Amazon Introduces New Feature To Make Dialogue In Its TV Shows Intelligible - Sl...

Amazon Introduces New Feature To Make Dialogue In Its TV Shows Intelligible

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• It has always mattered if the actors mumble. Boosting the volume of the mumbling only gets you so far because the single is bunk at the source.

  But yet it's not (entirely) the actor's fault. Ultimately it's the director's responsibility. They should direct against this in the first place, and should it happen anyway either retake the scene or get it fixed it in post with ADR. Even if they didn't notice on the set it should be clearly seen as a problem in the dailies. The fact they're consistently missing all these checks and opportunities just tells me the directors aren't simply dropping the ball...but they WANT the mumble, they're DIRECTING the actors to mumble, they consider this to be a FEATURE rather than a bug.

  They're wrong. And stupid. But that's Hollywood. Mumbling dialog is a fad that hopefully doesn't last long.

  • Wild audio is not used in final edit

    Other than in soap operas (where they shoot cheap), the wild sound recorded during the scene is not used. 99.999% of the time it is re-recorded in post, in a nice quiet iso booth with a mic right in front of the actor's face.

  • Re:

    To blame the actor is simple thinking.
    The picture and action and sound passes by many eye and ears, the director even has a boss and still, mistakes get made. This is business and a job and they get so much time and money to do it and that's it. George Lucas, said, I paraphrase unironically: Movies are abandoned[, not released.] Maybe it isn't worth the time to get a good sound designer. Maybe there's some dysfunction on the set. Countless factors play in.
    
    Because of this, I personally also think it'

  • The fact they're consistently missing all these checks and opportunities just tells me the directors aren't simply dropping the ball...but they WANT the mumble, they're DIRECTING the actors to mumble, they consider this to be a FEATURE rather than a bug.

    They're wrong. And stupid. But that's Hollywood. Mumbling dialog is a fad that hopefully doesn't last long.

    I think this might be explained by gross incompetence as well.

    We aren't going to look back at this time as a high point in cinema. We have the bad sound, the inability of writers to follow the basic rules of storytelling, embarrassingly clumsy attempts to inject politics into movies, even though we know how to do that without it being so obvious and clumsy.

    Even things like lighting are a train wreck in today's cinematic world.

    There are rules of good storytelling, and rules of good cinema. We can break them in places to create a jarring effect, but as my Photography professor noted. "Break the rules at times. But use them like spice. Don't use them as the main course. But most importunately know what the rules are first, otherwise you look stupid and random.

    The present crop looks like they don't know the rules.

  • Re:

    Well, there's an actor I cannot stand in my country because he mumbles all his lines. I can never understand a single word he says, and yet he's been famous for 3 or 4 decades. So there's clearly a market for it. Can't even remember his name.

  • Re: I know a cheaper way

    Make them all speak Transatlantic again. Just think of it, Spiderman sounding like Katherine Hepburn!

• Re:

  A loud mumbler, is hardly more effective than a quiet one.

  I certainly see your point, but proper enunciation for clarity does matter, as every professional speaker can attest. Clearly that education isn't happening these days either.

  • It's not the actors' fault. It's the directors'. They want dialogue to sound more realistic. That means people don't speak as clearly as they traditionally have on TV. It's a bad idea for obvious reasons. There's a sweet spot in between realistic and theater (as on a stage) and lots of modern programming has shot right past it. It's easy to make a TV show look and sound realistic, shoot on location with practical audio. The art is in making it more than realistic.

    • Re:

      If the viewers of a movie can't understand what's being said, then the character being spoken to wouldn't be able to either. That's only realistic if it's part of the story - ie the character doesn't hear properly and misinterprets, or asks the first character to repeat himself.

      • Re:

        I disagree. You're at a different point, and you also don't have as much practice as they do at interpreting the other party's mumbling. Anyway like I said, the art is in making it seem realistic while also making it intelligible. And since it's commercial art, it's meant to be apprehensible (WTAF that's not in the Firefox dictionary by default? How ironic) by the widest possible audience.

    • "It's easy to make a TV show look and sound realistic, shoot on location with practical audio. The art is in making it more than realistic."

      The worst show I ever saw with 'auto-sound' was 'The Americans'.

      Each time somebody shut up, the microphone gain went slowly up until you heard the birds outside and the crew moving, then somebody said something and abruptly the gain does down and the birds shut-up, it made me crazy and I'm not a sound guy.

      • Re:

        Compressors are usually used on the dialogue track to apply gain and even out the volumes of the voices. They are "auto" in the sense that they adjust gain dynamically based on thresholds. Usually the thresholds are set high enough so they don't do what you describe.

        These are usually directional mics mounted with vibration isolation and held at close range to the actors. Unfortunately, directional works both ways. Things that are exactly directly behind the microphone (birds in the sky) can get picked u

    • Re:

      Right. It is a bad idea. All the more reason people should be questioning the "professional" directors who choose to warp a product that tends to rely on the tenants of professional speaking instead of streaming providers having to literally create anti-director technology to compensate.

      If a habitual mumbler showed up to acting school, that would be the first problem they would address. So directors are sending quite the mixed message there too.

      All entertainment is considered a form of art. If this theo

• Re:

  Producers seem to think we enjoy having our ears blasted at irregular intervals. Often they will have a quiet part, followed by a super loud party scene or battle.

  Even if the actors are properly recorded and mixed, the viewer often can't hear them because they turned down the loud parts and now it's another quiet part.

  • Re:

    It's been this way forever such that I won't even watch movies without a DVR that can limit the dynamic range. I guess there are some people out there who have rooms with 30dB background noise and expensive audio systems that play a full 96dB range and they want to feel like they are getting value. For the rest of us, we want to watch the movie!

    • Re: I know a cheaper way

      A lot of time we don't even want to watch the movie, we just don't have anything better to do.

      • Re:

        There are a lot of good movies that I'm glad I've watched. And some not so good ones:)

• Re:

  Exactly. My biggest issue is that the sound effects are mixed way too high compared to the voice. The Foley effects are almost universally overdone today, with the footsteps or crinkling of a bag or clothing "swish" being just as loud or louder than the voice.

  And then there is the dynamic range overuse. I suppose a big kaboom right after the actors are whispering might be good in a few places, but not through the entire movie.

  Full disclaimer - I'm pretty deaf, and it turns out that my noggin processes

• Re:

  Back in the olden days nearly all dialog in TV shows and movies was dubbed in a sound studio after filming. Makes for an enjoyable watching experience when the dialog is crisp, and clear, yet still natural sounding.

  I'm not sure why this practice ended. Perhaps production folks and actors don't want to go to all that work now? Or maybe the studio doesn't want to spend the money (poor CEOs are barely scraping by as it is).

  • Re:

    That's not needed for crisp sound. A directional mic on an isolated boom can get very close to the actors. Often the dialogue track itself is crisp and clear and has no other sounds in it. Other tracks are layered in at the post production stage, including background sounds like birds and so on.

    ADR is still extremely common. But doesn't always sound natural due to imperfect matching of the acoustics of the on-screen location. You don't usually dub the entire movie, though.

• not enough

  that's still not enough

  Dialog needs to be on it's own track, and standard television interfaces need to be able adjust the relative volume of dialog and everything else.

  • Re:

    Dialogue is pretty much the only thing in the center channels on a standard 5.1 track - which these days even most TV is distributed as 5.1. A very limited number of TVs have options to adjust the mixing of the center channel but it does exist.

• Re:

  There was some really lousy at-home post-production done during COVID. A very noticeable drop in production quality due to people working with poorly isolated setups with not so good speakers.