• Annoyed_🦀 @lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    Have no shame in using subtitle, because american movie is either horribly sound balanced or spoken in unintelligible accent.

  • FelixCress@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • IcyToes@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      And please stabilise the camera. I’m not in this car chase, I’m trying to watch it without getting a migraine.

      • SharkWeek@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        4 months ago

        Shakey cam to cover up a limited budget for a car chase, instead of getting creative … so if the rapid cuts and wobble wasn’t there you’d see that they only had one street and couldn’t exceed 30mph

      • towerful@programming.dev
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        4 months ago

        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

        • Sidhean@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          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

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 months ago

      Good luck getting actors and directors to understand hyperealistic and method acting are not ideal on every instance.

    • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      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.

  • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • alekwithak@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        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.

      • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 months ago

        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.

      • epicstove@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        Because a video game is a program that can change it’s behavior as it’s running.

        A video is a recording. It’s already been recorded.

        • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          incorrect. movies are streams of multiple layers of content.

          1. video
          2. environment audio
          3. effects audio
          4. vocal audio

          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.

        • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz
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          4 months ago

          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

    • gens@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      It’s called compression, and most players have it in the settings somewhere. Quick and dirty is to up the volume in vlc to like 120% and lower it in system.

  • Blue@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Exactly why I use subtitles. Seem to recall Interstellar was horrible like this.

    • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 months ago

      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?

      • youngalfred@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • ours@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          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.

        • four@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          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…

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        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.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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.

  • cRazi_man@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    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.

  • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    It is why I enable “Loudness Equalization” on every audio device in Windows.

    It makes soft sounds louder and loud sounds softer.

    Can’t stand it otherwise either.

    • gaja@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      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).

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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…

    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz
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      4 months ago

      As someone who played EVE a lot back in the day, all I can hear is “get that interdictor!”

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 months ago

    Just run the audio through a dynamic range compressor. Then everything will be just as loud as the commercials.

  • Ziglin (it/they)@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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?

    • Jimmycakes@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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