Hacker News Reader

Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

In my naive younger years, when Blu-Ray was being announced, I thought, "Hey, they could put the dialogue on one track, the music on another, and the foley business somewhere else, then you could mix those as you needed." Just put the baby down? Switch to dialogue, with only ten percent explosions and soundtrack.

(This of course would only be useful where you had original audio tracks)

View on HN

The video games have pretty much universally been having at least two separate volume sliders (one for music, other for SFX, optionally the third one for the dialog) for about 15? 20? years. Maybe in another 20 years the cinema industry will adopt something like it, who knows?

I keep waiting for this setting and I don’t understand why a service like Netflix or HBO hasn’t offered it yet.

Do they have access to the individual audio tracks for anything that they haven't produced themselves?

Unlikely but if they offered it on their own stuff it could create a trend.

And increasingly they are losing the quality content that they didn't produce themselves.

Directors and the like would probably refuse to cooperate.

This is mostly prevalent in video games because they lack auteurs obsessed with this kind of thing.

Some games go even further. For example, Uncharted 2 had different dynamic ranges and even a midnight mode. A Naughty Dog audio engineer explained it at the time on the AVS Forum [0]. It's a great post, here's an excerpt:

> Dialog always pans across center, but in movies, most FX generally don't. In games, since much of the action happens up front, even with full-range centers, putting all of the volume in one speaker for all the dialog and FX happening directly in front of you generally doesn't sound as good as spreading the power for the FX around to the front mains.

It says a lot about Naughty Dog that they wanted players to have the best experience, no matter what setup they had.

[0] https://www.avsforum.com/threads/uncharted-among-thieves.109...

Satisfactory went ballistic in the latest update, adding 50 separate volume sliders for every sound effect. Not sure it was necessary, but I did use it for a couple of items I find especially irritating.

In some cases this winds up being an abdication of responsibility, as I've found the default can be mixed quite poorly, with eg music drowning out the dialogue. But it's certainly nice to have that control.

In 5.1/7.1 audio mixes, the center channel is the magic channel with the dialogue.

It gives plenty of control. It's pretty great in practice.

Until people don't have a center speaker hooked up.

Yeah but that messes up the balance, ie character moves from left to right - it is quiet, then LOUD, then quiet.

I guess upping the center channel is an ok solution in practice because this doesn't happen very often, but DTS:X and Dolby TrueHD do actually support a separate dialog object that you can adjust the volume of independently, but AFAIK there are no actual movie titles that are mixed to make use of this feature.

That's power user thinking! Nothing is built for power users anymore, except most FOSS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com