136
Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)
(www.slashfilm.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
136 points (94.2% liked)
Movies
7526 readers
106 users here now
Welcome to Movies, a community for discussing movies, film news, box office, and more! We want this to be a place for members to feel safe to discuss and share everything they love about movies and movie related things. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow!
Related Communities:
!books@lemmy.world - Discussing books and book-related things.
!comicbooks@lemmy.world - A place to discuss comic books of all types.
!marvelstudios@lemmy.world - LW's home for all things MCU.
While posting and commenting in this community, you must abide by the Lemmy.World Terms of Service: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
-
Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
-
Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
-
Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
-
Shitposts and memes are allowed until they prove to be a problem.
Regarding spoilers; Please put "(Spoilers)" in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers, as we do not currently have a spoiler tag available. If your post contains an image that could be considered a spoiler, please mark the thread as NSFW so the image gets blurred. As far as how long to wait until the post is no longer a spoiler, please just use your best judgement. Everyone has a different idea on this, so we don't want to make any hard limits.
Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread. Most of the Lemmy clients don't support this but we want to get into the habit as clients will be supporting in the future.
Failure to follow these guidelines will result in your post/comment being removed and/or more severe actions. All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. We ask that the users report any comment or post that violates the rules, and to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
TL;DR:
Modern actors are incompetent self entitled imbeciles with no theatre training whatsoever who mumble their words because they think it sounds cooler.
Directors are incompetent self entitled imbeciles who believe unintelligible dialogue is more realistic, but also that drowning it in way too loud music makes the film more emotional, that sound recording equipment gets in the way of filming and should be kept as far away as possible from the action, and that if they know what the script says (because they've read it a thousand times) so will the audience.
Producers (and the aforementioned actors and directors) are cheap lazy incompetent self entitled imbeciles who'll refuse to film another take claiming the useless shit they just filmed can be fixed in post (it can't, it's shit).
Theatres fired all competent projectionists and are now manned by lazy incompetent untrained teenagers who have no idea how to properly operate and set up the sound systems and will more often than not play the films at the wrong volume.
Streaming sites overcompress and overprocess (and overprice) the audio into an even more unintelligible noisy mess.
“Smart” TVs overprocess it even more on top of that, making it even worse. And you're probably using the wrong settings anyway.
In short: the audio is intentionally crap, becomes even crappier in every step between filming and your ears (except, according to people working in sound processing, the sound processing step, but there's only so much you can do to fix crappy digital audio).
Audio standards are also a fucking mess. Getting a surround sound system to actually work is a nightmare because there's more surrounded sound audio standards than there are atoms in the universe, and the "auto" settings that are supposed to take care of it just don't.
And if the format of the media you're watching doesn't match your speaker setup, the audio ends up being awful.
As somebody who recently set up a Denon 5.1 system, that's not been my experience. I mean, there's certainly a lot of tweaking, wires, and configuration to do, but it's not because of the audio standards. Dolby just fucking works, and everybody uses it.
The main problem is trying to figure out how best to upmix stereo inputs to get it to sound decent, and make sure you can get a decent mix of narration and music. I've found it's best to just trust the microphone-based auto-configuration for speaker levels, and use the other options like multi-channel stereo and the dialog enhancer settings to make it work better.
Which Dolby? I have to change the settings when I change services or individual programs to find which setting actually results in the surround channels playing audio.
Do I need it to use Prologic, DTS, Atmos, Pro Logic II, Neo, Digital Plus, or Aura?
It doesn't matter. Your audio receiver will know which one is it and decode it.
Yet somehow it never does, or just defaults to "virtual surround"
warning that I didn't read the article but the actor thing might also be compounded by how a lot of film actors are told not to be theatre actors because the current trend is for almost-nothing performances because that's en vogue right now.
Then you watch all the "greatest" TV shows: Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, Freaks and Geeks, Gilmore Girls, Star Trek, Madmen which are filled with these huge, scenery-chewing performances.
So actually the issue might be: creating something actually good isn't easy and is quite rare, especially in a world where money matters more than the art.
What do all of those shows have in common? They were all made at least ten years ago by cable studios that actually knew what the fuck they were doing. Today's Hollywood is mostly a dumpster fire of bad writers, bad directors, bad writers, actors that have their hands tied by the rest of the crew, terrible terrible writers, and producers who are so far removed from reality that they don't even understand what makes a film great.
Ah, the Golden Age of TV. When is that exactly? I know some people say it's still going, but it must have been from like The Sopranos or Lost up to, idk, Mad Men or Breaking Bad, right? When good, serialized, prestige television became en vogue but before streaming took it all over, would be my guess.
The last great TV series I watched was Mr Robot, and that started in 2015, by a cable studio.
Now, I've seen plenty of good potential streaming series that have a first season, like Arcane and Severance. But, the odds of them having some sort of beginning, middle, and ending are damn near zero. How can you have any sort of series when they want to spend something like five years between seasons?
Hell, even The Expanse, which started out as a cable series, got picked up by Amazon, and they decided to just shitcan the series because they wanted to spend a billion dollars on their LotR boondoggle. They had a pretty good run, but it deserved better.
Can you imagine the sheer frustration of trying to hear and appreciate the glorious dialogue of Deadwood were it subject to the poor standards of current productions?
Great summary. Saving us a click. Sounds like a problem that will have to be tackled at multiple steps.