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.
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.
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.
Great summary. Saving us a click. Sounds like a problem that will have to be tackled at multiple steps.
“bemoaning directors' over-reliance on music as ‘pushing emotion’ on audiences”
One of my pet peeves. It’s usually the sign of a poorly made movie if you feel you have to lay on the music because actors performances aren’t enough to convey the emotions of a scene.
Really though the last mentioned issue in the article is the main problem. (Gotta get you to scroll to the end!) The movies are mixed for a theater sound system and most don’t get remixed for television.
You mean you're not a fan of the cover song that is slowed down to sound ominous that you hear in every got dang trailer?!
Very much the case of streaming movies, like the brothers one with Peter Dinklage and Josh Brolin. They're phoning it in while those working post are trying to make it gel better. I don't know if I've seen a genuinely good movie which went straight onto streaming platforms.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines was good, but it wasn't produced for streaming.
A good director will know how to use music to its full advantage to elevate a scene. How could you watch the Interstellar docking scene without Hans' No Time for Caution? Or major chunks of Dune without the soundtrack?
But, audio ducking the music to make sure the narration is understandable is just as important. Lay on the music when there isn't dialogue, and bring it down when it's time to listen to the narration.
Here's why I'm not clicking your article (And you know how to fix that)
The fuckin journalists are worse than the sound engineers
It's pretty clear about what it is to me.
That's a brilliant article.
Assuming facts are accurate, and there's not much missing info, it explains so much about why I've consistently hated the sound on streaming services. Even with my full home theater setup instead of just stereo, there's flaws that stand out compared to dvd or bluray.
Take the opening scene of evil dead. Well, I can't recall if it's 1 or 2 that has this particular scene. But it's when the swing is banging against the cabin. On DVD the sound is balanced roughly right; the banging isn't out of line with the dialogue, no need to mess with volume. But streaming? Again, I can't even remember what service it was on, but that banging was absurdly loud compared to the dialogue, and so were the effects. It was a horrible experience to a movie I've seen literally hundreds of times over the years.
When that happens, it's usually because the sound being broadcast doesn't match your tv's sound setup. The easiest thing to do is to switch it to mono. You don't get the nice stereo effects, but at least you can hear everything without being blasted out of your seat.
Or, if you can afford it and have the space, get a 5.1 surround system (or better). Most movies and series are mastered in surround and besides being a more immersive experience in general, dialogue is primary played by a designated speaker (center speaker) and most sound systems allow you to boost the output to said speaker, making dialogue stand out a bit more against the music/noise.
The new dialogue Enhancer feature on the AppleTV 4K works quite nicely on almost everything.
Is that the one for your dialogue in the room or the viewed media
Media. There's also like a level 2 called, IIRC, Boost Dialogue, but that one tends to screw with the rest of the audio track, whereas Enhance level has minimal impact (pretty much unnoticeable...MOST of the time. I have had some media where I definitely have turned it off).
I like just using the "reduce loud sounds" setting which indirectly makes dialogue louder compared to very loud scenes.
A picture you can hear.
A few of the most recent movies I've seen used AI to write all or part of the script, which is why it's hard to understand; it's literally incomprehensible because it's just a fucking word salad spat out by an LLM. Even if you can hear it, you won't understand it.
Your comment was written by AI. We have equivalent evidence.
That's not what this article is talking about. This is about sound mixing, not the script.