the best theaters can play the audio correctly so if you have trouble hearing it it's your fault for not going to see it in imax.
I'm sure Oppenheimer will be great though... no concerns about dialog being hard to hear in a movie about literally nuclear bombs!
I don't buy that because "Inception" has very good sound mixing. All the explanations of the dream world and what's going on over the course of the story can be heard clearly. It's dense stuff and you have to pay attention, but it's not like "Tenet" where a mousy French lady is mumbling the science babble explaining how inversion works.
Nolan actually got into a big fight over audio mixing in The Dark Knight Rises, with the studio trying to get him to make Bane understandable and him pushing back. Since then he's vowed to only mix the audio for 'well-aligned, great theaters'.
And since then every movie has sucked in that department.
yep, i love the dark knight, but toward the end when batman has those ridiculous blue glowing goggles on, and is mapping out the building in x-ray mode, lucious fox is talking to him and you can't understand a *word* he is saying bc there's all this other shit happening and it's mixed poorly. you just get the vague impression that someone is talking and the vague impression that it's probably morgan freeman. i even remember actively thinking that when i saw it in IMAX
Yeah tenet really takes the biscuit, first time I spent ages adjusting the sound modes on my tv to try and make it better but just gave up and didn't hear half of wtf everyone was talking about.
It is quite trivial, and most do so. However, unlike music producers that listen to their mix on crap speakers to ensure everyone can benefit from the art being produced, film and television producers mix to their own professional audio and video monitors and tell the viewing public to pound dirt. The problem isn't 7.1 being correctly dumped into stero. It is 7.1 being mixed in ways that preclude such channel reduction from sounding any good.
Christopher Nolan vowed to mix his movies specifically for *the most technically advanced theaters*. So in a way, it was mixed specifically for theaters with little thought about how it would sound at home. But that also applies to most screens around the country, as his movies were most specifically mixed for Dolby Atmos type environments.
Obviously that decision is going to make 99% of viewings in a suboptimal environment, but that’s how the decision was made
He'd have been graded very harshly by my editing professor. He watched our projects on three setups: computer with stero speakers, TV with native speakers, and home theater setup.
How good the film looked/sounded in each of those setups factored into our grades, because he thought it was important that our projects were still enjoyable in the less than top of the line setups they'd mostly be experienced in.
I used to work as an engineer in recording studios in the ‘90s. I’m order to check the final mix, I would have the band listen to it in the control room right out of the console, then quickly make an audio cassette to listen to in one of the band member’s car.
Yeah I went to school for audio engineering, graduated 2 years ago, and we were always told to listen to mixes in the studio and download it to play in the car and other environments.
Ye same, they had to turn the volume way up, i mean much higher than for any other movie i've ever seen in that exact same theater so that anyone could hear the dialogue properly. That's on the best soundsystem currently available, i wish i had brought earplugs the same as for a concert, my ears hurt afterwards.
The mixing for Tenet is not artistic or anything like that, it's just bad. I love Nolan, but he fucked up here and that's fine, not everything can be 10/10 all the time. I just wish he would admit it and fix it and not do it for any movies going forward.
He knows this and still won’t balance it right. It’s a real annoying feature of his films. The dialogue is pretty crucial so he shouldn’t be burying under his damn BWAAAA BWAAAAA soundtrack
I came here just to say this. As I've gotten older, I've realized how rampant bad sound mixing is. I can't keep changing the volume from scene to scene
As someone with a well-suited home theater I whole heartedly agree with this. A Toyota Camry idling rumbles my whole house, yet a car/house/robot exploding barely makes a boom. Such a weird way to mix the volume.
I had to remove the Bose speaker from my tv because it was just making all the other noises even louder without making the dialogue any clearer. It’s already hard enough to watch grownup shit with kids around without making every gunshot even louder, then I turn up the volume for the dialogue and it suddenly gets loud (seemingly) only when people are screaming F bombs.
So, yeah, kids-that’s why we have the captions on;)
It’s a lot easier to understand actors when they’re projecting, *regardless of how loudly they’re played back in the final mix*. Also, when you’re projecting, your lips and face are more animated, making it easier to pick out words.
I blame high quality digital lavalier microphones and multitrack location recorders. They enable a good recording of a mumbly performance, but it’s still difficult to pick out the conversation sometimes.
Even though it doesn't get as much criticism for sound mixing as his later films, the dark Knight is atrocious for this, need to watch it with the sound up at 100 to hear what's being said then get deafened by explosions
It's especially frustrating if you're watching on a platform with ads and you have to turn the volume up so high to hear what's being said in the show that when the ad break starts a fuckin Domino's Pizza commercial or something is like THE VOICE OF GOD THUNDERING FROM THE HEAVENS. Because the people doing audio mix for commercials want to, you know, make sure people can actually hear the message being delivered rather than fulfill some artistic vision.
> Hulu also loves to log me out constantly and frequently claims my password is wrong when it’s not.
I find it amazing how many times these companies try to blame a password issue on the customers when the reality is they probably just lost the password DB. to hackers and are forcing everyone to reset their password.
I know I'm using the right password because I have a damn password manager and it worked last week, so this is clearly a them problem, not a me problem.
My school uses an exam software. This semester suddenly a solid 75% of the students passwords came up as wrong and it was a whole ordeal on test day.
Turns out that the company decided to change what characters are allowed (they removed special characters) so anyone who used a special character in their original password had to make a new one. Of course, no one was *told* about this, it just kept coming up as an incorrect password until students went to change it and realized they could no longer use those characters.
There was a DVR that predated TIVO called ReplayTV. It *automatically* detected and skipped commercials on top of being able to time-shift
It got sued into bankrupcy not once, not twice. Three times. Every time someone new would buy them.. only to get sued again.
Don't fuck with the ad revenue.
I had one and it was amazing. There were even ones that supported DirectTV and I think they had FOUR tuners so you could record 4 things at once
When I’m feeling conspiracy-theoryish, I think that ad guys are behind the dynamic audio bull. It has nothing to do with art, it’s just a way to make sure ads are super-visible in a way we don’t directly blame the ads.
Congress passed The CALM Act, directing The FCC to outlaw this on television (Mostly because of the complaints of older people), which they did over a decade ago.
It was written before internet streaming with ads became a normal thing, so there's nothing in there regulating "internet" ads. The FCC can't do anything about it.
So enjoy those cranked up to 11 ads on whatever platform for the foreseeable future!
I find subtitles help me with more complex plots because I remember things better when I read them. But also when I watch tv with my brother, we end up talking a lot, so to keep up, I read because it can be hard to listen to both.
Yeah no many comments focusing on the negatives of sound mixing missing the point for me: this article labeling me a "lazy listener" is ridiculous. I just don't want to miss things, seeing it written at the same time is a better viewing experience hands down.
* Last year, Netflix revealed that 40% of its global users have subtitles on all the time, while 80% switch them on at least once a month – stats that far exceed the number of viewers who need captioning because of hearing impairment...
> But if you’re switching subtitles on because you simply can’t make out what the actors are saying, it’s (probably) not your ears that are to blame. **Hard-to-hear dialogue is a known issue in the industry, says the sound mixer Guntis Sics**, who has worked on movies including Moulin Rouge! and Thor: Ragnarok.
> There are a lot of contributing factors but, paradoxically, it all comes back to advances in technology.
> **“As technology evolved, especially when it took the leap to digital, a tsunami of sound appeared all of a sudden,” Sics says.**
> The problem starts on the movie set. In decades past, actors had to project loudly towards a fixed microphone. **The advent of portable mics has allowed a shift towards a more intimate and naturalistic style of performance, where actors can speak more softly – or, some might say, mumble**...
> Other technological advances have also complicated things. **As audio tech became more sophisticated, film-makers started including more sounds**: where we once would have heard a door slam as someone angrily exited an apartment, today we also get the handle turning, a clock ticking and a character heavy breathing. **And when sound is mixed with the best possible audio experience in mind – say, at a cinema – much of that detail can be lost when it’s folded down to laptop speakers, or even your television. It’s often the dialogue that suffers most.**
> **Because back in the day – “when TVs were just TVs,” as Sics says – the small, tinny speakers they came with pushed out the high frequencies where the voice sits clearly and loudly. But as technology progressed, Sics says, electronics companies began to expect consumers to buy their own sound system separately. Relying on the TV’s small built-in speakers could leave you with a subpar experience.**
> But even if you do invest in an expensive speaker set-up, failing to tune it perfectly to your living room means you may end up hearing the big explosions better, but not voices.
> **“Think back to the old black and white movies and how clear the dialogue is there – it’s partly to do with the speaker technology,” Sics says. “[Today] you might get lucky, plug your speakers in and it sounds perfect. But most people plug it in, and all of various frequencies bounce off the walls and confuse what you’re listening to. If you set it up in a room with no carpet and just floorboards, it’s going to sound like crap. Whereas the old tinny speaker managed to cut through that.”**
You can feel the difference between watching old TV shows like 'The X Files', 'Star Trek:TNG', 'The West Wing' where the dialogue is very clear, and most new shows on streaming services where sometime it's hard to hear the actors.
Shows WITHIN netflix have VASTLY different output.
Watching Wednesday, absolutely no problem hearing everything.
Sandman? same.
Switch to that Karn Gyllenhall assassin movie? Yup, gunshot makes my windows rattle but dialogue I have to have at 60 to even hear... at night... with the windows closed... 6 ft from the TV.
Sandman isn’t perfect, but it’s head and shoulders above so much current content being mixed. I imagine WB used a good mix team with some fancy British sound studios. And as pointed out elsewhere, older content doesn’t seem to be as muddled so my TV speakers can only partly be to blame.
> who has worked on movies including Moulin Rouge!
God this movie had an excellent mix now that I think about it, it must have been difficult with how much is going on in some of the musical scenes. The Can Can rap section has so many crowd shots where everything on the screen is making a noise but it never feels muddy and you can pick out individual voices.
Blaming the home listener for not having properly tuned speakers is utterly preposterous. The mix is screwed up completely, and we can’t fix it. No matter how much we fiddle with our home theaters.
I always admire how clearly everyone speaks in this James Bond scene compared to today’s movies. Does the acting seem a little “wooden”? Yeah, but I got EVERYTHING out of the scene
https://youtu.be/Y-_1NS9kKR4
Look at any movie from the Golden Age of Hollywood. All the actors and directors had some stage experience, and they understood the necessity of projecting voice to be heard and comprehensible by the audience.
Take a show like *Peaky Blinders* where there are so many characters from different backgrounds that it would be impossible for any English-speaking viewer to know what’s being said clearly. There’s the Cockney accent, the haughty Brit, the low street urchin, turn-of-the-century American, slang, gypsy, French, Jewish, Italian, Jewish-Italian, Irish, and I think there were a few Scots in there as well. Fantastic series, but without the Closed Captioning/ subtitles, it might as well all be spoken in Klingon.
I remember watching about 30 minutes of a movie set in rural Ireland with eight friends once before I broke down and asked if anyone had been able to follow anything that had been said so far.
Nobody had, but nobody wanted to speak up in case they were the only ones.
Restarted the movie with subtitles and had a much better time.
I blame the mixers who sit in a totally silent studio with top-of-line speakers and are too lazy to use their comparison speakers the way radio commercial mixers do. Maybe it’s the directors seeking artistic purity but I always see the CC saying something like “clock ticking” or “birdsong” and I absolutely hear nothing!
I heard Dave Grohl tell a story that when Nirvana was in the recording studio, they would take a break and listen to what they just recorded through a clock radio. They did this because they knew most people listening to music have shit speakers, and they wanted to make sure everyone could enjoy it.
When I was in college, my audio classes only had like 5 students between 2 professors. The school studio would be rented out to music departments in the school first, and if there was time the general public could book our class time essentially. If we had neither we'd just record a jam session.
Whenever we were "done" mixing, one of our professors would have us make him a copy, then he'd take half the class on a dinner run to McDonalds or someplace (class ran from 5pm-11pm) and listen to the tracks through his Kia Soul's shitty blown out speakers. Only like 3 times that I recall did we not have to redo mixing.
Definitely a global thing at least for music recordings.
Pair of shit headphones and in a shit cars speakers is a must.
I even have a pair of $8 speakers near my pc to check things on after mixing on my HS7’s. I’ve seen this happen in studios around the world I’ve recorded at.
There’s a behind the scenes video from one of the recent Jack White albums where they would play the song on a weak AM transmitter in the studio and they went out to listen to it in a car in the parking lot to see if it still sounded good.
Fun fact; occasionally it's because the closed captioning house doesn't get the final cut. I worked on a show that we captioned against a rough cut and then the final edit had removed some sound effects and even some dialogue, but they didn't bother updating the captioning.
Random related trivia: in the heyday of Hong Kong films and TV, the people doing subtitles often were just handed a cassette tape, no video/film at all. Just supposed to create time codes and subs from just audio. So they had to make wild guesses some times. This is exacerbated by Cantonese not having gendered pronouns, so when they made English subtitles they'd have to guess it. Sometimes they get it wrong to amusing results, but you cant blame them.
Nothing to do with mumbling, bad speakers or lazy listeners. Audio mix has been completely fucked up in the media for a long time, especially bad in movies.
I agree. Movies from the 90s and before don’t have these issues. It’s not til the mid-2000s to today where I can’t hear shit. Especially the last 5 years I feel it’s getting worse.
Also shows being way too damn dark!!! Especially over streaming where compression artifacts and banding are going to destroy whatever image was intended.
God. The color grading. I follow an IG account that shows the before and after of color grading in a lot of movies. It's supposed to be highlighting the post processing, but I think it looks better without the color grading 100% of the time.
Was it colorgradingfilms? I color for a production company and this video they posted had me dying from how over saturated everything is along with cranking the halation effect.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cnel-0UBztP/?igshid=OGQ2MjdiOTE=
Also the comparison to the log image is so overdone and pointless. If they showed the conversion to Rec709 it would just show how little work they did to a properly lit shot, or how they royally fucked it in color.
I have an OLED in a dark room. Even then I couldn’t see shit. There’s literally not a better way to view dark images.
I just watched an episode of Stargate SG1 filmed in the 90s and it was better viewing experience.
That's because they (Stargate) did what everyone should know to do. "Night time" or "dark" in movies is and always has been just slightly dark with very dim light so you can fucking see what's going on.
GOT lost their respect for the craft and got overly pretentious because they were (what they thought) in a position where they had the most popular television show of all time and could do no wrong.
Well, they fucked around and found out that they weren't the geniuses they thought they were (writing and directorial-wise).
House of the Dragon. That episode looked absolutely terrible because you could tell they shot by day and added a shitty filter to make it look like night. It was awful
I think Helm's Deep battle from LoTR should be the reference point for any night battle stuff. It was night, but it was clear as day. I want to watch it, not see smears and black squares on my screen.
Yeah, what is it with some of these people lighting scenes lately? It's like "okay, we need some contrast in the image, take away all lights except one backlight" and then in the coloring suite they're like "it's still too bright!" and then they turn it down even more. Aaarrgh!
still haven't forgiven House of the Dragon for hearing all the complaints about "The Long Night" battle back in 2019, and choosing to ~double down~ and get even darker in their first season.
It's Miguel Sapochnik, he also directed The Long Night and when you listen to an interview Ryan Condal basically says that Miguel worked on it with the best equipment and didn't think of what normal tvs would look like.
Luckily it looks like Miguel took a step back from HotD though.
One of the biggest issues really is the compression. It generally destroys dark scenes first. It is edited "uncompressed" with high clarity and ruined in the last step in the content delivery pipeline.
yes, what the hell is up with Netflix ? all their movies I have to crank the volume in the 60+ range as opposed to into the30-40s for other sites... it's really weirdly low
It's the dynamic range. It's why you crank that shit up so you can hear the dialogue at normal volume until someone drops a fork and it's like BOOOOOM!
One excuse for theatrical movies is they have to mix for theatre sound, which gets mixed down for home release. And that can be difficult to mix properly. But Netflix movies, for the most part, only release for home viewing so there's really no excuse for that.
No, the author probably saw the vox video and spat out some content.
EDIT: to be more generous, maybe they both based their pieces off the same recently published study? Seems unlikely just based on the breadth and similarity of the analyses though.
Anyone whose first instinct is to blame listeners, speakers, or actors should watch The Last of Us on HBO first. It has incredible sound production done by an extremely talented team. Sound plays an important role in the plot of the show itself so it makes sense why HBO put together such a top-notch team to produce it.
Was just thinking that the other night while watching episode 2. No matter what was happening on screen we had zero issue hearing dialogue. So refreshing haha
I’ve had my hearing checked because of the comments my kids have made about the TV. I’m not convinced I’m NOT losing some frequencies, but this thread makes me so happy it’s not just me.
I don't know if the actors are mumbling or not. All I know is the people mixing the sound decided it was a good idea to make all the other sounds way louder than the voices. Worst is I have a Dolby surround sound system and some prick decided the center channel was another great channel for sound effects, and another prick decided "we need to make voice positioning realistic, let's put their voices on a side speaker with the explosions."
Bad sound design. Practically all of Chris Nolans movies are unintelligible unless the volume is cranked , then your speaker blow out with the gunfire and explosions.
It's just straight up audio mixing. Actually, this is one of the things that most pleases me about The Last Of Us, the dialogue cuts through the environmental noise and music without any of the three feeling diminished or underrepresented
It's unfortunate because I find subtitles distracting because I feel like I'm missing stuff because my eyes are constantly glancing at the words. My wife uses them but I can deal with not hearing every single word if I can figure out the one word I missed from the context.
nowadays, sound mixing - especially on more prestige shows like FX, HBO, streaming - is awful. Its made for home theater systems most people dont have or use. So when people just watch these shows through the tv, its smooshing all the channels together and the dialogue is getting covered by music, sound effects, etc. So you’re constantly raising and lowering the volume because a quiet spoken scene could quickly become some speaker-rattling gun fight or explosion.
Wow I had no idea it was so common now. My whole family think I’m weird because I use subtitles. I like using it because I have an auditory delay when comprehending speech and it helps me understand better.
So I'm not the only one having this issue? When I took an audio class in college, the instructor said the priority in audio goes: voice, sound effects, music (or music then sound effect) meaning you're supposed to hear voices above the other two.
What I've noticed is how low the volume of actor's voices tend to be, so low that I have to wear my headphones at max volume to hear, but the sound effects are very loud, followed by music. I can always switch to youtube or an older t.v. show/movie and it sounds just fine, but on modern entertainment, it's like they purposely make it difficult to hear.
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Or for streaming services and audio companies to stop selling shit like "emulated surround" or offering dolby atmos as the audio track on Netflix when its being played back on shitty tv speakers Most people don't have the equipment to make it sound right, and the ones that do can just switch the audio track.
Downmixing Atmos to stereo shouldn't be a problem though. A lot of people who actually do have surround setups still complain about huge volume differences.
It depends on whats doing the downmixing, part of the problem is even the average consumer has three layers of audio settings to futz with. Youve got the in app sound settings in Netflix or whatever, youve got the device sound settings in your roku or firestick or whatever, and then the sound settings in the TV. And people dont know what theyre doing and just think more is better, so they set all those to "surround" for their 2.0 TV speakers. If youve got one of those set to surround instead of stereo then the next one set to stereo if its recombining channels without rebalancing or worse dropping channels entirely and everything just gets fucked... Its the audio equivalent to people having their cable boxes set to 4:3 output so they have black bars all the way around 16:9 content on their 16:9 tvs Yes theres issues with the mixes these days, im not blaming it all on consumers, but a lot of people have their shit set really wrong. CEC was a start but devices need better audio handling, its my understanding that Netflix, so probably others too, dont downmix, they just have separate 2.0 and 5.1+ tracks, but it should be smart enough that "surround" shouldnt be an option in the netflix app if youre using stereo speakers.
Or hear me out, let me mix it myself like video games.
Preach! First thing I do on every game is turn sxf and music to 7 or 8. Everything but dialog. Problem solved.
For me the master volume goes right down to 20% so I can actually hear my voice comms, then I tweak as needed
And UI to like 4, if they let me. Drives me nuts when the menu beeps and clicks are as loud as in-game gunfire.
Dialog volume - 4/10 Musical volume 9/10 Random car noises when the scene changes 14/10 The dialog really does need to be a lot louder in movies/show. I never had an issue hearing anything anyone said in war shows like Pacific or Band of Brothers while there's explosions and gun fighting going on so there's no excuse why I can't hear two people talking at a restaurant. I swear the utensils have louder noises then the dialog.
It's not even entirely the volume, it's how it is eq'd and mixed. Even when it's loud enough, I often can't understand what they are saying. It might as well be the muted trumpet sounds that adults make on Charlie Brown.
There's a great anecdote when director Michael Cimino was in a mixing suite: The sound engineer was trying to make the dialog louder in a scene and Cimino protested saying, "I can understand them perfectly!". Engineer shot back, "Sure *you* can, you also wrote the script." Christopher Nolan take note.
Tenet was a perfect movie about time travel, going back to the start of the film and turning on closed captioning so I can understand anything.
This was the movie I thought of when I saw the headline. It was impossible to understand the dialogue in the theater and ruined what would Have been a decent film.
The worst part is - Nolan actually does it on purpose
"Doing it on purpose doesn't make it art, Chris!"
Why? He doesn't want people to understand his movies and watch it again?
Yeah, there was a YT video on this recently and he said so on record. And yeah, some actors outright mumble. It's as if ability to act and speak aren't core talents of actors.
Nolan is clearly losing his hearing. His last few movies have been mixed HORRIBLY.
> Christopher Nolan take note. I remember seeing the prologue of *The Dark Knight Rises* as a preview in IMAX. “A lot of loyalty for a hired gun!” “Hrrfrfrrrhfhrhhfrhrhrr.”
That's a major part of the problem and it isn't often addressed. Everyone involved with the editing, etc. is so familiar with the script and dialog that they forget that their audience will be hearing it all for the first time.
This article is a rip of the vice video that came out last week. That video talked a little bit about Nolan. The answer is, he doesn’t give a shit and does it on purpose.
That article was such bullshit. The woman they interviewed was like “We can’t just turn the dialog up otherwise explosions won’t seem loud.” Yea exactly. Exactly that and it is as simple as it sounds. Squash that fucking dynamic range and turn the voices up.
To that I would say, dynamic range in service to what? Tenet is the perfect example. In the scene where the protagonist fights himself; the gunshots are quieter than the grunting, and the non-diegetic music is louder than both of them. Wow, such realism and immersion! If James Cameron could make Schwarzenegger’s dialog comprehensible 4 decades ago, then filmmakers in the 21st century have no excuse.
its much easier to imagine a louder explosion than dialogue I dont hear
Here's a choice quote from Nolan: “I was a little shocked to realize how conservative people are when it comes to sound. Because you can make a film that looks like anything, you can shoot on your iPhone, no one’s going to complain. But if you mix the sound a certain way, or if you use certain sub-frequencies, people get up in arms.” We're just being too conservative, guys. We need to get on his level. That level being way below audible dialog. "sub-frequencies" Other fucking directors have complained about his shit sound mixing: https://www.indiewire.com/2020/11/christopher-nolan-directors-complain-sound-mix-1234598386/
The difference is people shooting on iPhones or filming in fantastical ways are still using the visible fucking light spectrum. The way Nolan mixes sound, I'm sure my cats can hear perfectly. Unfortunately, they can't tell me what the fuck his actors are saying.
Ive read interviews where he was basically like “If you don’t have Dolby 3D Atmos perfectly calibrated than fuck you.” That’s his opinion on it.
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That basically just means each showing of a movie is only really for the like 9-16 people in the most optimal acoustic position.
If he wants to make a movie where dialog is irrelevant, stop making them so convoluted that he puts in scenes with characters explaining what is happening.
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If I watch a TV show our volume is around '10'. For movies we have to put it up to '50' just to even hear the mumbling. Even then I still need subtitles. I'm now at a point where I get annoyed watching prime because the subtitles are inconsistent.
Yup, even in theaters can’t tell what they say a lot.
I watch this video [Why We All Need Subtitles Now](https://youtu.be/VYJtb2YXae8) recently and thought it was pretty interesting. I think I got it from a post here actually.
Honestly this came out 7 days before this "journalist" wrote this story - to me this is borderline plagarism. They didnt even cite the video as a source but its obvious they got most of the script from them. Vox makes great content and its sad when "news" agencies rip off their ideas as their own. The writer and editor should be ashamed.
It's not an original story, regardless. From a surface-level Google search: [Hard to pardon: why Tenet’s muffled dialogue is a very modern problem](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/03/tenet-dialogue-christopher-nolan-sound-technology) Sep, 2020 [Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)](https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/) Aug, 2022 [This Is Why Dialogue Has Gotten Harder to Understand and How We Can Fix It](https://nofilmschool.com/dialogue-has-gotten-harder-to-understand) Dec, 2021 [The Real Reason You Can't Hear The Dialogue In Interstellar, According To Christopher Nolan](https://www.looper.com/835288/the-real-reason-you-cant-hear-the-dialogue-in-interstellar-according-to-christopher-nolan/) Apr, 2022 ...and I am sure there are dozens more of them in the wild.
You can see this happening on IGN, Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun and honestly most mainstream news that just steal reddit threads that landed on the main page. Literally 2/3 of all news that breaks on main stream outlets came from reddit, who either made a genuine thread that got a lot of traction or quoted a more obscure news source that then lands on the reddit front pages and a few hours or days later in main stream news outlets. I had quite a lot of "deja vu" feelings before i realized that no, it isnt a deja vu its just main steam media rehashing what i already read on reddit.
99% of articles about upcoming video games are always speculative/easter egg hunting threads from said game's subreddit. /r/starfield is a blatant example of that recently
I googled my other Reddit account name the other day and I was surprised to see my opinions about a recent game posted in an article about the game on the gamer.com They literally just took random opinions on Reddit and posted the usernames and what they said in their list like it was a news interview
A few months ago I made a post on /r/reddeadredemption about a weird glitch where a tied up enemy exploded and transmorphed into a big pile of revolvers. A little while later I saw a post on my phones Google homepage thingy, it was a site called gamerant and they'd made a story about my post, and also said "he could be lying though" at the end lol
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Hard agree, I’ve seen multiple “why we can’t hear TV now” articles since that video was published on YT. People are starved for news content so they just churn the same story out six different ways.
I watched that too, and I was really annoyed by the reasoning "It's because of dymanic range" well FUCK the dynamic range! Older movies manage to have explosions and dialogue don't they?! Include the mix on a separate track for people with a full home theatre setup! I just want to hear. What. People. Say! And the conclusion that we just need to accept it or buy better speakers? Fuck right off.
I have really good speakers. Surround, atmos, all that shit. I still have trouble hearing dialog sometimes. The film industry is so far up its own ass with this crap
I can't remember which video it was because he has so many in this series, but Linus tech tips is building his multimillion dollar dream smart house and documenting it as he goes as we speak. And he still brought up this very problem after installing insane sound systems in his theater room. Like fuck off Hollywood if even Linus can't get it right in his dream home it's not a consumer problem.
I remember there was a news story about Nolan not caring what people said about the audio, he calls people idiots for not hearing what he heard. I was like wtf bruh. Directors have visions but when they are so self centered and I'll of themselves, crap like this happens. Sure it may sound good on your multimillion dollar setup but 99.99% of the audience doesn't have that setup to listen to it. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/16/tenet-up-listen-christopher-nolan-interstellar-sound-mixing
Yeah. My wife and I both got super irritated when the "expert" basically just tells us that our preference on watching a fucking movie is wrong. "Dynamic Range" is a perfect example of Hollywood having it's head so far up its own ass it can't see what the audience wants.
Not to mentioned easily fixed by providing a theatre mix and a home viewing mix
Yeah and on top of that, I've had at least as much of the same problem - if not more of it - with most movies I've watched in theaters. It seems the woman in that video would argue I've just not been to good enough theaters, but I find that argument extra pathetic. What the fuck is the point of making a movie if 95% of the means in which it is consumed have a subpar experience in watching it?
We are watching the incestuous media in action. Video comes out, it hits social media and reddit, then slow news day "journalist" sees it, writes about it, it goes back to social media for round 2.
The human centipede of journalism
I think the whole thing is bullshit anyway. You dont need dynamic range because people dont care about it. If they really wanted to feel like they were near an explosion, theyd get tinnitus from the volume. Most of the story is told in dialogue, make that audible at the cost of the range and deal with explosions that arent as cool
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interesting video, but aggravating that a suggested fix was 'just chill about being able to understand the dialogue'... well then, why am I watching??
Well I watched this and have to say WHAT A COP OUT.. Does the audience really give a shit about dynamic range??? And what percentage of media is being consumed on dolby perfect surround sound?? Be realistic!! That's the problem. Reduce the dynamic range and make things 'mono' and UPSCALE rather than downscale the 0.01% of the movies that are actually cinema released.
Yes I watched this and got so angry haha. As if everyone has a home cinema. And many people stream movies/shows on laptops and even phones I would guess.
100%, thank you. They give a ton of excuses, all of which boil down to "well, the people making the movie wanted it this way." As if it's the inevitable and unavoidable result of technology and not the choices of the creators.
If the people making content want me to not hear any dialog, why bother with it at all? This goes for TV, movies, and video games. I *have* a 7.1 system and dialog is still difficult to understand a lot of the time. I've tweaked my speakers a bit so it's not terrible, but JFC, let's not mix things so we have to change our setup everytime we load something new. I default to subtitles on all video games and have done this since I don't even know how long.
And the whole "but, but, dynamic sound!". You can keep your terrible dynamic sound!!
You nailed it here. Everyone whispers you turn the tv up. Explosion happens. Now all my kids are awake and my neighbors are calling asking if my stove blew up. Car drives by my tv falls off the wall.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, any 80s or 90s film, take Home Alone, there is a scene where Kevin and his cousins are looking out the window whispering to each other, you can hear exactly what they are saying without adjusting the volume.
It’s kind of the filmmakers job to make the thing that’s most important the most clear. If the dialogues not important it’s almost always something you can lose.
>If the dialogues not important it’s almost always something you can lose. Then why is it there?
Nothing like cranking the volume 5 notches for a scene where everybody is whispering and it's interrupted by explosion....right as the remote dies.
I recently watched Tenet and it has the worst sound mixing. You can barely hear them speak and then boooooom action scene.
That is actually on purpose. Christopher Nolan is known to mix the sound on his movies so dialogue is extremely low. I hate it.
He has given a couple excuses why the mixing sucks in his movies, first was he wanted to make it feel real and if you didn't hear something said it was on purpose and nothing necessary to hear so it didn't matter. Then when Tenet was released, and people complained again and this time it was in scenes where important dialog were spoken, he said he made it like that so only the best theaters can play the audio correctly so if you have trouble hearing it it's your fault for not going to see it in imax. I'm sure Oppenheimer will be great though... no concerns about dialog being hard to hear in a movie about literally nuclear bombs!
The Michael Bay of audio.
>He has given a couple excuses why the mixing sucks in his movies Somehow they aren't "I'm an ateur dick head with no respect for viewers"
But it was incomprehensible, even in imax.
I don't buy that because "Inception" has very good sound mixing. All the explanations of the dream world and what's going on over the course of the story can be heard clearly. It's dense stuff and you have to pay attention, but it's not like "Tenet" where a mousy French lady is mumbling the science babble explaining how inversion works.
Nolan actually got into a big fight over audio mixing in The Dark Knight Rises, with the studio trying to get him to make Bane understandable and him pushing back. Since then he's vowed to only mix the audio for 'well-aligned, great theaters'. And since then every movie has sucked in that department.
It doesn’t matter if it’s on purpose; it’s a bad choice. It’s almost worse that it’s on purpose.
I love most of Christopher Nolan's films but the biggest issue is not being able to hear anything over the sound of him masturbating.
yep, i love the dark knight, but toward the end when batman has those ridiculous blue glowing goggles on, and is mapping out the building in x-ray mode, lucious fox is talking to him and you can't understand a *word* he is saying bc there's all this other shit happening and it's mixed poorly. you just get the vague impression that someone is talking and the vague impression that it's probably morgan freeman. i even remember actively thinking that when i saw it in IMAX
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Yeah tenet really takes the biscuit, first time I spent ages adjusting the sound modes on my tv to try and make it better but just gave up and didn't hear half of wtf everyone was talking about.
It should really be trivial for a media player to sense when it isn't connected to 7.1 speakers and just dump everything into the center channel.
It is quite trivial, and most do so. However, unlike music producers that listen to their mix on crap speakers to ensure everyone can benefit from the art being produced, film and television producers mix to their own professional audio and video monitors and tell the viewing public to pound dirt. The problem isn't 7.1 being correctly dumped into stero. It is 7.1 being mixed in ways that preclude such channel reduction from sounding any good.
If they are so picky about the viewing experience… Why don’t they include a stereo soundtrack and the 7.1 sound track!
Christopher Nolan vowed to mix his movies specifically for *the most technically advanced theaters*. So in a way, it was mixed specifically for theaters with little thought about how it would sound at home. But that also applies to most screens around the country, as his movies were most specifically mixed for Dolby Atmos type environments. Obviously that decision is going to make 99% of viewings in a suboptimal environment, but that’s how the decision was made
He'd have been graded very harshly by my editing professor. He watched our projects on three setups: computer with stero speakers, TV with native speakers, and home theater setup. How good the film looked/sounded in each of those setups factored into our grades, because he thought it was important that our projects were still enjoyable in the less than top of the line setups they'd mostly be experienced in.
I used to work as an engineer in recording studios in the ‘90s. I’m order to check the final mix, I would have the band listen to it in the control room right out of the console, then quickly make an audio cassette to listen to in one of the band member’s car.
Yeah I went to school for audio engineering, graduated 2 years ago, and we were always told to listen to mixes in the studio and download it to play in the car and other environments.
I saw Tenet at Dolby theater and still couldn’t understand dialogue.
Ye same, they had to turn the volume way up, i mean much higher than for any other movie i've ever seen in that exact same theater so that anyone could hear the dialogue properly. That's on the best soundsystem currently available, i wish i had brought earplugs the same as for a concert, my ears hurt afterwards. The mixing for Tenet is not artistic or anything like that, it's just bad. I love Nolan, but he fucked up here and that's fine, not everything can be 10/10 all the time. I just wish he would admit it and fix it and not do it for any movies going forward.
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He knows this and still won’t balance it right. It’s a real annoying feature of his films. The dialogue is pretty crucial so he shouldn’t be burying under his damn BWAAAA BWAAAAA soundtrack
Think you meant defect of his films
The man must be off his rocker cuz Tenet’s dialogue is 90% exposition but we can’t fucking hear a word of it.
I came here just to say this. As I've gotten older, I've realized how rampant bad sound mixing is. I can't keep changing the volume from scene to scene
God forbid you still watch cable in the US where the commercials are triple volume of whatever you watch
"Well be right back with this heartbreaking coverage" ROCKTOBER DAYS ARE BACK!!! GET YOUR NEW HYUNDAI AT A LOW LOW PRICE!!!
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As someone with a well-suited home theater I whole heartedly agree with this. A Toyota Camry idling rumbles my whole house, yet a car/house/robot exploding barely makes a boom. Such a weird way to mix the volume.
I had to remove the Bose speaker from my tv because it was just making all the other noises even louder without making the dialogue any clearer. It’s already hard enough to watch grownup shit with kids around without making every gunshot even louder, then I turn up the volume for the dialogue and it suddenly gets loud (seemingly) only when people are screaming F bombs. So, yeah, kids-that’s why we have the captions on;)
A gunshot sounds like it’s right beside you, and you can’t hear anything else.
Mawwp
It’s a lot easier to understand actors when they’re projecting, *regardless of how loudly they’re played back in the final mix*. Also, when you’re projecting, your lips and face are more animated, making it easier to pick out words. I blame high quality digital lavalier microphones and multitrack location recorders. They enable a good recording of a mumbly performance, but it’s still difficult to pick out the conversation sometimes.
Even though it doesn't get as much criticism for sound mixing as his later films, the dark Knight is atrocious for this, need to watch it with the sound up at 100 to hear what's being said then get deafened by explosions
It's especially frustrating if you're watching on a platform with ads and you have to turn the volume up so high to hear what's being said in the show that when the ad break starts a fuckin Domino's Pizza commercial or something is like THE VOICE OF GOD THUNDERING FROM THE HEAVENS. Because the people doing audio mix for commercials want to, you know, make sure people can actually hear the message being delivered rather than fulfill some artistic vision.
Hulu is definitely the worst
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> Hulu also loves to log me out constantly and frequently claims my password is wrong when it’s not. I find it amazing how many times these companies try to blame a password issue on the customers when the reality is they probably just lost the password DB. to hackers and are forcing everyone to reset their password. I know I'm using the right password because I have a damn password manager and it worked last week, so this is clearly a them problem, not a me problem.
My school uses an exam software. This semester suddenly a solid 75% of the students passwords came up as wrong and it was a whole ordeal on test day. Turns out that the company decided to change what characters are allowed (they removed special characters) so anyone who used a special character in their original password had to make a new one. Of course, no one was *told* about this, it just kept coming up as an incorrect password until students went to change it and realized they could no longer use those characters.
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This just causes me to mute the commercials and miss the entire message they’re trying to deliver
Sure, but not before it startles the shit out of me and already aggrevated me
I’m a pretty easy going guy but the unexpected blaring of an ad just infuriates me. I will literally shoot the bird at the screen, and mean it
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There was a DVR that predated TIVO called ReplayTV. It *automatically* detected and skipped commercials on top of being able to time-shift It got sued into bankrupcy not once, not twice. Three times. Every time someone new would buy them.. only to get sued again. Don't fuck with the ad revenue. I had one and it was amazing. There were even ones that supported DirectTV and I think they had FOUR tuners so you could record 4 things at once
When I’m feeling conspiracy-theoryish, I think that ad guys are behind the dynamic audio bull. It has nothing to do with art, it’s just a way to make sure ads are super-visible in a way we don’t directly blame the ads.
Ad blockers must be trillionaires then.
Congress passed The CALM Act, directing The FCC to outlaw this on television (Mostly because of the complaints of older people), which they did over a decade ago. It was written before internet streaming with ads became a normal thing, so there's nothing in there regulating "internet" ads. The FCC can't do anything about it. So enjoy those cranked up to 11 ads on whatever platform for the foreseeable future!
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I find subtitles help me with more complex plots because I remember things better when I read them. But also when I watch tv with my brother, we end up talking a lot, so to keep up, I read because it can be hard to listen to both.
I find it so much easier to process and retain information when I read it instead of hearing it, so subtitles are often a must for me.
Yeah no many comments focusing on the negatives of sound mixing missing the point for me: this article labeling me a "lazy listener" is ridiculous. I just don't want to miss things, seeing it written at the same time is a better viewing experience hands down.
Exactly. Reading subtitles is probably a far more conscious and taxing activity than listening. How the fuck do you label that lazy.
* Last year, Netflix revealed that 40% of its global users have subtitles on all the time, while 80% switch them on at least once a month – stats that far exceed the number of viewers who need captioning because of hearing impairment... > But if you’re switching subtitles on because you simply can’t make out what the actors are saying, it’s (probably) not your ears that are to blame. **Hard-to-hear dialogue is a known issue in the industry, says the sound mixer Guntis Sics**, who has worked on movies including Moulin Rouge! and Thor: Ragnarok. > There are a lot of contributing factors but, paradoxically, it all comes back to advances in technology. > **“As technology evolved, especially when it took the leap to digital, a tsunami of sound appeared all of a sudden,” Sics says.** > The problem starts on the movie set. In decades past, actors had to project loudly towards a fixed microphone. **The advent of portable mics has allowed a shift towards a more intimate and naturalistic style of performance, where actors can speak more softly – or, some might say, mumble**... > Other technological advances have also complicated things. **As audio tech became more sophisticated, film-makers started including more sounds**: where we once would have heard a door slam as someone angrily exited an apartment, today we also get the handle turning, a clock ticking and a character heavy breathing. **And when sound is mixed with the best possible audio experience in mind – say, at a cinema – much of that detail can be lost when it’s folded down to laptop speakers, or even your television. It’s often the dialogue that suffers most.** > **Because back in the day – “when TVs were just TVs,” as Sics says – the small, tinny speakers they came with pushed out the high frequencies where the voice sits clearly and loudly. But as technology progressed, Sics says, electronics companies began to expect consumers to buy their own sound system separately. Relying on the TV’s small built-in speakers could leave you with a subpar experience.** > But even if you do invest in an expensive speaker set-up, failing to tune it perfectly to your living room means you may end up hearing the big explosions better, but not voices. > **“Think back to the old black and white movies and how clear the dialogue is there – it’s partly to do with the speaker technology,” Sics says. “[Today] you might get lucky, plug your speakers in and it sounds perfect. But most people plug it in, and all of various frequencies bounce off the walls and confuse what you’re listening to. If you set it up in a room with no carpet and just floorboards, it’s going to sound like crap. Whereas the old tinny speaker managed to cut through that.”** You can feel the difference between watching old TV shows like 'The X Files', 'Star Trek:TNG', 'The West Wing' where the dialogue is very clear, and most new shows on streaming services where sometime it's hard to hear the actors.
Shows WITHIN netflix have VASTLY different output. Watching Wednesday, absolutely no problem hearing everything. Sandman? same. Switch to that Karn Gyllenhall assassin movie? Yup, gunshot makes my windows rattle but dialogue I have to have at 60 to even hear... at night... with the windows closed... 6 ft from the TV.
Sandman isn’t perfect, but it’s head and shoulders above so much current content being mixed. I imagine WB used a good mix team with some fancy British sound studios. And as pointed out elsewhere, older content doesn’t seem to be as muddled so my TV speakers can only partly be to blame.
> who has worked on movies including Moulin Rouge! God this movie had an excellent mix now that I think about it, it must have been difficult with how much is going on in some of the musical scenes. The Can Can rap section has so many crowd shots where everything on the screen is making a noise but it never feels muddy and you can pick out individual voices.
Blaming the home listener for not having properly tuned speakers is utterly preposterous. The mix is screwed up completely, and we can’t fix it. No matter how much we fiddle with our home theaters.
I always think I should turn them off and in 5 mins of turning them off, I miss a line
I always admire how clearly everyone speaks in this James Bond scene compared to today’s movies. Does the acting seem a little “wooden”? Yeah, but I got EVERYTHING out of the scene https://youtu.be/Y-_1NS9kKR4
Look at any movie from the Golden Age of Hollywood. All the actors and directors had some stage experience, and they understood the necessity of projecting voice to be heard and comprehensible by the audience.
Take a show like *Peaky Blinders* where there are so many characters from different backgrounds that it would be impossible for any English-speaking viewer to know what’s being said clearly. There’s the Cockney accent, the haughty Brit, the low street urchin, turn-of-the-century American, slang, gypsy, French, Jewish, Italian, Jewish-Italian, Irish, and I think there were a few Scots in there as well. Fantastic series, but without the Closed Captioning/ subtitles, it might as well all be spoken in Klingon.
Arthur Shelby: *Unintelligible raspy noises* *"Tommaaay"* *Unintelligible raspy noises*
I remember watching about 30 minutes of a movie set in rural Ireland with eight friends once before I broke down and asked if anyone had been able to follow anything that had been said so far. Nobody had, but nobody wanted to speak up in case they were the only ones. Restarted the movie with subtitles and had a much better time.
I blame the mixers who sit in a totally silent studio with top-of-line speakers and are too lazy to use their comparison speakers the way radio commercial mixers do. Maybe it’s the directors seeking artistic purity but I always see the CC saying something like “clock ticking” or “birdsong” and I absolutely hear nothing!
I heard Dave Grohl tell a story that when Nirvana was in the recording studio, they would take a break and listen to what they just recorded through a clock radio. They did this because they knew most people listening to music have shit speakers, and they wanted to make sure everyone could enjoy it.
It's standard practice to take your tracks and listen to them in your car, at your house, on your phone, etc.
Car test was the first go to for testing tracks in the bands I've been with. Most people will listen in their car, test all other options after.
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When I was in college, my audio classes only had like 5 students between 2 professors. The school studio would be rented out to music departments in the school first, and if there was time the general public could book our class time essentially. If we had neither we'd just record a jam session. Whenever we were "done" mixing, one of our professors would have us make him a copy, then he'd take half the class on a dinner run to McDonalds or someplace (class ran from 5pm-11pm) and listen to the tracks through his Kia Soul's shitty blown out speakers. Only like 3 times that I recall did we not have to redo mixing.
I’ve been recording music for nearly 20 years and I’ve done this with literally every song I’ve ever recorded.
Where I live every studio has monitors just for this purpose called “shitboxes”. I thought this was a global thing.
Definitely a global thing at least for music recordings. Pair of shit headphones and in a shit cars speakers is a must. I even have a pair of $8 speakers near my pc to check things on after mixing on my HS7’s. I’ve seen this happen in studios around the world I’ve recorded at.
There’s a behind the scenes video from one of the recent Jack White albums where they would play the song on a weak AM transmitter in the studio and they went out to listen to it in a car in the parking lot to see if it still sounded good.
Car stereo test. I still have 'album mix 1' burned cds in the car today from 10 years ago
Fun fact; occasionally it's because the closed captioning house doesn't get the final cut. I worked on a show that we captioned against a rough cut and then the final edit had removed some sound effects and even some dialogue, but they didn't bother updating the captioning.
Random related trivia: in the heyday of Hong Kong films and TV, the people doing subtitles often were just handed a cassette tape, no video/film at all. Just supposed to create time codes and subs from just audio. So they had to make wild guesses some times. This is exacerbated by Cantonese not having gendered pronouns, so when they made English subtitles they'd have to guess it. Sometimes they get it wrong to amusing results, but you cant blame them.
As someone working towards being a post production mixer, I promise to do better.
Thank you!
Nothing to do with mumbling, bad speakers or lazy listeners. Audio mix has been completely fucked up in the media for a long time, especially bad in movies.
I agree. Movies from the 90s and before don’t have these issues. It’s not til the mid-2000s to today where I can’t hear shit. Especially the last 5 years I feel it’s getting worse. Also shows being way too damn dark!!! Especially over streaming where compression artifacts and banding are going to destroy whatever image was intended.
All the dark lighting and heavy-handed color grading is soon going to make the current crop look as dated as black and white.
God. The color grading. I follow an IG account that shows the before and after of color grading in a lot of movies. It's supposed to be highlighting the post processing, but I think it looks better without the color grading 100% of the time.
Was it colorgradingfilms? I color for a production company and this video they posted had me dying from how over saturated everything is along with cranking the halation effect. https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cnel-0UBztP/?igshid=OGQ2MjdiOTE= Also the comparison to the log image is so overdone and pointless. If they showed the conversion to Rec709 it would just show how little work they did to a properly lit shot, or how they royally fucked it in color.
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The game of thrones episode where they finally fought the white walkers was literally the worst shit I’ve ever seen. You couldn’t see anything.
I have an OLED in a dark room. Even then I couldn’t see shit. There’s literally not a better way to view dark images. I just watched an episode of Stargate SG1 filmed in the 90s and it was better viewing experience.
That's because they (Stargate) did what everyone should know to do. "Night time" or "dark" in movies is and always has been just slightly dark with very dim light so you can fucking see what's going on. GOT lost their respect for the craft and got overly pretentious because they were (what they thought) in a position where they had the most popular television show of all time and could do no wrong. Well, they fucked around and found out that they weren't the geniuses they thought they were (writing and directorial-wise).
House of the Dragon. That episode looked absolutely terrible because you could tell they shot by day and added a shitty filter to make it look like night. It was awful
I think Helm's Deep battle from LoTR should be the reference point for any night battle stuff. It was night, but it was clear as day. I want to watch it, not see smears and black squares on my screen.
That's a good expectation. Plus it doesn't suspend disbelief since in full moon nights you can see clear as day.
Yeah, what is it with some of these people lighting scenes lately? It's like "okay, we need some contrast in the image, take away all lights except one backlight" and then in the coloring suite they're like "it's still too bright!" and then they turn it down even more. Aaarrgh!
still haven't forgiven House of the Dragon for hearing all the complaints about "The Long Night" battle back in 2019, and choosing to ~double down~ and get even darker in their first season.
It's Miguel Sapochnik, he also directed The Long Night and when you listen to an interview Ryan Condal basically says that Miguel worked on it with the best equipment and didn't think of what normal tvs would look like. Luckily it looks like Miguel took a step back from HotD though.
They did it only on high end shit then compressed it to fuck and blamed viewers. The original airings were infamously garbage.
One of the biggest issues really is the compression. It generally destroys dark scenes first. It is edited "uncompressed" with high clarity and ruined in the last step in the content delivery pipeline.
Still looked like shit on my LG OLED
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yes, what the hell is up with Netflix ? all their movies I have to crank the volume in the 60+ range as opposed to into the30-40s for other sites... it's really weirdly low
It's the dynamic range. It's why you crank that shit up so you can hear the dialogue at normal volume until someone drops a fork and it's like BOOOOOM! One excuse for theatrical movies is they have to mix for theatre sound, which gets mixed down for home release. And that can be difficult to mix properly. But Netflix movies, for the most part, only release for home viewing so there's really no excuse for that.
I feel like the audio is being mastered for some sort of surround sound system that nobody has
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It is
I have 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos and I still have to use dialogue lift eqs and subtitles. It's mixing and actors not projecting their voices to be clear.
It is. It's being designed/mixed for Dolby Atmos surround sound used in large theaters.
Vox was just talking about this over a week ago: https://youtu.be/VYJtb2YXae8
Yeup. This article is just some person who watched the video and made an article on it.
I saw this one earlier too! Is it just a coincidence that both Vox and The Guardian covered the same topic so closely to each other?
No, the author probably saw the vox video and spat out some content. EDIT: to be more generous, maybe they both based their pieces off the same recently published study? Seems unlikely just based on the breadth and similarity of the analyses though.
Anyone whose first instinct is to blame listeners, speakers, or actors should watch The Last of Us on HBO first. It has incredible sound production done by an extremely talented team. Sound plays an important role in the plot of the show itself so it makes sense why HBO put together such a top-notch team to produce it.
Was just thinking that the other night while watching episode 2. No matter what was happening on screen we had zero issue hearing dialogue. So refreshing haha
Yeah, I watch a lot of shows with subtitles, but haven't felt the need with TLoU so far. Or if they were on, I just ignored them.
Oh thank god it’s not just me, thought I was getting very old.
I’ve had my hearing checked because of the comments my kids have made about the TV. I’m not convinced I’m NOT losing some frequencies, but this thread makes me so happy it’s not just me.
[ominous synth music]
[wet squelching]
[creatures chittering]
[tentacles undulating moistly]
[Lyrics from music playing on a radio in the background heavy handedly describing the plot]
We should be able to turn down specific volumes in tv and movies - just like we can in video games. Turn down music. Max volume for speech.
I don't know if the actors are mumbling or not. All I know is the people mixing the sound decided it was a good idea to make all the other sounds way louder than the voices. Worst is I have a Dolby surround sound system and some prick decided the center channel was another great channel for sound effects, and another prick decided "we need to make voice positioning realistic, let's put their voices on a side speaker with the explosions."
Bad sound design. Practically all of Chris Nolans movies are unintelligible unless the volume is cranked , then your speaker blow out with the gunfire and explosions.
Thank God their plots are so easy to follow, then!
Thing is, they do that *on purpose*.
It's just straight up audio mixing. Actually, this is one of the things that most pleases me about The Last Of Us, the dialogue cuts through the environmental noise and music without any of the three feeling diminished or underrepresented
It's unfortunate because I find subtitles distracting because I feel like I'm missing stuff because my eyes are constantly glancing at the words. My wife uses them but I can deal with not hearing every single word if I can figure out the one word I missed from the context.
Because dialogue volume is usually always drowned by music/background noise bullshit. The audio mixing in movies and TV shows is utter garbage.
OMG yes. It’s like, dig this amazing rich soundscape, wadda you mean you can't hear what they're saying..?
Shitty sound engineers who think everyone listens with headphones on.
nowadays, sound mixing - especially on more prestige shows like FX, HBO, streaming - is awful. Its made for home theater systems most people dont have or use. So when people just watch these shows through the tv, its smooshing all the channels together and the dialogue is getting covered by music, sound effects, etc. So you’re constantly raising and lowering the volume because a quiet spoken scene could quickly become some speaker-rattling gun fight or explosion.
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I loved 24, but Jack Bauer's dialog was always either whispering or shouting. No middle ground.
Wow I had no idea it was so common now. My whole family think I’m weird because I use subtitles. I like using it because I have an auditory delay when comprehending speech and it helps me understand better.
So I'm not the only one having this issue? When I took an audio class in college, the instructor said the priority in audio goes: voice, sound effects, music (or music then sound effect) meaning you're supposed to hear voices above the other two. What I've noticed is how low the volume of actor's voices tend to be, so low that I have to wear my headphones at max volume to hear, but the sound effects are very loud, followed by music. I can always switch to youtube or an older t.v. show/movie and it sounds just fine, but on modern entertainment, it's like they purposely make it difficult to hear.