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Background Music: destroys your eardrums
Brit Lowtalker Villain: we gunna mumbly the wumbky aintwe guvnah
I was watching bewitched! which was made in the 60s and was amazed how clear the sound was and how articulate the actors were.
Drives me INSANE. Oh and my favorite the auto-generated (read: completely wrong) subtitles in the middle of the screen for some fucking reason.
I was watching a Chernobyl documentary. When there were Russian speakers with subtitles already provided, the cc settings added “SPEAKING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE” over the useful text. I know a bit of Russian and was able to follow. Still duh
Watching ‘The Mummy’ on streaming the other day… Unless subtitles were switched on, the translation when anyone spoke Egyptian wasn’t used. It also weirdly removed location title cards, like when there’s an establishing shot and text ‘Cairo, 3 months later’ or something.
I give talks and training in the accessibility space, and have literally this image when I make a point about audio processing and cognitive issues. Another example “I need to park, hold on let me turn the music down I can’t see the parking spots”
I spent 2K on a capable surround to be able to hear my damned tv.
The downmix to stereo is 90% of the problem. They don’t normalize the channels, Front channel is always low, rear channels are always WAY too high. mumble mumble mumble, mumble mumble SCREEEECH CRASH BANG BANG mumble mumble
I think the TV vendors do it so you’ll buy their soundbar.
Center Channel / Voices + 5, rear channels -2 and you can actually hear your damned movie.
It’s an audio issue. That never happened in thr early 2000s such as in Lord of the Rings which is weird when you think about the things that have regressed.
I’m re-watching Memento and I’m like “damn, I can hear what everybody is saying clearly.” Clearly Nolan wasn’t born deaf.
Also, I’m straight, but why didn’t Guy Pearce become the hottest male actor in history?
His casting in subsequent Nolan films has been blocked by some Hollywood dickhead apparently. Who knows.
Another perspective.
Once upon a time, it was pretty normal to watch something and not be able to pause or rewind. It was perfectly expected that you might not get every single word and you didn’t really think twice about it, just like you don’t think about how you miss some words in real life.
But now, we can pause, we can rewind. We can get exactly what was said and we get preoccupied with making sure we understand every single word. So captioning becomes even more critical.
Once upon a time, people in TV spoke at audible volumes. We don’t live in that world anymore.
Also people watched TV. They didn’t have the TV on while they scrolled on their phones and didn’t pay much attention. I’m sure that not concentrating on what’s happening is part of the issue for a lot of people.
If you’re not paying attention to the screen, you’re certainly not paying attention to subtitles.
A lot of people glance up at the screen, read the subtitles, then go back to scrolling.
More power to them if they’re actually able to follow what’s going on! I can’t divide my attention like that.
(Neither can they, they just think they can.)
And if they’re just passively sitting next to you while you’re watching, that’s fine.
But, it’s different if they interrupt to ask questions, or rewind, or if they need the subtitles on even though they’re not actually really paying attention.
Well not exactly … I’m a child of the 70s and when everyone was around the TV on Sunday night we would all have our own things going. I was playing with toys and mom might be reading or knitting. Dad always had his beers to keep him occupied.
It’s a slippery slope. Listening to a bunch of podcasts while driving will fix that.
I’ve been learning a new language for a while and I fell into the trap of watching things with (target language) subtitles. This resulted in me getting pretty good at reading the language, but not comprehending spoken word.
Podcasts while driving/walking definitely helped me break the cycle, 10/10 recommend.
the only good subtitles were the ones on one of the Ghost in the Shell releases - these were fucking closed captions and they featured every single sound and they cycled at breakneck speed and it was a lot of fun to randomly catch some “loud screech” caption
some of the streaming sites have changed how the subs are delivered and their own existing formatting features don’t work at all anymore because they were designed for a different file type or something. roku via browser is the latest one i’ve noticed that on. i can’t have my 200% size anymore.
This is torture if the subtitles don’t match.
I have a soft spot for dubbed anime and always have, but in pretty much every case, the subtitles are not a transcript of the dub, they’re a translation of the original Japanese.
As a result, the feeling you get trying to watch that is not unlike going up a set of stairs and miscounting, but for every sentence.
I feel your pain. I been learning German and got a bunch of DVDs and Blurayd digitalised. 99% of the time subs do not say exactly as it was dubbed. It counts as paraphrasing but different enough to begin to hate it.
The most fucking fun part is when you watch a local language movie (e.g. Das Boot) and subs also do not match. How? Baffles me.
Different but related, it was annoying in Xenoblade 2 when Rex would yell “Homura!” and the subtitles would say “Pyra!” He did it a fair amount.
It’s also torture if the subtitles don’t (reasonably) match for non-dubbed content.
This bothers me more with captioning for English language movies in English. They abbreviate a lot to make it easier to quickly read what is being said. Sometimes that makes perfect sense and is very useful. A lot of the time, they’re just cutting out details for no good reason.
It’s also very annoying for non-native speakers who want to listen to the original audio and have the subtitles as help when they don’t understand something:
- what was that one word I didn’t get?
- subtitles: completely different sentence (with the same meaning, OK, but different words)
AI generated subtitles are utter garbage. Combine that with idiots who can’t be bothered to check their 60 second long video for mistakes and you basically end up with subtitles that have no reason of being there in the first place
I used to do work on Amazon Mechanical Turk for extra cash. A LOT of subtitles jobs were there. They paid really high but you had to be insanely good at it. There was an acceptable percentage of errors that was not zero. Sometimes you just couldn’t figure out what was said in the video, I made stuff up but in context. I never really thought about it but we were the AI back then. Fun story, I got laid off, was late on payments on an Amazon card for a while before I paid it off. Blacklisted for life.
If you want the subtitles to match the dub you have to specifically look for dubtitles or CC. But they are rather rare.
I prefer just listening to it in Japanese, but even knowing just basic Japanese you start seeing inaccurate translations in the subtitles too (especially with cussing).
It’s like following two different stories at once!
I’m with you on that. Anime has to have dubtitles if I’m putting them on there. Thankfully you can find those pretty easily these days if you need to.
Are they both named Billy? Edit: I realize non-Billy spoke up for Billy
On the bright side: I don’t spoil the video myself because i read too fast
On the bad side: JESUS CHRIST I WANNA READ, MY BRAIN CAN’T BEAR YOUR SLOWNESS
*rarely the case but if i have subtitles that’s the reason, either that or the speak has a strong Bri’ish🍵 or Freedom 🦅🦅🦅 accent
I read so fast that with long subtitles I have too much time to think about me being useless
Same here. You really are useless aren’t you? ;)
This would be amusing in japanese <-> English as the word order is roughly opposite. There are a few implementation strategies that are varying degrees of trash
that guy is, ttbomk, mr beast. bring out the guillotine.
deleted by creator
If a motherfucker could properly mix audio I wouldn’t need them.
If I wouldn’t have to turn the volume ALL THE WAY UP followed by ALL THE WAY DOWN because your show/movie can’t decide if we’re whispering or blowing the planet up every ten seconds, I wouldn’t need them.
That’s cause you probably are listening to a 5.1 or 7.1 audio on your 2.0 speakers. You got no center channel and that’s where the dialog happens.
This is the issue with TVs most of the time. You can either downmix 5.1 to 2.0 somehow, be lucky and have a setting on your TV that can downmix for you, or buy 5.1 sound system.
They often claim you need a proper audio setup.
I have an expensive (be it old) surround sound setup. Marvel and many other modern movies suck absolute arse. Having to pause and fiddle with volume going from a barely audible conversation to deafening noise in a single scene.
Fuck that noise, audio seems optimized for smartphone speakers nowadays.
What if, hear me out, they changed the format a bit to supply 2 separate audio tracks. One for voice, one for effects. Then we could adjust it ourselves.
I’d vote for you
They kinda do that with surround. Dialogue is mostly isolated to the center speaker.
Which is why it sounds bad, because 99% of the audience is watching on a stereo TV they got at Wal-mart.
Even with decent amps and good speakers and all leveled some movies suck, a lot of shows suck and it’s a random crapshoot what works. Older movies work well.
I was watching Enter the Dragon a few days ago.
Amazing how a movie from 1973 has better audio quality than the vast majority modern movies. And that movie feels like a bad dub sometimes.
Boost your center channel and/or enable dialogue enhancer.
Won’t help with Marvel movies (their mixing sucks ass) but most others.
Let me find the center channel setting on my two speaker stereo real quick.
Movies from the 90s and prior sound perfectly fine even with loud explosions and whispers and a large dynamic range. Today’s mixes are just straight up dog shit.
that would be the occasion to find the [enable dialogue enhancer] setting (or a reasonable facsimile, mine is called the same) in the tv. if you have a center channel, leave it off.
Kodi power.
Fuck that noise, audio seems optimized for smartphone speakers nowadays.
No, it’s optimized for 42-speaker, billion-watt Imax screens. Where I have to wear earplugs.
We went to the re-airing of interstellar on imax. The sound when the ship was getting hammered with hail was so loud my ears were ringing and we left. Making movies painful should not be the point.
Same. I never saw it when I had an original run in the theater and was so excited for the re-release. Couldn’t get to one of the true film IMAX showings of it, but went to an IMAX theater and oh my God did they just have the damn sound cranked… So muddy, so loud. Makes me appreciate my home theater that much more…
But it really makes you feel like
SpidermanYou have tinnitus
“Yeah well, it sounds perfect in my soundproof bunker on my $10,000 cans, I don’t know why you think Inwould test the sound out in a cluttered living room setting on a $300 TV with no surround sound.”
– Average Present Day Audio Engineer
i’ve got one of those systems. It’s tuned damn well. I still have those problems. It’s like asking why someone would not like something shot in shaky cam. Some people just get nauseated when it takes up the whole screen. I do, and I do fine on roller coasters. And was stoned. It was weird. Not every film is for every person, but if you can add subs it makes it more accessible.
At least some of those audio engineers go home everyday to listen on their $300 Roku TV so it really makes no sense. I know some.
Audio Engineering is not some lofty high-paying profession.
I keep hearing things are mixed for the theater, but I went to the theater to see the odyssey the other day for the first time in a while, and it had the same problem! Sound mixing is trash these days…
the first film i really noticed it in was Corpse Bride. been a problem for 21 years.
Yeah “these days” is getting to be a pretty wide range you’re not wrong 😅
it was just one scene in Corpse Bride, too. a single song, I finally watched it with the subtitles on and understood it this year. I understood some delightful jokes and lyrics for the first time! I want to cast so many aspersions at our dear friend Alan Smythee at the sound department on that film, but like half the sound department went uncredited so i get it.
