Is movie dialogue getting harder to hear for you?

I think Fincher does embrace this approach. There's dialogue in 'Zodiac' that is sometimes incomprehensible - and that's not good, given the heavy amount of information that is required for processing in order to follow the investigation.

 

"Lost Highway" is terrible for this, so was "Heat" when I watched the LD of it a few weeks ago...

 

So turn on the closed-captioning. I know Zodiac had it.

 

ER is my "captions required" viewing.

 

Nah - I just scroll back and kick up the volume. I can't have anything obscuring Fincher's carefully composed frames now, can I?

 

Well, if you want to hear the movie, which you said you couldn't...

 

No I don’t have any listening to dialogue and its not just the dialogue it can also be softer sound effects in the centre you know “centre” its often made up with matching fronts and I don’t have any listening difficulty.

 

I don't have a matching centre, but the AV amp calibrates using a mic and on some films the centre channel seems to be lacking, or perhaps the dynamic range is too wide for domestic use.

 

I am glad someone else feels this way ,I thought my hearing was going .What is even more annoying to me is when people wisper on film uuugh.

 

As I've been saying since I started this thread...this is really about intelligible dialogue in theaters. At home, you have a remote, a volume knob, and can rewind the program as frequently as you please, and walk right up to the speaker to hear if you need.

That option really isn't open to those who sit in a theater seat, and have one time to get it all so the film will make sense. Allowing for the occasional baby wail, yakking customer or whatever, those that mix the film should not bring their quest for realism into interfering with whatever one needs to hear in order to understand a plot point. I don't mind a good boom, realistic background noise or accurate acting...I just want to know what the guy said that made the other guy so mad he said something else back which caused the soundtrack music to swell, and got everybody chasing each other around the room. Is that too much to ask for $9.50?

 

Apparently

 

Hey, it's not the theatres, primarily, IMO. It's how the mixers are mixing the films. Today's films are so full of ambient junk noise to justify surround sound that it's just incredulous! I really don't know how much adjusting the average theatre can do, but it may be very problematic for them to help the low dialog of many films...?

I like films at home these days. If the centre channel needs to be sky-high, I can make it so.

 

No, the problem IS in the theaters. Because THAT's where you don't have control over your center channel...you just wrote that yourself.

Of course it's the mixers, I never said it wasn't.

 

Well, I've chatted with some mixers over at AVS. They know some people are annoyed. One told me that some directors made him bump levels up beyond what he thought prudent.

I'll never quit going out to films completely but with Blu-ray blossoming, staying in for films is more appealing than ever.

Sir-round-sound is just the problem and the solution. Too many films are made with impressing the hormone, testosterene, crowd these days. How many times have I heard the lament, "the surrounds were not active".

Sorry charlie, only the best films have intelligible dialog these days....

 

I thinks films also use too much of the dynamic range available.

 

There are supposed to be standards in the industry that all the major mixing stages use. But I still hear volume and balance levels all over the map, disc to disc, and studio to studio.

There's no harm in bumping up the center channel a dB or two. Just be aware that there's no such thing as a "once size fits all" mixing level. It might work for the specific DVD you're watching, but it won't for the next one, or for a TV show. And this still won't solve the problem of overzealous mixers who blow the roof off during high-volume scenes.

Surprisingly, though, I thought the recent Bruckheimer/Michael Bay blockbuster Transformers was pretty well-mixed. I didn't hear any dialog problems, and the loud scenes weren't ridiculously loud, especially for a film as big as this. So it can be done.

David Fincher is an extremely technically-aware, "hands-on" kind of director. Anything you see and hear in his films was totally, absolutely under his supervision and control. Good or bad, that's what he wanted you to hear.

There's always the chance that your speaker/room setup is exaggerating or creating a problem. There are so many variables in this process, the fault could be in a dozen different places. I can tell you that by the time a mix hits the screen (or home video), there's been about 10 different people involved in checking it, re-checking it, and checking it again before it ships. Mistakes still happen -- I've ever heard reversed channels on older stereo films from five years ago -- but they're a lot more rare than you think.

 

Sound effects and music notwithstanding, today's major issue regarding high quality dialogue is that nearly every movie and television production is shot with at least two cameras, one capturing a wide shot and another simultaniously shooting a close-up. Because of infringement into the wide shot, the boom or fishpole (high-quality microphone) is unable to capture the dialogue and much of the time sound is taken from a bug mic hidden in the actor's clothing. Hiding the bug mic (the capsule is smaller than your little fingernail) robs the high frequencies and causes the muffled sound. It takes a skilled mixer and good luck to capture clean dialogue with a bug. Sometimes the actor re-records dialogue in certain sequences (known as foley) to repair edits and unusable sound from the bug.

Although it would take only a few minutes to re-shoot the sequence again for close-ups, if the director likes the performance given when utilizing multi-cameras, he will not shoot the close-up pass again to please the sound department.

The final dialougue track consists of boom/fishpole mics, bug mics and foleyed recordings, somtimes giving the listener a roller-coaster ride and in my opinion, killing the feel of the movie. Many big-budget films suffer from this scenario.

--Russ

 

I thought foley was the recording of extra/enhanced sound effects (like footsteps, etc) and that the rerecording for voice was done more often than not and is known as some process that begins with an A.

 

You're correct. ADR (dialogue replacement) is the process used for replacing dialogue. Thanks for the correction.

Russ

 

We refer to this as the "wide and tight" problem in production.

No one I've ever heard of refers to lavs as "bug mikes," but they are called "lavaliers," "wireless mikes," as well as "pieces of crap" by most respected mixers. The standard boom mike is a Schoeps MK641 that costs about 3 grand (more with a good mount, boompole and windscreen). A good lav like a Tram TR-50, Sanken COS-11, or a Countryman B6 costs about $300 by comparison. But sometimes, we have to rely on the lavs to get the sound, period. Digital wireless transmitters have at least made them much more reliable than in the old days.

It's sometimes possible to mix in a little of the boom in order to take the curse off the lavs. If you only use the lav, it sounds like the actor is 6" away from the mike (which they are), and it sounds phony and artificial, plus you run the risk of picking up clothing noise every time the actor moves. The boom captures the sound of the actor in a real space, so you get some ambience and a sense of where they are, and it sounds a hundred times more real and natural.

In high-noise areas (particularly city streets or rooms with bad echo), lavs can be a godsend at keeping the acoustical problems down. There are many TV shows on the air where 75% of the sound you hear are all from lavs; Lost is one of them, because they're shooting in noisy jungles and on beaches with continuous surf noise. It's a miracle the mixers get the dialog to sound as good as they do, given the horrendous time & money pressures they're working under.

BTW, smart directors will shoot a medium shot and a simul close-up from the same angle, so there's no issues with getting the boom in close (and lighting issues are reduced as well). Wide shots require either a 20' boom (with matching/distance issues) or wireless lavs, but the reality is that a good dialog editor will "steal" all the sound from the close-ups later on anyway.

ADR is a last-ditch thing for most movies and TV series these days. It's unavoidable with big effects movies due to giant fans and explosions, but ADR is not nearly used as much today as it used to be. ADR sounds far worse than even a lav mike, and I rarely hear a convincing re-recorded performance. It almost never sounds like the real thing. Smart directors avoid it at all costs unless there's just no other alternative.

 

Fascinating! Thanks for the info

 

Some movies I can hear every word of dialogue clearly. Other movies I struggle to make out some words. I was watching Captain America Civil War today and I swear half the dialogue I couldn't understand even when I rewound the movie and tried again I still couldn't make it out. Is this fairly common with newer movies?

 

Subtitles are your friend.

 

That's how I felt with the Robert Downey Jr "Sherlock Holmes" movies. I couldn't understand a dang thing....about an hour in I gave up and left the theater. I tried it again on TV...worse.

 

Lots of quiet mumbling in movies now, and then they follow up a quiet mumbling scene with a loud-ass plane or helicopter landing, or digital zero musical montage.