Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)
Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)
/Film spoke with several Oscar-winning sound designers, editors, and mixers to learn why it has become tougher to understand what characters are saying.
This is a particularly important topic for myself on the spectrum, as I've had a lot of difficulties trying to follow what's going on in the cinema. I'd have subtitles on all the time if that was possible.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Great summary. Saving us a click. Sounds like a problem that will have to be tackled at multiple steps.