Source/secret panel: https://m.tapas.io/episode/3005249
Source/secret panel: https://m.tapas.io/episode/3005249
For the sound engineers, your not wrong, but they don't have the power you think they do. Asking for another take is an annoyance but accepted by the camera team and visuals, but audio is often overlooked, and you can't just keep mixing a bad take. But, directors are on a time crunch and so a sound guy saying "actually I know that take was perfect but we can't hear anything" is usually ignored.
This is a fair point. If people demanded their money back when a film has bad audio, I wonder if that might incentivise the industry to care more about this.
I've noticed that some of the best enuciators are people that have a lisp and have obviously either taken speech classes or have self taught themselves how to overcome their lisp with better enuciation.
I present to you the master orator and renowned pugilist philosopher Mike Tyson.
Nah, I have a good sound setup and I don't want to be watching movies with less dynamic range because some people are using their shrilly built-in TV speakers with their children screaming in the background or $5 earbuds.
If you don't want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup, it's not the director's problem, it's the media player. Audio compression, center channel boosting, and subtitling are things that media centers have been able to do for decades (e.g. Kodi), it's just that streaming platforms and TVs don't always support it because they DGAF. Do look for a "night mode" in your TV settings though, that's an audio compressor and I have one on my receiver. If you are using headphones, use a media player like Kodi that allows you to boost the center channel (which is dedicated to dialogue).
There is millions of people who "don't want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup". It is the director's problem, optimise for the masses, not people who can afford to setup a cinema system in their home
We have movies with multiple audio streams. So you can choose English, or French, or crew commentary.
Why not have a mix for "standard home TV setup" and a mix for "5.1 ultimate surround sound system" and keep both groups of people happy?
It's called Dolby 2.0 and a lot of Blu-ray movies actually do have a track (though not all). Though it's been my experience that the native 2.0 usually sounds worse than the 2.0 that I compress down from the 5.1 or 7.1 when I make a backup of my movies. I am unsure as to why this is. I'm guessing it's cause, as OP stated, the studio sound mixers just don't give a shit to make a 2 speaker system sound good.
Downmixing is a pretty straightforward affair. You have 6 channels, you need to go to 2, so you just average 4 signals per channel using some weights.
Good media players (Kodi) allow you to change those weights, especially for the center channel, and to reduce dynamic range (with a compressor). Problem solved, the movie will be understandable even on shitty built-in TV speakers if you want to do that for some insane reason.
The problem is that there are "default" weights for 2.0 downmixing that were made in the 90s for professional audio monitoring headphones, and these are the weights used by shitty software from shitty movie distributors or TV sets that don't care to find out why default downmixing is done the way it is. Netflix could detect that you're using shitty speakers and automatically reduce dynamic range and boost dialogue for you, they just DGAF. But none of that is the movie's problem.
So you're advocating that the whole industry cater to the lowest common denominator instead of simply having people who don't want to waste money on audio setup just activate certain settings?
You do realise the masses are mostly using tinny TV speakers and cheap wireless earphones to watch movies, don't you? Catering to them means compressing the audio to their small dynamic range, so now any sound system that is better than a TV speaker will sound just as shit.
No, they're advocating for sensible defaults. Just because you're an enthusiast doesn't you're the market. Being supported is great, but believing you deserve to be sppecially catered to at the expense of the maajority is real smug bullshit.
Where do you draw the line? If you use a soundbar, someone else is complaining because they use their built-in speakers. But if you optimize for that, someone else is using their laptop speaker on the train.
What really pisses me off with this "argument" is that the audio information is all right there, which you would know if you bothered to read the second half of my comment before getting all pissy.
5.1 audio (and the standards that superseded it in cinemas) all have multiple audio channels with one dedicated to voice. If you have a shit sound system, the sound system should be downmixing in a way that preserves dialogue better. Again, the information is all right there as there is no stereo track in most movies, your player is building it on-the-fly based on the 5.1 track. It's not the director's fault that Netflix or Hulu is doing an awful job at accounting for the fact that most of their users are listening on a sound setup that can barely reproduce intelligible speech.
I draw the line at "people watch stuff on TV and cannot hear any dialogue".
I don't need to have a doctorate on audio / put in thousands of dollars into a hobby I don't want to hear dialogue in a movie without rupturing my eardrums by an action scene.
If everything is there, let's optimize for people like me, and let people like you mess around with the settings for your home cinema.
WHY are you getting down voted despite giving clear suggestions on how to get around this problem for people without a 5.1 surround sound setup?
people don't like spending money, and it's the entire problem. Visuals people will shell out money for a great TV, but then complain that the audio is terrible. Really people need to invest in both. If you are watching a movie on an expensive TV but didn't do anything for audio, well then of course it won't sound good. TVs aren't designed to have good audio. They give you a speaker to be able to listen to something, but it's a small cheap one or two in the back.
Fact is that for movies it's a video and audio, and people should be thinking about both. People don't need to go spend another 500 bucks on a 5.1 system, but even a cheapo sound bar for 150 is going to sound better - because they made it for audio. It's an audio device. I have zero surprise that people can't hear things well from a device that is meant to display visuals first.
I had a 5.0 setup before I even bought my first TV. I was just using my PC monitor until then.
It's counter-intuitive but decent sound comes first. I'd much rather watch Interstellar in 360p with 5.1 audio than in 4K OLED HDR with built-in speakers.
But when you say that people get mad because they spent a grand on a TV that sounds like shit and they feel they have to defend their choices.
Even if I had the money and desire for a setup like that, I would not want a high audio range in media because I hate loud noises and am very sensitive.
In my opinion the big explosion can be a little bit louder than the footsteps but there doesn't have to be a huge difference. I'll sacrifice some realism for my eardrums.
And why can't all dialogs be about the same volume either?
I guess it's a hot take, but dynamic range is a very useful tool, not limited to movies but also music and almost any audio that isn't just "talking heads".
I do want explosions to be significantly louder than whispers.
Not everything is a podcast / video essay that needs to be mixed to minimal dynamic range.
Right?! A track like Spanish Sahara by Foals that uses the full dynamic range is such a pleasure to listen to. Then there's In the Air Tonight which IIRC has a digital release with super compressed dynamic range. The whole point of that song is that it slowly builds up to a genre-defining drop, so it had better stand out!
But people want to listen to movies on their built-in TV speakers with children crying in the background, and they don't want to understand how or why things are the way they are, they just want to complain that the world doesn't revolve around them.
So the excuse you are making is that the performer on stage does not need to speak clearly and loudly, because the people in the first few rows can hear them fine.
Good tip on night mode though.
It should reduce the difference between the quietest sound and the loudest sound in a movie, but if an actor doesn't speak clearly in the first place, I don't think it helps much.
Yes. And stop fucking mumbling. And use a proper lighting for fuck sake, I don't care if it is middle of the night in a forest, I want to be able to see what's going on.
I swear there was a phase where shakey-cam had just become the in-thing.
I remember watching a TV series or a movie or something where shooting had clearly wrapped before shakey-cam was popularised. And it looked like they had just added it in post. It was unnatural movement (so, not like someone was holding the camera), and there was too much of it. I had to skip a lot of the shakey-cam scenes
Me when I feed the false memories of strangers and myself online
I swear I've made that exact same complaint about a show or movie! I like when I can see whats going on when I'm watching something
I prefer for actors to mumble then their character is supposed to mumble, and just use subtitles. Maybe it's because I've gotten too used to subtitles from all the anime I watch but I always enable it for anything on YouTube or any other video content I consume.
Agree on the lightning part though, at least for action scenes, bad lighting is often used to cover for bad CGI. For narration scenes of the place is actually dark, I don't really mind for me to basically only see silhouettes, it's appropriate.
I feel like the real issue, is that we only get one volume bar. If it was normal to define both the minimal and maximal volume setting and have the players stretch the given dynamic range into that then it would all be good.
I have dabbled in video editing and it is SO easy to manipulate and level the audio track so that dialogue is louder than music and sound effects. This has led me to believe that movies where this is a major problem like Tenet are absolutely mixed this way on purpose, and the only reasonable conclusion to draw from that is that Christopher Nolan is insane.
Mostly, it's a downmixing issue.
The movie is mixed to have Music, Speech, SFX spread out through 5.1 or 7.1 The speech and primary important sounds come through center. General music is a mix of L,R and Surround. When you feed that audio track to a dumb tv, it does a horrible job at turning it into L and R sound only.
If you feed it through a good 5.1 or 7.1 receiver or soundbar, you get options for Speech and surround and you can mess with levels individually. But the speech is front and loud.
If I just plug my roku into my tv, the center channel is almost at, all I get is the light intermixing of center in L and R so speech is horrible. you jack up the volume to hear the speech, then all the other sound is way too loud
Likewise, in most cases just taking an AAC and convert it to mp3 without adjusting the levels, it ends up sounding like trash.
How can we set volume of music, SFX and voice separately, in games but not in movies?
In games these categories of audio are calculated and mixed locally in real time, for movies they are mixed down to a single track and compressed ahead of time.
These days having three audio tracks would not be a significant problem, compared to the high resolution video track. But I guess the industry never changed.
I could already hear the forums filling with desync complaints
incorrect. movies are streams of multiple layers of content.
environment audio are things in the background like cars, birds, children playing.
effects audio are sound effects like breaking glass, car crashes, explosions.
vocal audio is just that, the dialog between characters.
streams MUX these together into a playable movie on the fly and is how it's possible for them to use the same movie with different language dubs.
it's completely in the realm of possibility for them to create a control to manage the volume of each of these layers before muxing. that would break their caching strategy though.
physical media like Bluray should be able to do it though. BD players never implemented such a feature that I am aware of.
You can record multiple channels, you already have left and right recorded separately. Other channels could exist for different things, it would just need a standard to follow to be useful
It was great in cinema. It's terrible at home.
Frankly annoying as hell that shows and movies can basically only be enjoyed in a cinema or with headphones.
Where's the audio equivalent of HDR?
It's funny because I understood what you meant, but I think it's the exact opposite of HDR. You want to reduce the range with a compressor.
And some home cinema receivers do offer this option. Often labeled something like "night listening mode".
I've found upgrading my front center speaker has greatly improved dialogue. I had my speakers from a home cinema kit and the center front was a puny crappy speaker.
There's HDR for displays, which increases the dynamic range, but there's also HDR for photos, where the dynamic range is compressed. So maybe they meant the latter? Very not confusing naming...
What about the HDR on my HDR TV that just makes all colors darker when enabling HDR?
192kHZ/24bit audio vs 44.1kHZ/16bit
Irionically HDR for video is new and a mess, but audio has long been "high dynamic" range, which is why its so awful in non-perfect listening environments.
Alot of it is... pretentiousness?
Like, there's a lot of high-brow thinking in the movie industry where stuff is mixed for movie theaters. You know, theaters that have good surround speaker setups, but also turn the volume way too loud. It's "as its meant to be experienced" if you ask the Hollywood producers. I think Netflix and more small-screen oriented producers are better about this, where even surround mixes are much more reasonable.
Watching a Christopher Nolan movie I see.
Or films from Spain. They whisper in a mumbled accent, then all of a sudden they start SCREAMING at each other.
For anyone who might find this useful:
Kodi is great for normalising volume and I try to use Kodi for Plex and YouTube on the TV:
Try adjusting the Volume to about -20 dB and the Volume Amplification to +30 dB. The latter will compress the audio as it increases volume to avoid peaks, and will effectively "flatten" the volume contour a bit. Adjust the values to your taste.
The other thing that has really helped is having a good Bluetooth speaker. If the kids are playing and being noisy in the room while I'm trying to watch TV, then sound is much clearer if the speaker is right next to me rather than trying to turn up the volume to drown out other noises.
You can get an audio compressor extension on most browsers too. It functions by reducing volume above a threshold and increasing overall output to compensate.
On the flip side, if a poor audio mixer overly does this to make their track sound louder, services such as YouTube penalize the volume of the entire audio track.
Human ears are more sensitive to certain sounds, so boosting certain frequencies can make something sound louder without necessarily increasing the overall amplitude of the sound waves (air pressure).
Been there the hard way. I got Tubular Bells II, and listened to it via headphones (I had no speakers).
There is one passage where the music ends, and a child speaks. It was hard to understand, so I turned the volume to 11, and heard the end of the sentence like "and nothing was ever heard of him again but the sound of tu-bu-lar bells." The next sound was the BANG of the tubular bells, making my eardrums meet somewhere in the middle. somewhere...
Sometimes there's also a random high pitched buzz in the background that's louder than anything else for one whole scene. How heard would it be to just remove that frequency range or maybe see that it is louder than every other scene?
Solve guy went to music school instead of law to add that in there. He's keeping it in there if it's the last thing he does
Exactly why I use subtitles.
This could be because your TV sucks, or at least the audio, a lot of companies push for big Bass like would be in an explosion because it sells TVs which would be fine if they didn't skimp on the highs and mids making speech suck.
Lol, no, it's not because your TV sucks, but because almost none of us are watching on a 5.1 or higher channel system and the audio mix was never changed from their cinema release
Anything I watch in my TV that sounds awful sounds just fine out of my 5.1 PC because I suddenly have access to more channels where the audio is actually out (dialogue looooves to get mixed to center only for some reason)
This may be for some cases. But I've also had the exact same experience in the theater except I can't change the volume. All the fun of not understanding mixed with the thrill of losing your hearing.
I'm pretty sure a lot of it is simply because that sort of mixing style is pretty fashionable at the moment. If you mix movies like they were mixed in the 90s and 2000's (i.e. very clear and distinct dialog) then they don't 'sound' modern.
Even in cinemas the mix is awful and almost inaudible half the time. Extreme example but I saw Tenet at the cinema and had to guess at half of the dialog because Christopher Nolan is especially and increasingly fond of this.
It's not like the audio mix isn't shit in theatres anyways.
For me Star Trek is one of the worst offenders of this.
Right now TNG. I'm re-watching it with my fiancรฉ. The sound of the ship whooshing past is deafening.
It's been a minute since I've seen the rest of the shows. So I don't remember how good their mixing is.
The actual dialogue is good, I agree. But even the best talented actors in the world can't undo the mixing of a space ship transmitting sound as if there is air while going faster than light.
My guess is the newest movie trilogy. Maybe the newest shows? Picard and/or that Netflix one? Discovery?
This is why Iโve cancelled all movie subscriptions.
Subtitles!
I've got some decent stereo speakers connected to my TV. Music sounds great, but it does not fix this issue at all.
A soundbar might actually be better cause it has no base I assume.
A sub would help, it would divert some of the responsibility away from your driver's there. It could then focus a bit more on dialogue, and you could probably tweak the EQ to be more friendly towards the mids. That being said, play with the EQ in general, you might be able to squeeze a bit more out of your current ones
Play around with your settings, you might be able to fix it.
My ass plays sound too, but nobody want to pay to hear it.
They may as well just sell them without speakers at all. I don't need specifixally high quality sound, just not-garbage sound.
If you want your TV to have an audio system on par with the 4k OLED display it's going to cost twice as much and weigh three hundred pounds. And be gargantuan. Speakers need space to move air and resonate.
I don't need high-powered, audiophile-grade surround speakers. Just maybe something a little better than a landline phone. There's a pretty wide spectrum, and TVs come with shit tier audio. They don't have to, but they do.
My TV has a "Night" mode that caps the volume at a certain level, so you can make the dialogue audible without having action be way louder. And also a "Volume Levelling" setting that has a similar effect, by trying to make all the sounds roughly the same volume rather than only quieting the ones that were louder to begin with.
Or just get a 5.1 setup. Speakers are cheaper than ever.
Edit: Well. They were. Before an orange man decided to destroy the economy.
Hey totally fair, whatever works. I built out the surround system because, after experiencing someoneโs home theater when I was a kid, Iโd always wanted to. ๐
But it's funny because it's true.
Some of us can't use subtitles. I want to actually watch the cinematography and the actors. If text is on-screen I can't not read it
Well since you're obviously into film, you should invest in a proper Dolby Atmos/DTS:X surround setup to give you options. You can either turn up the center channel, put it in "dialog" mode, or enable dynamic range compression (night mode).
Regardless, tou're not getting the full experience if you don't have a surround sound setup. Ideally you should buy a receiver and hand pick your component speakers, but even a sound bar is better than TV speakers, so long as it's from a well-known brand and has up firing drivers in both the front and rear. If the third number in the number of speakers is 4 or higher (ex 5.1.4), then you're good to go.
This applies to everybody reading this, not just lagoon8622. All your dialog problems are being caused by your TV speakers.
I shouldn't have to invest hundreds of dollars into a whole separate sound system just because the sound designers of a movie can't properly balance to audio for stereo sound, the single most common audio set up in the entire world.
It would be nice if TVs came with a proper sound system, but since they don't, you should factor audio into the cost of your home entertainment system. That's like going to a restaurant and ordering food without a drink.
Blind people don't exist.
If subtitles are on I may as well be deaf because I'm no longer watching with those damn words getting in the way. That's what books are for.
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@lemmy.world
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
*๏ฟฝ Be Nice!
*๏ฟฝ๏ธ Community Standards
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It should be noted that when you make reports, it is your responsibility to provide rational reasoning why something should be removed. Saying it simply breaks community rules is not always good enough.
Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.
When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:
Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)
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This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.
If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they're shouting, that's not adding realism, they're doing bad acting.
If the sound engineers can't get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that's not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they're bad at mixing.
If the director can't keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that's not artistic choice, they've made a bad film.
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