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I was watching bewitched! which was made in the 60s and was amazed how clear the sound was and how articulate the actors were.
Background Music: destroys your eardrums
Brit Lowtalker Villain: we gunna mumbly the wumbky aintwe guvnah
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.
It’s not even like I can’t hear or anything. It’s just sound mixing is terrible.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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’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?
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”
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.
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.
When and why did this become a thing? Half the people I know are like this
It’s a vicious circle, these past twenty years. Before then, movie makers made effort to ensure dialog could be heard and understood. There’s a line in Casino Royal that James mumbles, “He’s a bloody idiot, then”, but you can still understand him, it’s meant to be mumbled, Eva Greene asks “What?”, but he’s understandable when he’s acting like he’s mumbling. They wouldn’t even make him unintelligible for a line that was meant to be unintelligible.
Without subtitles, when I don’t have them for whatever reason, sometimes I need to rewind, and turn up the volume to catch a single word the actor mumbled. Sometimes, I never hear what they said, and I just move on. Was that important? I don’t know.
We started watching with subtitles because we couldn’t hear what the actors are saying.
“Big explosions go boom, everyone likes loud music.”
Actors don’t need to speak clearly, which adds “atmosphere” or whatever, because everyone is watching with subtitles.
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
If you’re gonna talk about me behind my back, I’m gonna steal your meme!
