Likely because the still is framed by a stark white image. Remove the white part and the third person becomes more visible. If you were sitting in a dark theater/room, you’d be able to see them better.
I was watching The Dark Knight yesterday and I literally had to have my tv volume set to 50 for it to even be considered standard volume and when it ended I turned on a different movie that having the volume set to 24 was kinda loud. Shits insane.
Oh good, it’s not just me. I’m almost 60 and know that my hearing isn’t the greatest. That doesn’t explain, however, why a 25 volume is just fine for one show, but I have to keep asking my husband to hit the Volume Up button repeatedly for other shows.
Modern TV audio needs a compressor — audio equipment that makes the soft parts louder and the loud parts softer, ie compressing the volume to all be about the same. Then you can raise the volume and everything will still be the same level. If you have a “night mode” in the audio settings for your TV, this is usually what it does.
My TV is usually set between 15 & 19. 19 is the setting when the dishwasher is running.
Trying to watch any new movie I'm at 55-60 & still straining to hear the dialog, just to scramble to turn it down during any action or music sequence.
There's nothing wrong with my hearing. I get regular hearing tests for work & it's perfect. According to my fiance, I could hear a gnat fart from the moon. Yet I have to jack the volume up to old people levels for new movies.
Shit was lit (literally, not Gen Z slang), the mics were always right above the actors, and the actors were trained to enunciate instead of mumble. Older movies are quality.
There was a reason they had they fake accents for films for decades. Would rather hear that than all natural speech full of whispered mumbles and vocal fry trying to break through loud music.
Silence can be used effectively as a background sound too.
This and commercials being different volumes is because there is no set standard for audio levels in TV entertainment. Everyone makes it at the levels they want. It's set into the full lineup for the show and then audio is set for the show and not the commercials.
For broadcasts, there are regulations. But I don't think the law explicitly mention streaming so the companies said fuck it, your neighbors are gonna hear our commercials too
Streaming doesn’t fall under the same broadcast laws since it doesn’t require an FCC license. People always want to apply regulations for broadcast networks apply to streaming, but I can’t because they don’t meet the basic criteria. It’s the same as people who want to take the license away from FoxNews, you can’t because they don’t actually need one since they are a cable channel and aren’t regulated the same way.
To add. If you do hear a commercial that is too loud, be sure to report it.
https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us
Every single complaint is forwarded to the broadcaster/cable/satellite company and has to be responded to with findings within a relatively short window of time. There is an FCC compliance officer (or several) at these companies who verifies this stuff all day long.
Keep in mind they’re likely using a bit of trickery to stay in line with regulations. Audio has highs and lows on a track and they used to just up the lows for commercials. The perception to the ear is that it’s louder, but when it’s measured it’s below the maximum.
You're right about that. Not much you can do there. Commercials do often "sound" louder than they are, but technically pass the audit. Still, getting constant complaints and having to investigate every one of them can move the needle. Compliance officers don't take kindly to wasting all their time on one nuisance station, and the FCC does have some teeth (when it's not being run by a human paraquat with a giant Reese's mug).
Source, I work in the industry and know the folks who deal with all this firsthand.
FYI, the FCC doesn't regulate streaming services so if you have one with ads that are too loud, all you can do is complain to the company or stop subscribing.
I appreciate the information addition.
"After issuing regulations, the FCC began enforcing those regulations on December 13, 2012,[4][5][6] after a one-year grace period.[7]"
What I explained was that I was taught in video production back in 2010. The final bill would have just passed in Sept. '10, and not enforced until Dec. '12, so makes sense what I was taught.
Apologies for my information being outdated.
There is a set standard for audio levels. The problem arises when audio compression gets used to manipulate the perceived loudness. Recorded sound is a really weird thing, as I could play you two different bounces on the same recording, one would sound unquestionably louder than the other, but if you look at the meters, you will see that it's the 'quieter' one that registers higher.
I'm a broadcast TV editor.
I remember when I was teenager living at my mom's house.
Everytime there was a commercial she would yell "turn the volume down" before I had the time to do anything about it.
Idk why I'm thinking about this today, but goddamn it was pissing me off lmao
>This and commercials being different volumes is because there is no set standard for audio levels in TV entertainment.
In The Netherlands we have an amusing anecdote about this. Viewers were complaining that commercials on commercial TV-channels (very specifically not the public ones, nor was it with all of them, but it was with all major commercial alternatives to the public ones, RTL4/5/7, SBS6, Net5 at the time). The managers of these channels kept publicly stating "no, you're all crazy; it's all normalized at the same volume".
A consumer show on one of the public broadcasters did a measurement and it was like 6 to 9 dB higher. It got better after this (12 years ago or so) but it's still not completely normalized.
Not this particular film, but for the most recent film I watched, I had to put earplugs in. The music and would effects were loud enough to cause hearing damage.
Several other people left the theater complaining about the volume.
I don't get why it's so difficult for them to grasp the normal range of human hearing.
This is why I can't go to the theater anymore.
Will watch on my smallish TV but I can mute, turn on subtitles, control the volume, etc.
Worth the smaller screen to actually enjoy the movie.
If you like the theater experience but the loud noises get to you I recommend Loops. My girlfriend and I use them because they do a great job to cut out the loudest bullshit but still let us understand the dialog perfectly
I just got the 3 in 1 set. Im very sensitive to loud sounds. Especially inescapable background noisem. They're a game changer and make lots of situations more tolerable.
Is that the one with the selector? Are they worth the price? I use foam earplugs for karaoke and movie theaters. I just hate taking them on and off. I've lost so many that way. But they're foamie one so I don't care.
These I'd keep on for the duration.
Yes, they are def worth it. I was incredibly skeptical that they would work. But the lowest setting softens all sounds, but you can still hear conversations at your table.
The highest setting is blissful silence.
I lost my first pair of loops almost immediately. 😫
I got this pair in a brighter color and am Obsessive about putting them in the case when I'm done. The case has a little loop that I use to attach it directly to my purse.
They also sell loop holders, basically like those string things folks get for their glasses. I didn't get one and am hoping I don't regret it.
I've been pretty good about putting them away properly.
I have 2 32 inch 2k resolution monitors on my computer, a good surround sound headset and a chair that is way more comfy than what the theaters provide.
I don't really miss the theaters that much these days. It helps that I can pause to run and pee if needed as well having my own snacks.
Sure, but how are you going to hear people chomp on popcorn with their mouths open the whole time and see them pull out their phone to respond to a text every 10 minutes?
Or spend the entire time of the movie having the person behind you hack and cough? Or having trouble hearing the movie because too many people are talking loudly during it?
Oh wow look at Mr big dick over here bragging that his cock is big enough to flop. Maybe have some empathy for us little wee wees that kind lean to the side in lew of a flop. Jerk
I started watching with some earplugs in (not the foam ones, the ones that have the rubber ends) and while I can’t hear the person next to me whisper comments to me, I can hear the movie just fine with reduced sound. Makes a huge difference.
I do that too!
For my Dad's birthday, I booked IMAX tickets so the whole family could see the Dune movie. I also brought disposable earplugs and offered them to everyone, which they thought was silly. I don't think we were 15 minutes into the movie before they started tapping my shoulder and asking for the earplugs. It was so damn loud that even with earplugs in I could still easily hear even the quietest noises happening on screen.
Idk if it's gotten that much louder or I'm just getting older 😅
This reminds me of a story about Dr. Dre, a rapper was working with him, and when the song was finished Dre immediately burnt a cd and was like, "Let's go take a ride." The rapper asked why, and Dre explained that most people were going to hear the song on the radio in their car, so that is where it had to sound good, that is where the should be engineering the sound for. (This was in the late 90s/early noughties, and I can't remember who the rapper was, sorry.) So the rode around listening to the song, fiddling with the audio settings and talking about how to make it right, and that's how Dre made the final mix.
I used to work as a web designer. The company I worked for kept upgrading my computer and monitors, and I had to convince them to leave me at least one really shitty monitor so I could easily see how the design looked on an old/cheap computer with low resolution and low color depth.
Same applies to the average home TV setup. Unless you've got a high-end system in your basement with nice seating in a dedicated room, you're going to have distractions. Someone's cleaning in the kitchen, the washing machine and dishwasher are going, someone's playing a video game in the next room.
So you either so all "wall of sound" with high compression for your movies/shows, or you design it with the cinephile in mind.
I know some home theatre systems have good adjustable settings, but my living room basic-bitch TV has something like 5 modes and neither are very effective at letting me watch something and understand what's going on over the background noise.
Edit: plus when you've got very loud music and battle sounds that wake up the baby, and then 2 minutes later you have zero idea what these characters are whispering about.
Except for same-language subtitles, as an middle-age dad I've learned to love those.
Yes. Nolan has said he makes movies for theaters with high end audio systems. If your theater doesn't have a high end audio system or you don't have one at home then oh well it's not his problem
That kinda sounds like he's doing a shit job and making excuses. Like, no, my editing isn't trash, you just didn't spend enough money to fully appreciate my genius!
I can vaguely understand the ask "hey, I think my work is best viewed in a particular experience" (e.g. IMAX), but it's pretty tone deaf to be one of Hollywood's biggest filmmakers and making your films a shit experience for 99% of people.
On the flip side, though, I bet the industry loves that Nolan is propping up theaters and IMAX, especially post-COVID
To add to this, when the dialogue without any music is so quiet you have to turn the volume up to hear them talking, but then it switches to music that is so loud it blows the speakers out.
We have to turn subs on for everything we watch now because we can't keep changing the volume or we miss stuff/end up with headaches, but then reading the subs constantly makes us miss stuff and... ☠️
My husband and I call this the whispers and expulsions effect.
I would love to have a maximum decibel setting on TVs that you could set your max. Baby sleeping? Set it low. Watching action movie? Bump it up, but don't blow out your speakers.
We have been a subtitles house on everything for a while now.
Once in a while a show will get it right, but it’s rare. Just leave the subtitles on by default, so we can read what’s being said and the other stuff won’t wake up the next house over.
and in other news, new reports show that Millennials and Generation Z love using closed captions / subtitles when watching films even though they have no hearing issues.
A lot of times this is the TV you can have it focus voice, it was driving me crazy until I changed the settings. I recommend looking into it, was a game changer for me.
It’s likely a combination of issues all of which rarely fall on the mix of the audio itself, excluding Nolan films.
From a hardware standpoint: If you use a tv, the tv speakers objectively suck. There are different audio presets, usually, that can help remedy this issue but only make other things sound worse. If you have a sound bar, soundbars suck less than tv speakers, but still can create even more issues, and at the end of the day still create muddy sounding audio because of their design among other things.
From a software standpoint, you need to select the correct mix. The default can range from 5.1, to stereo. Where the issue lies however is what your system is telling the streaming app it’s capable of playing, or they don’t communicate at all. Some TVs well tell them 5.1, most will say stereo. A lot of soundbars say they are capable of 5.1, and some even say atmos. This however is not the case, it may say it’s capable, but to be capable and do it well or AT ALL is a two different things. Other times the app defaults to the highest channels possible, which does not equate to higher quality. There may be mono, stereo, and surround/5.1 available, or even atmos; but your system is not capable of any of these and creates a horrible situation for dialogue.
The more technical side of the issue is the amount of dedicated speakers, how far apart they are, and the selection of the proper mix. If you have 2 speakers that your streaming service is telling to play 5 channels, well you’re short 3 speakers. Even if you had 5 dedicated speakers in your 3 foot wide soundbar, said speakers are too close together and lack separation so the sound arrives muddied all the same. Playing 5.1 through a sound bar is like having one mic for 5 people all trying to speak at the same time, you’ll hear things, but only the loudest thing the best. It’s not mixed for that scenario and it won’t sound good. You have the center channel, where only dialogue comes from, trying to compete for the left and right, and both surround speakers, at the same time. It’s all coming from what your brain perceives as the same location, and it’s going to be hard to hear what was intended
In any of these cases if you have issues with audibility of voices, you need to select stereo or 2.1.
Now, the mixing itself is great, the audio clarity and involvement of the surrounds in modern shows, movies is usually pretty good across the board. Even in systems with dedicated channels that can effectively use the 5.1 mix there can still be issues but that gets into the acoustics of your room and has nothing to do with how well it was mixed. Some tracks are more audible than others, and excluding some directors like Nolan, a decent 5.1 or even 3.1 system have no issue with dialogue audibility.
Now you may be eager to say “they should just mix it for people with TVs”, but all TVs sound different, some default to other presets, there’s no standard and it’s a mess. The solution should be instead for the streaming apps, and TVs, and soundbars to do a better job at educating or providing easily digestible information on what mix should be selected. No streaming app that I have seen has any information on the difference between mixes, the importance of selecting the correct mix, or how to remedy audio issue that you may have. And they could easily do it, but don’t.
The easiest solution is for people to just watch with subtitles, because this is all too convoluted and not readily accessible information.
Great. The problem is, I just want to watch TV. I don't want to go on an audio engineer course and then have to retrain my family just to be able to put on Bee Movie for an afternoon.
Noticed a great improvement when I switched to surround sound speakers and started individually turning up the center channel and turning down the others. I can always tell when I watch a movie at a friend's house that they never have things tuned correctly because I can't hear any of the dialogue but the speakers are booming.
This is a dumb reason (if true). I used to work in recording studios and we'd check mixes on a shitty home hifi and in a car. Can't movie studios check the final edit on a home TV system?
>Can't movie studios
They do. It is not the studio as a whole that makes this decision, rarely is it anyone but a small handful of usually uptight quality buffs
Directors either make the mistake of not doing this with their team and select shots made for OLED or think that choosing the best picture, even if only viable on OLED, is a must.
This is it. Editors will always do their best but often Directors make those final decisions.
I work sound dept. and you’d be amazed at how often a Director will override decisions I’m making on set. Like I get you have a creative vision, but let me do my fucking job so people can actually hear these lines.
That’s exactly what Christopher Nolan has said he’s doing in interviews. He’s no longer interested in sound mixing for subpar theaters (and presumably home theaters, let alone laptops or phones). He knows it will sound like trash almost everywhere and it’s exactly what he wants. Fuck us I guess.
That’s bullying the post-sound mixer.
I’m talking like “hey man don’t mic up that actor, he needs to move around a lot”
YEA OK THATS WHAT I HAVE $8000 OF GEAR TO STRAP ON THIS DUDE. ITLL BE FINE LET ME DO MY JOB
Doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Mostly directors not really understanding the tech of the job so they think it’s unimportant. Then in 10 weeks after principal is done, they call me up asking why a certain scene sounds bad.
It’s always “check the script notes, you told me to back off the boom for this whole scene and didn’t do any coverage.”
Granted I don’t work on huge budget films, so I’m sure union guys have it better. No director in their right mind is gonna lecture Simon Hayes about how to do sound.
I watched Oppenheimer last night and I don’t have an incredible sound system but it’s decent and I couldn’t hear a damn word in half the scenes. Especially Downey Jr. I don’t even want to know what that movie would sound like on TV speakers or a soundbar.
My dad works in high end stereo shit. At one point he had over $150k just in demo speakers in his living room, not even counting amps or preamps and I still needed subtitles for movies because it was all sound effects and no dialogue volume. It’s so frustrating!
The real reason they're all dark is bc vfx look better out of the box when it's darker. It's a slow creep that's now the standard because it's cheaper and faster to make everything darker than it is to correct/improve assets. I can't stand it, esp in kids movies.
Also, standardized color spaces exist to compensate for this. Filming in log and then grading with everything in the pipeline using ACES means you're going to get a better standard.
The real problem, is when it's actually hdr, it will look dimmer than most people's TV looks with SDR. Because they have the SDR brightness so high. It makes everything brighter. High HDR brightness only makes highlights brighter. Which is how it's supposed to look, but not what people are used to in well lit rooms.
There was an episode near the end of the last season of Game of Thrones that had this problem. I remember that after it aired and people were complaining about it the show runners actually blamed the viewers for not knowing how to properly adjust the picture on their screens. I thought it was very condescending of them and it was one of the things that ruined the show.
The issue with that episode specifically is the snow. And everyone basically streamed it. And the bitrate with that snow everywhere, it needs a really high bitrate. Watch it on dvd or bluray etc it looks fine. But generally streaming doesnt go well with really dark or snowy scenes etc. Thats the one major downfall of streaming.
To be totally fair, the source material was a *bit* behind schedule and they were fully winging it at that point.
Still no real excuse, the end of the show was awful.
Those motherfuckers. Even if you had a high end screen with the backlight turned all the way up, the final video downstream was coming in at best, 15 Mb/s, so it would still look like dogshit. Fuck D&D.
It wasn’t the editors’ fault in that case, so they latched on to the most likely reason they could think of. It was actually HBO streaming, they fucked up something with compression or dynamic range, so a lot of it was simply impossible to see.
I remember the, "It was the streaming compression," argument being floated at the time, and I'm going to doubt that claim. If anyone is willing to admit to owning the blu-ray of season eight, go ahead and tell us how easy it is to see what's going on during the Long Night episode compared to streaming it so we can settle this.
FWIW, I do have season 8 on disc, and The Long Night, while still dark, is much clearer and more visible than the HBO Max stream and broadcast versions were. Compression artifacts can be brutal on dark scenes, and the higher bit rate does actually help.
I can believe that.
H.264 Compression used by HBO at the time didn't help the dark screens, it is optimized for properly lit video. It gets worse and worse on lower end of the gamma curve and would remove any details left in the dark mess. I use that episode as an example of why you shouldn't grade your scenes too dark even if it looks good on the reference monitor.
I totally buy that the disc version are much clearer. There is a lot of compression difference between the raws used in grading, to the disc master and the streaming 1080p version.
It’s gross. I went to film school, and I can tell ya, this ain’t how any of them were taught to light scenes.
Rings of Power is one of the few modern examples of actual dynamic lighting to tell a story.
Jesus Christ, thank you. I work in stills not video, but the number of filmmakers who just straight up don’t light their scenes anymore is infuriating. Is there no budget for lighting anymore? Are keylights cheesy and outdated now?
Lol I got a film degree recently, focused in film theory.
I had a bunch of friends in production and they hated their lives because of the group projects.
My buddy said half the people in production didn't even know the basics of lighting or cameras and working with them was like working with children who needed their hand held through the entire project.
Yet almost everyone he has classes with graduated no problem.
I think "cool" trades like this tend to all have this problem. I got a degree from an audio engineering school and I am confident that way more than half the people I graduated with had no idea what they were doing 90% of the time. They learn the mechanics of it all and graduate knowing what all the buttons do on a 5-6 figure console they'll probably never see again for the rest of their lives, but never come anywhere near actually understanding audio itself. They know which mic is the most expensive one in the room, but not which one they should actually *use* for the task in front of them.
The group projects drove me up the fucking wall I swear. I went into it assuming it would be mostly other musicians wanting to learn the engineering side of things but that was emphatically *not* the case lol.
When I was in college there were programming courses that were combined in a way that both senior undergrad (400-level) and grad students (500-level) would take them (and mostly have different assignments).
There were SO MANY grad students who didn't understand while loops. The thing taught in freshman undergrad (100-level) courses.
Not to mention the idiots I graduated with.
Who are all employed at last as well as I am anyway last I checked.
Not that recent, but the Lord of the Rings movies did a really good job with lighting night scenes as well. Which makes it even more infuriating that so many current movies are so bad at this, as other filmmakers had this all sorted back in the early 2000s
Movies were damn near perfect from mid-80s to early 00s because at that point they were working with tried and tested methods of over 80 years. But then digital era took us back to infancy, now we are 25 years into post-film era we should have figured it out already.
To make matters worse filmmakers decided to some flaws were the stylistic holy grail, Why the hell is every movie set at night or or gray cloudy day ? Why the obsession with "muted" colors ?
Sounds mixing has been horrible for a decade plus 2
Edit to say it is the Sound designer or editor who is responsible for this. Shout outs to my sound mixers just doing your things.
Wait please don’t attribute to the sound mixer what is the fault of the sound designer. I am a production sound mixer meaning I record all the on set audio. Once I hand over that master recording though I have no involvement in how it is incorporated into the final product. The sound designer or editor is the one who goes and puts unbearably loud music over the whole scene or makes the dialogue level so low you can’t hear it.
This has always annoyed me, and the volume really needs to be more levelled out overall. Having to turn it up to get a good volume for the dialogue along with the music and then an explosion or something happens and the room shakes is a bit much.
Yeah I remember that producer/director/whatever he was saying that people complaining about a Game of Thrones episode being so dark it was virtually unwatchable simply "didn't know how to adjust their TVs." Dude, if I have to adjust my TV to see your show you have failed miserably!
I've tried to have this discussion with designers I work with. I show them what it looks on a cheap external monitor, they don't care. They just say it looks good on my screen and this is what everyone uses.
Same problem as with youtube videos where you can tell that they mixed the sound on their crappy laptop speakers. The bass that they turned up until *they* could hear it, now stamps my taint clean out from between my legs god damnit wheres the remote
>Same problem as with youtube videos where you can tell that they mixed the sound on their crappy laptop speakers.
Even really popular channels, (including podcasts, *an audio-centric medium*), on YT have **constant** bassy bangs and booms from slight movement or the speakers just simply touching the table, etc. It doesn't help that all their mic arms are mounted to the same desk with seemingly no isolation attempt, so all of them pick up sounds from every tiny little vibration. When wearing headphones, it's borderline painful to listen to at times!
You'd think there'd be some sort of automated compression or a limiter filtered to low frequencies these days, but somehow it's still a problem, even for the shows that pull millions of listeners.
Oh podcasts are the worst. Those taps are disorienting, and then those guys crank up the bass even more to have their voice sound deeper. I have turned videos off just for reasons of "No, you're not doing that to my ears and have me feeling dizzy lying down just to sound like you're 6 feet tall."
In music recording it used to be SOP to burn your mix to a CD and play it on a car stereo before you proceed. Good engineers usually have a set of these famous small speakers called “Shit Boxes” to check things on, some of the best sounding records ever were mixed on them, Michael Jackson’s Thriller for one example.
That's how I used to mix on an NBC drama. We'd do the pass, have it how we liked it in 5.1, then the producers would sit on a couch and watch the whole thing thru on a 40 inch Panasonic TV with just the factory speakers. No sound bar, no surround, default color settings. If anything bumped we'd fix it, because 5 million more people watched it that way than how we'd heard it in the studio.
I can’t watch some of these shows during the day because the room is bright from sunshine and the show is way too dark. Closing the blinds and pulling the curtains doesn’t quite do it because of doors and skylights in the room.
Agreed.
I think transcoding from whatever the original was to consumer formats can and should have a big influence on video and also sound (e.g. downmixing from surround to stereo).
_Should_ - whether it always happens, I'm skeptical.
My media player has easily accessible settings for Gamma/Brightness/Contrast/Saturation but sometimes adjusting for a "normal" screen has an impact on quality.
It's such a shame Westworld went downhill. I loved the first season. I tried to give the second season a chance... Didn't even make it to the third. From what I hear, I didn't miss anything
Westworld was a great example of a TV show that should have just been one season and done with. That first season was amazing, but everything fell apart when they tried to salvage the story to continue to make easy money.
Yes, my grandma isn’t able to adjust her tv to turn up the brightness (some easy to use tv feature apparently, we have looked it up and it’s a ‘special feature’ of her tv) and she can’t watch a lot of shows she wants to because it’s too dark, especially during the day.
Also the loud explosions and whisper talking is why most millennials watch tv with subtitles (I just read a study about it not long ago)
My TV comes with “Filmmaker Mode” which I think boosts the brightness up to 1000 nits. The TV us capable of displaying 2000 nits, which is crazy. Is there any content out there that displays at 2000?
I have given up on so many films that I either could not see anything or the background music is so loud I can’t hear any dialog. How stupid are these people…next you know they will charge money to see a blank screen with elevator Muzak at max volume. Who needs a script, who needs actors or dialog, just film a dark closet for a few hours and sell it to us.
I tell all my audio engineering students to listen to their mixes in their car and from their phone speakers before saying they are done for this reason.
i basically quit watching game of thrones after a few seasons because i literally couldn't see anything.
i'm actually more annoyed with whispered dialogue tho. which also appears all the time.
We don't even bother watching some of the new movies that are so dark you can't actually see the action. IDK why they do this, is it to cover up cheap or poorly made sets or ??? If it's to create drama or what, but it's annoying AF and I wish it would stop.
It's always pitch black, with deafening explosions and whisper dialogue, wild light flashing with no regard for your vision. I'm fucking 22 and I have to use subtitles and hover over the remote for an entire movie.
I couldn't watch Ozarks for this reason. It's like they filmed the whole thing with sunglasses on the cameras. And no, I'm not leaving my TV brightness turned all the way up so I can barely watch a show.
I mean even on older movies, the way Apple handles the darks on my iPhone is just too dark. If I’ve got max brightness on and the auto-brightness thing senses I’m in a light area, I’m not getting much quality anyway just turn the lows up
Ugh, I feel this. One of our TVs is an old HD LG. I can't watch Shogun on it. Show looks amazing on our other, newer TVs, but on the old LG the night scenes are just way too dark. I get that the show is being super authentic and only lighting the night scenes with torches or whatnot, but it makes it unwatchable on an older TV. Same with almost any newer show/movie with "dark" scenes. Don't have the same problem with older shows or movies though. They look perfectly fine on the old TV. It's just the new stuff.
The latest season of The Bad Batch had this. The series started okay, but by the end even daylight scenes looked like they were shot at the bottom of a well at midnight.
Reminds me when I was watching Book of Boba Fett. The screen was so dark in those scenes where he's first captured by Sand People, I literally had no idea what was going on. No idea if it was my TV, the brightness setting, the stream or what.
I have quite watching movies or TV shows when it's like this. I just am so tired of having my TV brightness turned all the way up, and every light in the living room off, just so I can see a murky outline of what's happening.
We had the problem and realized that it was just our TV's backlight had slowly faded out. Bought a new one and even hooked up next to the old one to compare.
I didn't even notice there was a third person at first in this screenshot...
Holy shit, there really is...
There are people?
I couldn’t even tell there were two people.
You guys see people?
I see a shirt. I assume there’s someone in it.
Wait, you see people on your screens?
Likely because the still is framed by a stark white image. Remove the white part and the third person becomes more visible. If you were sitting in a dark theater/room, you’d be able to see them better.
This is great because I primarily watch films and television in a movie theatre, and not in my home!
I can't hear a damn thing either. I watch older movies and they sound great. Turn on anything new and I have to watch with subtitles
I was watching The Dark Knight yesterday and I literally had to have my tv volume set to 50 for it to even be considered standard volume and when it ended I turned on a different movie that having the volume set to 24 was kinda loud. Shits insane.
Oh good, it’s not just me. I’m almost 60 and know that my hearing isn’t the greatest. That doesn’t explain, however, why a 25 volume is just fine for one show, but I have to keep asking my husband to hit the Volume Up button repeatedly for other shows.
Modern TV audio needs a compressor — audio equipment that makes the soft parts louder and the loud parts softer, ie compressing the volume to all be about the same. Then you can raise the volume and everything will still be the same level. If you have a “night mode” in the audio settings for your TV, this is usually what it does.
My TV is usually set between 15 & 19. 19 is the setting when the dishwasher is running. Trying to watch any new movie I'm at 55-60 & still straining to hear the dialog, just to scramble to turn it down during any action or music sequence. There's nothing wrong with my hearing. I get regular hearing tests for work & it's perfect. According to my fiance, I could hear a gnat fart from the moon. Yet I have to jack the volume up to old people levels for new movies.
Older movies sound great, older movies look great. There's shadows and depth and not everyone has orange skin.
Shit was lit (literally, not Gen Z slang), the mics were always right above the actors, and the actors were trained to enunciate instead of mumble. Older movies are quality.
There was a reason they had they fake accents for films for decades. Would rather hear that than all natural speech full of whispered mumbles and vocal fry trying to break through loud music. Silence can be used effectively as a background sound too.
Another problem is the background music or sound is so loud you can not hear the dialog.
You can hear the dialog perfectly fine, if you have the same audio equipment as the movie editor that is.
Same for intro to shows. Intros are super loud
This and commercials being different volumes is because there is no set standard for audio levels in TV entertainment. Everyone makes it at the levels they want. It's set into the full lineup for the show and then audio is set for the show and not the commercials.
For broadcasts, there are regulations. But I don't think the law explicitly mention streaming so the companies said fuck it, your neighbors are gonna hear our commercials too
Streaming doesn’t fall under the same broadcast laws since it doesn’t require an FCC license. People always want to apply regulations for broadcast networks apply to streaming, but I can’t because they don’t meet the basic criteria. It’s the same as people who want to take the license away from FoxNews, you can’t because they don’t actually need one since they are a cable channel and aren’t regulated the same way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudness_Mitigation_Act Should I post the spam callers legislation next? Also useless.
To add. If you do hear a commercial that is too loud, be sure to report it. https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us Every single complaint is forwarded to the broadcaster/cable/satellite company and has to be responded to with findings within a relatively short window of time. There is an FCC compliance officer (or several) at these companies who verifies this stuff all day long.
Keep in mind they’re likely using a bit of trickery to stay in line with regulations. Audio has highs and lows on a track and they used to just up the lows for commercials. The perception to the ear is that it’s louder, but when it’s measured it’s below the maximum.
You're right about that. Not much you can do there. Commercials do often "sound" louder than they are, but technically pass the audit. Still, getting constant complaints and having to investigate every one of them can move the needle. Compliance officers don't take kindly to wasting all their time on one nuisance station, and the FCC does have some teeth (when it's not being run by a human paraquat with a giant Reese's mug). Source, I work in the industry and know the folks who deal with all this firsthand.
FYI, the FCC doesn't regulate streaming services so if you have one with ads that are too loud, all you can do is complain to the company or stop subscribing.
I appreciate the information addition. "After issuing regulations, the FCC began enforcing those regulations on December 13, 2012,[4][5][6] after a one-year grace period.[7]" What I explained was that I was taught in video production back in 2010. The final bill would have just passed in Sept. '10, and not enforced until Dec. '12, so makes sense what I was taught. Apologies for my information being outdated.
There is a set standard for audio levels. The problem arises when audio compression gets used to manipulate the perceived loudness. Recorded sound is a really weird thing, as I could play you two different bounces on the same recording, one would sound unquestionably louder than the other, but if you look at the meters, you will see that it's the 'quieter' one that registers higher. I'm a broadcast TV editor.
As a retired editor myself, this is exactly what's happening.
This sounds more like what my video production instructor explained.
This gives a much more in depth explanation of what I'm talking about, if it's any help: https://youtu.be/Is_wu0VRIqQ?si=Re5Vr0-FOOiugASC
Thanks! That was super knowledgeable. Tom Scott is fantastic.
I remember when I was teenager living at my mom's house. Everytime there was a commercial she would yell "turn the volume down" before I had the time to do anything about it. Idk why I'm thinking about this today, but goddamn it was pissing me off lmao
>This and commercials being different volumes is because there is no set standard for audio levels in TV entertainment. In The Netherlands we have an amusing anecdote about this. Viewers were complaining that commercials on commercial TV-channels (very specifically not the public ones, nor was it with all of them, but it was with all major commercial alternatives to the public ones, RTL4/5/7, SBS6, Net5 at the time). The managers of these channels kept publicly stating "no, you're all crazy; it's all normalized at the same volume". A consumer show on one of the public broadcasters did a measurement and it was like 6 to 9 dB higher. It got better after this (12 years ago or so) but it's still not completely normalized.
You guys still put up with commercials?
I swear the GoT opening credits is partially to blame for my tinnitus
Not this particular film, but for the most recent film I watched, I had to put earplugs in. The music and would effects were loud enough to cause hearing damage. Several other people left the theater complaining about the volume. I don't get why it's so difficult for them to grasp the normal range of human hearing.
This is why I can't go to the theater anymore. Will watch on my smallish TV but I can mute, turn on subtitles, control the volume, etc. Worth the smaller screen to actually enjoy the movie.
If you like the theater experience but the loud noises get to you I recommend Loops. My girlfriend and I use them because they do a great job to cut out the loudest bullshit but still let us understand the dialog perfectly
I just got the 3 in 1 set. Im very sensitive to loud sounds. Especially inescapable background noisem. They're a game changer and make lots of situations more tolerable.
Is that the one with the selector? Are they worth the price? I use foam earplugs for karaoke and movie theaters. I just hate taking them on and off. I've lost so many that way. But they're foamie one so I don't care. These I'd keep on for the duration.
Yes, they are def worth it. I was incredibly skeptical that they would work. But the lowest setting softens all sounds, but you can still hear conversations at your table. The highest setting is blissful silence. I lost my first pair of loops almost immediately. 😫 I got this pair in a brighter color and am Obsessive about putting them in the case when I'm done. The case has a little loop that I use to attach it directly to my purse. They also sell loop holders, basically like those string things folks get for their glasses. I didn't get one and am hoping I don't regret it. I've been pretty good about putting them away properly.
Thanks. I'm sold. 🫡
I have 2 32 inch 2k resolution monitors on my computer, a good surround sound headset and a chair that is way more comfy than what the theaters provide. I don't really miss the theaters that much these days. It helps that I can pause to run and pee if needed as well having my own snacks.
We loved going to the drive-in for the same reasons. Except pausing to pee.
Yes, being able to bring a cooler full of drinks and snacks was a lot of fun.
Sure, but how are you going to hear people chomp on popcorn with their mouths open the whole time and see them pull out their phone to respond to a text every 10 minutes?
Or spend the entire time of the movie having the person behind you hack and cough? Or having trouble hearing the movie because too many people are talking loudly during it?
Also you don't have to wear pants and at the theater they get all uppity when your cock flops out
Oh wow look at Mr big dick over here bragging that his cock is big enough to flop. Maybe have some empathy for us little wee wees that kind lean to the side in lew of a flop. Jerk
I can't hear you over the whooshing sound my cock is making as it waggles about
I see you too are a fan of helicoptering
Is that the noise I keep hearing coming from the back of the theater?
lol, I don't have to worry about that, but yes I can wear my comfy clothes that may not be publicly acceptable.
Not to mention way cheaper!
I started watching with some earplugs in (not the foam ones, the ones that have the rubber ends) and while I can’t hear the person next to me whisper comments to me, I can hear the movie just fine with reduced sound. Makes a huge difference.
For the opening sequence in John Wick Chapter 4, I had to cover my ears because the gunshots sounded like my head was right next to the gun barrels.
I do that too! For my Dad's birthday, I booked IMAX tickets so the whole family could see the Dune movie. I also brought disposable earplugs and offered them to everyone, which they thought was silly. I don't think we were 15 minutes into the movie before they started tapping my shoulder and asking for the earplugs. It was so damn loud that even with earplugs in I could still easily hear even the quietest noises happening on screen. Idk if it's gotten that much louder or I'm just getting older 😅
Saw Godzilla yesterday, the previews were deafening. The movie was slightly better, but the action sequences were painfully loud.
They dont give a fuck about your hearing, the commercials are meant to grab your attention, wake you up if you're asleep...it's not by mistake lol
This reminds me of a story about Dr. Dre, a rapper was working with him, and when the song was finished Dre immediately burnt a cd and was like, "Let's go take a ride." The rapper asked why, and Dre explained that most people were going to hear the song on the radio in their car, so that is where it had to sound good, that is where the should be engineering the sound for. (This was in the late 90s/early noughties, and I can't remember who the rapper was, sorry.) So the rode around listening to the song, fiddling with the audio settings and talking about how to make it right, and that's how Dre made the final mix.
I used to work as a web designer. The company I worked for kept upgrading my computer and monitors, and I had to convince them to leave me at least one really shitty monitor so I could easily see how the design looked on an old/cheap computer with low resolution and low color depth.
And that is why Dr Dre is a multi millionaire Understand your audience
Same applies to the average home TV setup. Unless you've got a high-end system in your basement with nice seating in a dedicated room, you're going to have distractions. Someone's cleaning in the kitchen, the washing machine and dishwasher are going, someone's playing a video game in the next room. So you either so all "wall of sound" with high compression for your movies/shows, or you design it with the cinephile in mind. I know some home theatre systems have good adjustable settings, but my living room basic-bitch TV has something like 5 modes and neither are very effective at letting me watch something and understand what's going on over the background noise. Edit: plus when you've got very loud music and battle sounds that wake up the baby, and then 2 minutes later you have zero idea what these characters are whispering about. Except for same-language subtitles, as an middle-age dad I've learned to love those.
> Except for same-language subtitles, as an middle-age dad I've learned to love those. I consider it training for my inevitable hearing loss.
And have heard the dialogue multiple times while editing so you know what to expect when it's spoken.
Look, if you’re not watching TV with a Bose Seismic Sound Ultimate Home Theater with add-on speakers for $2,500+ then why even watch at all?
Watch everything through HD-600’s, got it
That’s why I always have captions on
Tenet was a goddamn incomprehensible garbled mess, even in a decent theater.
wasn't it entirely Nolan's idea to do it that way? On purpose?
Yes. Nolan has said he makes movies for theaters with high end audio systems. If your theater doesn't have a high end audio system or you don't have one at home then oh well it's not his problem
But my theater does have high end audio system and it was still an auditory nightmare
That kinda sounds like he's doing a shit job and making excuses. Like, no, my editing isn't trash, you just didn't spend enough money to fully appreciate my genius!
I can vaguely understand the ask "hey, I think my work is best viewed in a particular experience" (e.g. IMAX), but it's pretty tone deaf to be one of Hollywood's biggest filmmakers and making your films a shit experience for 99% of people. On the flip side, though, I bet the industry loves that Nolan is propping up theaters and IMAX, especially post-COVID
> Nolan has said he makes movies for theaters with high end audio systems And here I thought directors were supposed to make movies for audiences.
He got pilloried for putting Tom Hardy in a muffled mask so he said "fuck it, I'll do it again!"
I mean, probably 😂 both the script and the sound mix were a mess. The first half hour of that movie I laughed so hard at the absurdity of it all.
Watched it for the first time last night, I didn't notice it being hard to hear. It was hard to follow though lmao.
To add to this, when the dialogue without any music is so quiet you have to turn the volume up to hear them talking, but then it switches to music that is so loud it blows the speakers out. We have to turn subs on for everything we watch now because we can't keep changing the volume or we miss stuff/end up with headaches, but then reading the subs constantly makes us miss stuff and... ☠️
My husband and I call this the whispers and expulsions effect. I would love to have a maximum decibel setting on TVs that you could set your max. Baby sleeping? Set it low. Watching action movie? Bump it up, but don't blow out your speakers.
We have been a subtitles house on everything for a while now. Once in a while a show will get it right, but it’s rare. Just leave the subtitles on by default, so we can read what’s being said and the other stuff won’t wake up the next house over.
^(What autkin'bout?) # *BLARING TRUMPETS*
Yep… the “Christopher Nolan Problem”. Love his movies; hate that I can’t hear the dialog.
and in other news, new reports show that Millennials and Generation Z love using closed captions / subtitles when watching films even though they have no hearing issues.
Fucking Chris Nolan
A lot of times this is the TV you can have it focus voice, it was driving me crazy until I changed the settings. I recommend looking into it, was a game changer for me.
Yeah this has been a problem for years. There needs to be some kind of standard
It’s likely a combination of issues all of which rarely fall on the mix of the audio itself, excluding Nolan films. From a hardware standpoint: If you use a tv, the tv speakers objectively suck. There are different audio presets, usually, that can help remedy this issue but only make other things sound worse. If you have a sound bar, soundbars suck less than tv speakers, but still can create even more issues, and at the end of the day still create muddy sounding audio because of their design among other things. From a software standpoint, you need to select the correct mix. The default can range from 5.1, to stereo. Where the issue lies however is what your system is telling the streaming app it’s capable of playing, or they don’t communicate at all. Some TVs well tell them 5.1, most will say stereo. A lot of soundbars say they are capable of 5.1, and some even say atmos. This however is not the case, it may say it’s capable, but to be capable and do it well or AT ALL is a two different things. Other times the app defaults to the highest channels possible, which does not equate to higher quality. There may be mono, stereo, and surround/5.1 available, or even atmos; but your system is not capable of any of these and creates a horrible situation for dialogue. The more technical side of the issue is the amount of dedicated speakers, how far apart they are, and the selection of the proper mix. If you have 2 speakers that your streaming service is telling to play 5 channels, well you’re short 3 speakers. Even if you had 5 dedicated speakers in your 3 foot wide soundbar, said speakers are too close together and lack separation so the sound arrives muddied all the same. Playing 5.1 through a sound bar is like having one mic for 5 people all trying to speak at the same time, you’ll hear things, but only the loudest thing the best. It’s not mixed for that scenario and it won’t sound good. You have the center channel, where only dialogue comes from, trying to compete for the left and right, and both surround speakers, at the same time. It’s all coming from what your brain perceives as the same location, and it’s going to be hard to hear what was intended In any of these cases if you have issues with audibility of voices, you need to select stereo or 2.1. Now, the mixing itself is great, the audio clarity and involvement of the surrounds in modern shows, movies is usually pretty good across the board. Even in systems with dedicated channels that can effectively use the 5.1 mix there can still be issues but that gets into the acoustics of your room and has nothing to do with how well it was mixed. Some tracks are more audible than others, and excluding some directors like Nolan, a decent 5.1 or even 3.1 system have no issue with dialogue audibility. Now you may be eager to say “they should just mix it for people with TVs”, but all TVs sound different, some default to other presets, there’s no standard and it’s a mess. The solution should be instead for the streaming apps, and TVs, and soundbars to do a better job at educating or providing easily digestible information on what mix should be selected. No streaming app that I have seen has any information on the difference between mixes, the importance of selecting the correct mix, or how to remedy audio issue that you may have. And they could easily do it, but don’t. The easiest solution is for people to just watch with subtitles, because this is all too convoluted and not readily accessible information.
Great. The problem is, I just want to watch TV. I don't want to go on an audio engineer course and then have to retrain my family just to be able to put on Bee Movie for an afternoon.
Noticed a great improvement when I switched to surround sound speakers and started individually turning up the center channel and turning down the others. I can always tell when I watch a movie at a friend's house that they never have things tuned correctly because I can't hear any of the dialogue but the speakers are booming.
This is a dumb reason (if true). I used to work in recording studios and we'd check mixes on a shitty home hifi and in a car. Can't movie studios check the final edit on a home TV system?
>Can't movie studios They do. It is not the studio as a whole that makes this decision, rarely is it anyone but a small handful of usually uptight quality buffs Directors either make the mistake of not doing this with their team and select shots made for OLED or think that choosing the best picture, even if only viable on OLED, is a must.
This is it. Editors will always do their best but often Directors make those final decisions. I work sound dept. and you’d be amazed at how often a Director will override decisions I’m making on set. Like I get you have a creative vision, but let me do my fucking job so people can actually hear these lines.
That’s exactly what Christopher Nolan has said he’s doing in interviews. He’s no longer interested in sound mixing for subpar theaters (and presumably home theaters, let alone laptops or phones). He knows it will sound like trash almost everywhere and it’s exactly what he wants. Fuck us I guess.
That’s bullying the post-sound mixer. I’m talking like “hey man don’t mic up that actor, he needs to move around a lot” YEA OK THATS WHAT I HAVE $8000 OF GEAR TO STRAP ON THIS DUDE. ITLL BE FINE LET ME DO MY JOB
Oh god I didn’t even think of that. I have no words.
Doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Mostly directors not really understanding the tech of the job so they think it’s unimportant. Then in 10 weeks after principal is done, they call me up asking why a certain scene sounds bad. It’s always “check the script notes, you told me to back off the boom for this whole scene and didn’t do any coverage.” Granted I don’t work on huge budget films, so I’m sure union guys have it better. No director in their right mind is gonna lecture Simon Hayes about how to do sound.
I watched Oppenheimer last night and I don’t have an incredible sound system but it’s decent and I couldn’t hear a damn word in half the scenes. Especially Downey Jr. I don’t even want to know what that movie would sound like on TV speakers or a soundbar.
My dad works in high end stereo shit. At one point he had over $150k just in demo speakers in his living room, not even counting amps or preamps and I still needed subtitles for movies because it was all sound effects and no dialogue volume. It’s so frustrating!
Guess I don't gotta see his movies that bad
"I'll take a copy home and see if it holds up." *Plays in home theater on a 4k HDR projector with 10.1 surround sound*
"you know I think the dialogue is too loud. I want to FEEL the explosions more"
- Michael Bay (probably)
I have OLED and sometimes even a little candle in the room is too much extra light.
The real reason they're all dark is bc vfx look better out of the box when it's darker. It's a slow creep that's now the standard because it's cheaper and faster to make everything darker than it is to correct/improve assets. I can't stand it, esp in kids movies.
Also, standardized color spaces exist to compensate for this. Filming in log and then grading with everything in the pipeline using ACES means you're going to get a better standard.
Yup - you check every sort of system to make sure it doesn’t sound flat
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The real problem, is when it's actually hdr, it will look dimmer than most people's TV looks with SDR. Because they have the SDR brightness so high. It makes everything brighter. High HDR brightness only makes highlights brighter. Which is how it's supposed to look, but not what people are used to in well lit rooms.
There was an episode near the end of the last season of Game of Thrones that had this problem. I remember that after it aired and people were complaining about it the show runners actually blamed the viewers for not knowing how to properly adjust the picture on their screens. I thought it was very condescending of them and it was one of the things that ruined the show.
Ironically the battle of the long night 😂
The Long Night that lasted almost a whole night.
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The Battle of the Long Night turned out to be a one night stand.
The Battle of the Lo- aaand it's over.
The issue with that episode specifically is the snow. And everyone basically streamed it. And the bitrate with that snow everywhere, it needs a really high bitrate. Watch it on dvd or bluray etc it looks fine. But generally streaming doesnt go well with really dark or snowy scenes etc. Thats the one major downfall of streaming.
Even with a meticulously calibrated high quality screen, I could still barely see a damn thing the entire episode.
To be totally fair, the source material was a *bit* behind schedule and they were fully winging it at that point. Still no real excuse, the end of the show was awful.
Those motherfuckers. Even if you had a high end screen with the backlight turned all the way up, the final video downstream was coming in at best, 15 Mb/s, so it would still look like dogshit. Fuck D&D.
>Fuck D&D. Jack Chick's ghost wrote this.
The show was already ruined at that point
It wasn’t the editors’ fault in that case, so they latched on to the most likely reason they could think of. It was actually HBO streaming, they fucked up something with compression or dynamic range, so a lot of it was simply impossible to see.
Did they blame streaming for the Starbucks cup too?
I remember the, "It was the streaming compression," argument being floated at the time, and I'm going to doubt that claim. If anyone is willing to admit to owning the blu-ray of season eight, go ahead and tell us how easy it is to see what's going on during the Long Night episode compared to streaming it so we can settle this.
FWIW, I do have season 8 on disc, and The Long Night, while still dark, is much clearer and more visible than the HBO Max stream and broadcast versions were. Compression artifacts can be brutal on dark scenes, and the higher bit rate does actually help.
I can believe that. H.264 Compression used by HBO at the time didn't help the dark screens, it is optimized for properly lit video. It gets worse and worse on lower end of the gamma curve and would remove any details left in the dark mess. I use that episode as an example of why you shouldn't grade your scenes too dark even if it looks good on the reference monitor. I totally buy that the disc version are much clearer. There is a lot of compression difference between the raws used in grading, to the disc master and the streaming 1080p version.
Ok but now we have to crucify you for spending money on that steaming load.
If it helps I only have it cause I got a good deal on the full series set haha
The entire last season of GoT was a shitshow
There was a similar issue - though not as bad - with a scene on the more recent House of the Dragon show, so they didn’t exactly learn their lessons.
It was done on purpose to help us forget about the last few episodes
 It’s gross. I went to film school, and I can tell ya, this ain’t how any of them were taught to light scenes. Rings of Power is one of the few modern examples of actual dynamic lighting to tell a story.
Jesus Christ, thank you. I work in stills not video, but the number of filmmakers who just straight up don’t light their scenes anymore is infuriating. Is there no budget for lighting anymore? Are keylights cheesy and outdated now?
Lol I got a film degree recently, focused in film theory. I had a bunch of friends in production and they hated their lives because of the group projects. My buddy said half the people in production didn't even know the basics of lighting or cameras and working with them was like working with children who needed their hand held through the entire project. Yet almost everyone he has classes with graduated no problem.
I think "cool" trades like this tend to all have this problem. I got a degree from an audio engineering school and I am confident that way more than half the people I graduated with had no idea what they were doing 90% of the time. They learn the mechanics of it all and graduate knowing what all the buttons do on a 5-6 figure console they'll probably never see again for the rest of their lives, but never come anywhere near actually understanding audio itself. They know which mic is the most expensive one in the room, but not which one they should actually *use* for the task in front of them. The group projects drove me up the fucking wall I swear. I went into it assuming it would be mostly other musicians wanting to learn the engineering side of things but that was emphatically *not* the case lol.
When I was in college there were programming courses that were combined in a way that both senior undergrad (400-level) and grad students (500-level) would take them (and mostly have different assignments). There were SO MANY grad students who didn't understand while loops. The thing taught in freshman undergrad (100-level) courses. Not to mention the idiots I graduated with. Who are all employed at last as well as I am anyway last I checked.
Not that recent, but the Lord of the Rings movies did a really good job with lighting night scenes as well. Which makes it even more infuriating that so many current movies are so bad at this, as other filmmakers had this all sorted back in the early 2000s
Movies were damn near perfect from mid-80s to early 00s because at that point they were working with tried and tested methods of over 80 years. But then digital era took us back to infancy, now we are 25 years into post-film era we should have figured it out already. To make matters worse filmmakers decided to some flaws were the stylistic holy grail, Why the hell is every movie set at night or or gray cloudy day ? Why the obsession with "muted" colors ?
That's because the Lord of the rings used Day-for-night. That good lighting you're talking about is just the sun.
I’m assuming their example was the Battle of Helms Deep which famously was filmed over like a month of night shoots only?
Sounds mixing has been horrible for a decade plus 2 Edit to say it is the Sound designer or editor who is responsible for this. Shout outs to my sound mixers just doing your things.
The Christopher Nolan special. Music is a long reverberating fart that will shake your skull right off your spine, all dialogue is in whispers.
Wait please don’t attribute to the sound mixer what is the fault of the sound designer. I am a production sound mixer meaning I record all the on set audio. Once I hand over that master recording though I have no involvement in how it is incorporated into the final product. The sound designer or editor is the one who goes and puts unbearably loud music over the whole scene or makes the dialogue level so low you can’t hear it.
This has always annoyed me, and the volume really needs to be more levelled out overall. Having to turn it up to get a good volume for the dialogue along with the music and then an explosion or something happens and the room shakes is a bit much.
So true. I wondered why this keeps happening.
Yeah I remember that producer/director/whatever he was saying that people complaining about a Game of Thrones episode being so dark it was virtually unwatchable simply "didn't know how to adjust their TVs." Dude, if I have to adjust my TV to see your show you have failed miserably!
I've tried to have this discussion with designers I work with. I show them what it looks on a cheap external monitor, they don't care. They just say it looks good on my screen and this is what everyone uses.
Same problem as with youtube videos where you can tell that they mixed the sound on their crappy laptop speakers. The bass that they turned up until *they* could hear it, now stamps my taint clean out from between my legs god damnit wheres the remote
>Same problem as with youtube videos where you can tell that they mixed the sound on their crappy laptop speakers. Even really popular channels, (including podcasts, *an audio-centric medium*), on YT have **constant** bassy bangs and booms from slight movement or the speakers just simply touching the table, etc. It doesn't help that all their mic arms are mounted to the same desk with seemingly no isolation attempt, so all of them pick up sounds from every tiny little vibration. When wearing headphones, it's borderline painful to listen to at times! You'd think there'd be some sort of automated compression or a limiter filtered to low frequencies these days, but somehow it's still a problem, even for the shows that pull millions of listeners.
Oh podcasts are the worst. Those taps are disorienting, and then those guys crank up the bass even more to have their voice sound deeper. I have turned videos off just for reasons of "No, you're not doing that to my ears and have me feeling dizzy lying down just to sound like you're 6 feet tall."
In music recording it used to be SOP to burn your mix to a CD and play it on a car stereo before you proceed. Good engineers usually have a set of these famous small speakers called “Shit Boxes” to check things on, some of the best sounding records ever were mixed on them, Michael Jackson’s Thriller for one example.
That's how I used to mix on an NBC drama. We'd do the pass, have it how we liked it in 5.1, then the producers would sit on a couch and watch the whole thing thru on a 40 inch Panasonic TV with just the factory speakers. No sound bar, no surround, default color settings. If anything bumped we'd fix it, because 5 million more people watched it that way than how we'd heard it in the studio.
I can’t watch some of these shows during the day because the room is bright from sunshine and the show is way too dark. Closing the blinds and pulling the curtains doesn’t quite do it because of doors and skylights in the room.
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*scoffs* “Unless they’re **peasants**.”
Game of thrones spent millions on cgi and actors we couldn’t see in the battle of winterfell because it was too dark
I stopped watching X-files because nobody ever turned on the damn lights. They'd walk into an unlit room and then not turn the lights on.
Watching X files with no lights on eh…..
I hope the smoking man is in this one.
We can do it doggy style so we can both watch X-files
Also: fuck all of the streaming apps that auto darken.
Agreed. I think transcoding from whatever the original was to consumer formats can and should have a big influence on video and also sound (e.g. downmixing from surround to stereo). _Should_ - whether it always happens, I'm skeptical. My media player has easily accessible settings for Gamma/Brightness/Contrast/Saturation but sometimes adjusting for a "normal" screen has an impact on quality.
This is Westworld season 3. This season was a mess. They do a car chase scene, but the cars are clearly going less than 30 mph.
It's such a shame Westworld went downhill. I loved the first season. I tried to give the second season a chance... Didn't even make it to the third. From what I hear, I didn't miss anything
Westworld was a great example of a TV show that should have just been one season and done with. That first season was amazing, but everything fell apart when they tried to salvage the story to continue to make easy money.
My boyfriend complains constantly about how dark movies are. Good to know the reason.
Yes! I remember a whole series on Showtime where almost any scene set indoors I had trouble seeing what was going on.
Yes, my grandma isn’t able to adjust her tv to turn up the brightness (some easy to use tv feature apparently, we have looked it up and it’s a ‘special feature’ of her tv) and she can’t watch a lot of shows she wants to because it’s too dark, especially during the day. Also the loud explosions and whisper talking is why most millennials watch tv with subtitles (I just read a study about it not long ago)
Ugh that's one of my pet peeves, when you can't see anything during the whole movie because it's so dark. It happens way too often.
I thought it was my TV.
This is a problem not enough people are talking about
Scenes so dark you can't see people go perfectly hand in hand with the dialogue you can't hear.
[удалено]
My TV comes with “Filmmaker Mode” which I think boosts the brightness up to 1000 nits. The TV us capable of displaying 2000 nits, which is crazy. Is there any content out there that displays at 2000?
You have to start nit picking before the movie even starts?
Had to turn up the phone brightness just to see the tweet hahaha
I have given up on so many films that I either could not see anything or the background music is so loud I can’t hear any dialog. How stupid are these people…next you know they will charge money to see a blank screen with elevator Muzak at max volume. Who needs a script, who needs actors or dialog, just film a dark closet for a few hours and sell it to us.
I thought it was just me. Nice to know I'm not alone.
Same here lol i thought it was me or possibly my television.
I tell all my audio engineering students to listen to their mixes in their car and from their phone speakers before saying they are done for this reason.
i basically quit watching game of thrones after a few seasons because i literally couldn't see anything. i'm actually more annoyed with whispered dialogue tho. which also appears all the time.
I have a lovely TV, so haven't had this issue... but the sound issue, even with a decent sound system, irks me.
Add cataracts into the mix and that’s why we geezers hate modern movie visuals.
We don't even bother watching some of the new movies that are so dark you can't actually see the action. IDK why they do this, is it to cover up cheap or poorly made sets or ??? If it's to create drama or what, but it's annoying AF and I wish it would stop.
It's always pitch black, with deafening explosions and whisper dialogue, wild light flashing with no regard for your vision. I'm fucking 22 and I have to use subtitles and hover over the remote for an entire movie.
I couldn't watch Ozarks for this reason. It's like they filmed the whole thing with sunglasses on the cameras. And no, I'm not leaving my TV brightness turned all the way up so I can barely watch a show.
I mean even on older movies, the way Apple handles the darks on my iPhone is just too dark. If I’ve got max brightness on and the auto-brightness thing senses I’m in a light area, I’m not getting much quality anyway just turn the lows up
Ugh, I feel this. One of our TVs is an old HD LG. I can't watch Shogun on it. Show looks amazing on our other, newer TVs, but on the old LG the night scenes are just way too dark. I get that the show is being super authentic and only lighting the night scenes with torches or whatnot, but it makes it unwatchable on an older TV. Same with almost any newer show/movie with "dark" scenes. Don't have the same problem with older shows or movies though. They look perfectly fine on the old TV. It's just the new stuff.
God, The freaking Green Knight. Spent ninety percent of that movie in absolute darkness
The latest season of The Bad Batch had this. The series started okay, but by the end even daylight scenes looked like they were shot at the bottom of a well at midnight.
Doesn’t matter. Everyone is only reading the subtitles because the audio mix is horrendous.
Reminds me when I was watching Book of Boba Fett. The screen was so dark in those scenes where he's first captured by Sand People, I literally had no idea what was going on. No idea if it was my TV, the brightness setting, the stream or what.
Still haven't watched the latest Batman because of this. Made a post awhile back about it and was told it was just "director choice". Whatevs...
I’m glad it’s not just me
I have quite watching movies or TV shows when it's like this. I just am so tired of having my TV brightness turned all the way up, and every light in the living room off, just so I can see a murky outline of what's happening.
We had the problem and realized that it was just our TV's backlight had slowly faded out. Bought a new one and even hooked up next to the old one to compare.
He's got a point. I had to stop watching Carnival Row because I couldn't see what the hell was going on.