Volume [Mr Lovenstein]

This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.

If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they're shouting, that's not adding realism, they're doing bad acting.

If the sound engineers can't get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that's not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they're bad at mixing.

If the director can't keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that's not artistic choice, they've made a bad film.

For the sound engineers, your not wrong, but they don't have the power you think they do. Asking for another take is an annoyance but accepted by the camera team and visuals, but audio is often overlooked, and you can't just keep mixing a bad take. But, directors are on a time crunch and so a sound guy saying "actually I know that take was perfect but we can't hear anything" is usually ignored.
- This is a fair point. If people demanded their money back when a film has bad audio, I wonder if that might incentivise the industry to care more about this.
Nah, I have a good sound setup and I don't want to be watching movies with less dynamic range because some people are using their shrilly built-in TV speakers with their children screaming in the background or $5 earbuds.
If you don't want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup, it's not the director's problem, it's the media player. Audio compression, center channel boosting, and subtitling are things that media centers have been able to do for decades (e.g. Kodi), it's just that streaming platforms and TVs don't always support it because they DGAF. Do look for a "night mode" in your TV settings though, that's an audio compressor and I have one on my receiver. If you are using headphones, use a media player like Kodi that allows you to boost the center channel (which is dedicated to dialogue).
- WHY are you getting down voted despite giving clear suggestions on how to get around this problem for people without a 5.1 surround sound setup?
- Even if I had the money and desire for a setup like that, I would not want a high audio range in media because I hate loud noises and am very sensitive.
  In my opinion the big explosion can be a little bit louder than the footsteps but there doesn't have to be a huge difference. I'll sacrifice some realism for my eardrums.
  And why can't all dialogs be about the same volume either?
- I guess it's a hot take, but dynamic range is a very useful tool, not limited to movies but also music and almost any audio that isn't just "talking heads".
  I do want explosions to be significantly louder than whispers.
  Not everything is a podcast / video essay that needs to be mixed to minimal dynamic range.
- Does night mode fix mumbly american actors who are unintelligible at any volume?
- I spent $400 on headphones to address this and despite having had enough issues with build quality to not recommend Bowers & Wilkins specifically, they sound damn good.
- So the excuse you are making is that the performer on stage does not need to speak clearly and loudly, because the people in the first few rows can hear them fine.
  Good tip on night mode though.
I've noticed that some of the best enuciators are people that have a lisp and have obviously either taken speech classes or have self taught themselves how to overcome their lisp with better enuciation.
- I present to you the master orator and renowned pugilist philosopher Mike Tyson.

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

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.

And please stabilise the camera. I'm not in this car chase, I'm trying to watch it without getting a migraine.
- 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
- 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
Good luck getting actors and directors to understand hyperealistic and method acting are not ideal on every instance.
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.

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.

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.
- 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.
How can we set volume of music, SFX and voice separately, in games but not in movies?
- 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.
- You could on laserdisk, but dvd got more popular
- 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.
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.

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

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?
- 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.
- It's called dynamic compression, often labeled as night mode. Makes quiet stuff louder and loud stuff more quiet. My AVR has it as a feature and probably most TVs as well.
- 192kHZ/24bit audio vs 44.1kHZ/16bit
- 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.

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.

I've made similar experiences in movie theatres. And streaming services continuously disappoint on that front too.

Watching a Christopher Nolan movie I see.

Or films from Spain. They whisper in a mumbled accent, then all of a sudden they start SCREAMING at each other.

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.

#High Dynamic Range™

The solution is obviously to learn german. Then you can watch with our excellent and easily intelligible dubs.

But you better enjoy our voice actors, we have about 3!
- Yippykayay, Schweinebacke

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...

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

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?

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

Exactly why I use subtitles.

This is perfect lol. Now we need one for absurdly loud motorcycles ruining an evening’s cool.

Subtitles!

https://youtu.be/j0m4rcx0of4

TENET has entered the chat

For me Star Trek is one of the worst offenders of this.

Which series? All of them? Serious question.
- Right now TNG. I'm re-watching it with my fiancé. The sound of the ship whooshing past is deafening.
  It's been a minute since I've seen the rest of the shows. So I don't remember how good their mixing is.
- My guess is the newest movie trilogy. Maybe the newest shows? Picard and/or that Netflix one? Discovery?

Spacing a tired-ass joke over several shittily drawn panels does not magically make it funny again

But it's funny because it's true.

I always have this problem on yt. At least I can complain in comments

I feel like the problem is the TV. I used to have this issue constantly but ever since I started watching things with headphones on it never happened

It's the TV. No one should expect TV speakers to be worth anything. Even getting one of the cheapest sound bars or even computer speakers will make a noticable difference
- Nobody should expect a product to function reasonably out of the box. That would be insane, right?
- I've got some decent stereo speakers connected to my TV. Music sounds great, but it does not fix this issue at all.
  A soundbar might actually be better cause it has no base I assume.
My TV has a "Night" mode that caps the volume at a certain level, so you can make the dialogue audible without having action be way louder. And also a "Volume Levelling" setting that has a similar effect, by trying to make all the sounds roughly the same volume rather than only quieting the ones that were louder to begin with.

There are a few interesting reasons for this.