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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

It's fundamental to a story - I have to see the actors. I have to hear them say their lines.

When they shoot dark scenes that leave me wondering who is talking, what they're doing, why they said that, it's a profound failure of the Director to make a minimally funcitonal story.

The other failure is mumbling actors. They whisper when they don't understand what emotion to show. They rush their lines to show passion but instead show lack of fundamental acting skill. They turn from the camera so I can't see their face, say something to the wall, leaving me without necessary facial clues, leaving me to puzzle out their accent or whatnot.

I blame it on falling standards of professionalism, driven by an insatiable demand for content.

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> I have to see the actors. I have to hear them say their lines.

There are entire scenes where, if you watch it in the average person's living room, the only thing you get from the movie are the subtitles (that you set because you can't hear them talking).

Unintelligible speech is a big flaw of modern movies. Made me enjoy lots of movies less and less

We re-watched The Dark Knight (2008) a few days ago.

There's darkness when it's appropriate. There's light to see what Nolan wants you to see. The fights are both well-choreographed and recorded and cut well -- not the flurry of a thousand ultra-tight cuts that waste the talent of everyone involved.

But the dialogue is about 9 dB under what it should be, and only subtitling makes any of it understandable except for a few scenes. My sound system is well-calibrated and powerful: it's the movie's fault.

Nolan is such a bad offender the audio in Interstellar was, I am not kidding, painful to my ears. I saw it in a theater and I'll never ever watch it again ever. It...just...wrong on so many levels.

Christopher Nolan is to cinematic audio what Chris Gaines is to rock and roll.

pro-tip: wear ear plugs to theaters. makes the experience ten times more pleasant for me and eliminates all of the sudden-surprise-audio volume explosions that hurt your ears. it's never impeded my ability to hear dialog in theaters.

He chose it. The happy moments have roughened up speech and the sad moments it's smooth and legible. He also plays with Dr Brandt mishearing Cooper re-entering the spacecraft "I'm sorry / Mann was lying".

It is becoming the anime of the 90’s, pre cowboy bebop. Voice actors would not learn the nuance of the original delivery, the pay was too low to spend the time. Everyone was either yelling or just rushing through them. This is happening now, shows are rushed to deliver “content” and fill the airwaves, not actually do something good.

I assume you are talking dubbed anime in English because Japanese voice-acting has been a mature industry since at least the 1970s.

Honest question: have in general the (japanese) voices of female anime characters increased their pitch during the last years, or am I imagining things?

This is happening now, shows are rushed to deliver “content” and fill the airwaves, not actually do something good.

This may be so, but shows used to have 22 episodes in the US, now series have 8 or 10. So far, far less work yearly, less cramming to get shooting/processing/writing done.

You'd think this would give more time for better takes, directing, acting.

Guess not.

Hmm, at least those I watch, if they have less episodes than its often 40-60 minutes instead of 20. Or maybe its different type of show, dunno. I think the cost of complexity of shooting have skyrocketed, before for a scene you needed few good actors and very primitive generic setting. Now hunt for perfection is much bigger on both sides of screen, plus required digital changes afterwards.

It stunned me to see ie what actors wore in Game of thrones in later series, when budget was high. A robe which was on screen for 1 minute max, and I focused on face of actress and scene so didn't notice it at all, had such details and beautiful ornaments sewed in by hand, crazy amount of work to create 1 unique piece just for that scene. Multiply by X actors there. Must have cost a small fortune to make, even for such a well oiled machine like Hollywood. Compared to ie Streets of San Francisco, guys wearing the same basic suit outfit over whole series.

Games of Thrones is a very rare series. Almost all other series are not that complex.

You're comparing one of the most expensive series ever, with low cost series.

And even action series, in the old days, would film 60 min. episodes, with live action, explosions, car scenes, really things are very cheap now with CGI.

Imagine having to retake a scene with real explosions?

Generally speaking it just means more shows with fewer or singular writers, and without ensemble casts.

A bit part of making shows with 22 -24 episode seasons was having a cast of circa nine main characters, so you could film three of them at once.

Audiences generally respond better now there is not network pressure to deliver half a year's worth of new episodes per annum with shows where their favour characters are the main characters every week.

Mumbling actors is more about the sound setup.

Cinemas have enough speakers and processing to create dozens of virtual speakers.

The result is that the speech is given it's own location and segment of frequencies.

The brain can easily pick it out in this setting. Think hearing your partner speak at a dinner party.

Then people watch movie on a two backwards facing speaker thin TV and think why can't I hear anything!?

It's like watching a 3D movie with no glasses and wondering why it's blurry.

Maybe, just maybe movies remastered for home consumption should assume that people are sitting in their living rooms with normal setup rather then in large cinema? And that maybe they dont want to play the movie so loud that the whole building/house hears explosions?

Had to jack the sound to max just to hear the dialogue in Tenet... which really wasn't worth much anyway, Nolan at his most sparse

Absolutely agree.

It's the movie viewers that are wrong, got it!

If you don't have surround sound in your home theater, do you even deserve to watch a movie?

I imagine that can contribute. But then other videos don't have the problem. Old movies don't have the problem. Just this new shabby stuff. Does my sound setup know somehow?

Bottom line a good sound engineer with time and access to the raw audio could mix it to work well with stereo systems. But that ain't happening.

> But then other videos don't have the problem.

They likely would if they were intended for playback on a cinema system and just flattened to mono or stereo.

Christopher Noland doesn't direct/produce movies thinking about how they'll look on a phone on netflix. And the sound engineer he hired doesn't care either.

How much time and money was dedicated to the sound engineering to convert that 20 speaker maybe 100 virtual channel system to your 2 speaker system? Then they need to do it for 2.1, 5.1, Atmos... Whatever else is the new thing these days.

And if you have 5.1 did you consider carefully the layout? Are there multipath effects you haven't dampened? Did you consider the path to each speaker relative to listener?

> Does my sound setup know somehow?

Well yes, kind of. Your TV if it is at all modern will do some processing to the audio. If it's connected to a 5.1 system it might just pass through a 5.1, what does it do with a stereo audio? Or 2.1? What if it gets 7.1 it must decide what to do likely you can control this in the settings.

Let's say you have a 5.1 setup at home. And your TV sends it stereo? What does it do then how does it make 6 channels from 2? The subwoofer is easy, relatively non-direction a low pass filter sends all low end to it and high pass to the regular speakers.

My TV has a decent "clear speech" setting which picks out speech boosts them and then suppresses no speech audio around them. Usually it works perfectly.

Playing stereo audio on a stereo system will work fine.

I would buy your argument if it were true that the sound wasn't muffled and unintelligible in theaters. But that's not the case. The recent Nolan films are almost as unintelligable in theaters as they are on a stereo home system, even on IMAX.

Nolan himself has tried to make this argument, he's trying to invoke sub-bass frequencies, that his goal was never for movies to be understandable, and that it was an artistic choice that maybe the audience doesn't have to understand everything.

I'm all for artistic integrity and him being able to do whatever he wants, but I'm also ok with calling Nolan wrong on this one. I have no interest in seeing his films if audio clarity is not one of his goals in film-making. It breaks immersion (real life isn't unintelligible and mumbled), it isn't an enjoyable experience for me, and frankly I think is poor decision making on his part. I'm ok with calling Nolan wrong, hand-wavy artistic stuff aside.

You make a good point. I found Tennet to be easy to hear but I know there were meme reviews about it being too quiet.

So I looked one up

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/03/tenet-dialogue-...

Interestingly in the case of Tenet the claim is that cinemas intentionally were playing the movie too quiet.

It brings up the usual issues of audio mixing and cinema and home is vastly different. But puts Tenet down to cinemas turning it down to avoid loud explosions.

So is this a case of cinemas turning down well mixed movies because movies are coming out too loud?

But really this is just the same problem over again. Sound engineer mixes audio intending for a high end cinema. Some cinemas plays it poorly, people watching at home have no chance to play it properly...

Sure, that may be the case that they turned it down. It seemed to be a widespread issue though across a lot of reviewers and opinions.

The sound engineer interviews in that article are interesting though, and they seem to be blaming Nolan and the mixing as well.

I also get wanting to turn them down. I've been in theaters so loud that my ears were ringing after the movie, or were actively hurting during certain scenes. The Dark Knight was one of those. It could also just be poor settings at the local cinema in that case as well though.

Given the vast majority of movies are understandable, I just wish Nolan would mix with that goal in mind given I would actually enjoy his movies most of the time if it just weren't for the muffled speech and sound.

I don't buy it, much recent content is nearly unintelligible on my pretty good 5.1 setup with a real AVR and real speakers, thats set up and tuned reasonably well. Older movies, from the 80's and 90's don't have this problem, just newer content. And so often it's not even a level problem, it's like the dialogue is deliberately muffled by an EQ or something. I can boost my center channel or use the AVR's speech enhancement control and it's still hard to understand. I kind of buy into the common complaint that it's the actors and actresses that don't know how to project their voices any more.

I seem to be failing to explain this...

In the 90s cutting edge cinema.audio was 5.1 systems (cinema digital audio) before that 2.1. You own a 5.1 system you say.

Today cutting edge is systems like Dolby Atmos Cinema which is a 128 virtual, 64 real speaker system.

Are you really saying you can't grasp that cinemas have moved on in audio system since the 80s?

Atmos’ big feature is to place audio properly no matter how many - or how few - speakers you have.

As long as the receiver has identified the positions of your speakers accurately (something receivers have been capable of with a small microphone since the early 00’s) it should place sounds appropriately.

That's Home Atmos. What happens if you take the 128 channel Atmos Cinema inputs and just blindly make stereo out of them?

Perhaps suddenly the very quiet speech the sound engineer carefully made space for in location and frequency is suddenly muddied?

That’s the thing, Atmos doesn’t care about channels, except for how to use them to represent a sound at render time. And that render is not embedded in the tracks, it’s calculated.

You think a home ATMOS system can take and process 128 real time channels at full audio quality!?

I have an expensive 5.1 calibrated setup at home and the audio still sucks.

Must I have my own IMAX theater?

Actually, I saw some shitty Nolan movie in the cinema and the audio sucked there as well.

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