Whisper and Explosion 2 is even better. The whispers and explosions happen at the SAME TIME!
Secret Panel HERE 💥 https://tapas.io/episode/3005249
(Originally published earlier today on mastodon.social) - Click the Fedi-Link to visit.
Clearly you don’t appreciate the ✨art✨ of realistic dynamic range.
This but unironically.
Do y’all go to the theater and complain that it’s too loud?
What you’re saying is like, “You complain about being sweaty??? So what, do you complain at the gym too?”
I’m not in a theater. I’m at home. I don’t want the TV crazy loud for a number of reasons which can include the fact that I’m not a terrible neighbor, the time of day, my partner may be asleep, etc.
If I wanted to go to the theater, then I go to the theater where I have certain expectations which includes well-mixed, loud sound. That’s fine, and I will hear both things that way.
Or… they can make a theater mix of the audio (full dynamic range) and a streaming/dvd mix (normalized volume levels) so that everyone gets the best experience.
They often do
And streaming services often don’t let you choose which one to use
But I notice sometimes when it’s wrong! So clearly it never happens!
What would be even better is when they include both.
If you don’t see the difference between home & theater…
You don’t have your kids sleeping next room in the theatre. Home video must be normalised.
Yes actually.
I’ve taken to bringing earplugs.
I have before, yes.
No. But when I’m watching it at home, with dinner, the neighbor does sometimes. It’s almost like they should be mixed differently.
Both me and my wife were both complaining about how loud the sound was last time we went to the movies (Dune part 2), so yes. I prefer immersion without shattered ear drums.
I don’t go to the theater at all.
Just like how they absolutely love to have extremely dark environments then switch to blinding light.
A Christopher Nolan movie, I see.
Yeah, Nolan decided dialouge is important enough to include but not important enough to be able to hear. Pick a damn lane. Either let me hear it or don’t include it
I encourage people to tweet photos of his movies with subtitles on and set to their largest size. We need to shame him to have some common sense.
Encouraging people to use “X” even for good causes is…. Frowned on
Subtitle size should vary based on audibility of the current line. The irony is, during those scenes with boats and face masks? The CC box is so big it can only fit a couple of letters at a time, making it ALSO impossible to understand.
I had this problem for so long until I got a really basic sound bar. Can’t believe how many years I put up with it.
That seems like the only solid solution. I got a budget 5.1 with rear satellites because not only did I want a dedicated center channel for dialog but I wanted to avoid the 5.1 to stereo downmixing issues (such as in Plex) where the center channel gets incorrectly divided with a volume decrease (jellyfin didn’t seem to have the issue), but this way I can just sidestep those issues by being able to directly play 5.1.
This has helped a ton but there are still some movies that don’t cooperate, like dune part 1 during the Paul and his mother breakfast scene at the beginning. Even though I have the truehd 7.1 atmos and DD 5.1 (which direct plays without conversion), the only way to make that scene audible without blowing out the speakers the rest of the movie is to crank up the voice boost EQ which ruins the balance.
I think it’s a psychological thing where people are more willing to deal with loud scenes in the theater versus at home.
It’s not just psychological. You’re expecting a loud experience in a theater. Everyone around you is, too. And the building is designed for it. Versus at home, where I have neighbors, potentially other housemates who aren’t watching, etc.
Sometimes, idk if dune is one…. Shows/movies have scenes with intentionally difficult to hear dialog. It’s like, sure, they’re talking… but we want you to just watch and don’t worry you’ll get everything from visuals
Then maybe shut up a bit? Let the vibes just go, why you gotta keep talking over em? If you put words in a movie, I’m going to try to interpret those words. If they’re not important, I dare say they can be removed.
Tenet is the ultimate example of this. Lots of dialogue is drowned out by other sounds. Couldn’t hear fuck all of what the actors were saying. Wish I’d known before going in that Nolan was going for vibes over dialogue. I probably wouldn’t have bothered.
Why Include the dialogue if it’s not meant to be there? Why have the subtitles written out instead of [unintelligible speaking]? Why waste my mental energy on trying to parse which pieces of the talking are important, and which are just, what? Vibe checks? You put those words in your movie for a REASON Christopher, and damnit, I’m going to uncover it.
Absolutely. I spent the film straining to hear the actors unsure if I was missing anything important. I was so distracted that the only ‘vibe’ I got was frustration
Nah, you can just regulate it using software, no need for additional hardware.
I mean that’s technically true, but:
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If the problem is bad 5.1 to stereo downmix, then you’d be trying to use software tricks to separate out dialog that has already been merged with the other audio tracks, which won’t do a great job.
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That software needs to run on some kind of hardware, so if you’re playing your media from a streaming box that doesn’t run custom software (Chromecast for example) then you will need to add an additional piece of hardware in the chain to do this processing, such as a DSP.
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This essentially amounts to trying to fix it with EQ when you can just not merge the center channel with the other channels in the first place. Having a dedicated center channel speaker lets you use the ultimate software regulation trick - simply turning up the volume on the center channel.
Just lower the high volume sounds and highten the low volume sounds, it really isn’t any more difficult.
Windows has Loudness Equalization for that.
Unfortunately volume normalization only works on the overall volume. If spoken dialog happens during sound effects that are supposed to play on a separate speaker (but got mixed into the dialog due to downmixing to stereo), no amount of fiddling with EQ or volume normalization will boost just the dialog without also boosting the background noise (in the case of using even a 30 band EQ, it won’t work if there’s any background music, vocals, or sound effects in the same frequency range as speech).
If you want to boost dialog with only software, the best route to go is to get in before downmixing so you can boost the center channel before it gets irreversibly mixed with unwanted sound effects from other channels. Some players might have that option, but like I said if you’re playing from a set top box or streaming stick, you’re gonna need an additional piece of hardware in the chain to do this. If you have the video file itself, you can use ffmpeg’s audio filter to do a custom downmix using the -af flag. This way, you can use a downmixing algorithm like the Robert Collier night mode dialog downmix mapping which preserves original dialog volume (which actually is an improvement in some cases since some algorithms erroneously lower the dialog volume when downmixing to stereo) while slightly reducing music and other channel volume - you can adjust the weights used to boost center channel volume further as well.
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My LG sound bar still fucks me over, maybe it’s just too old? (2017)
You can also just enable Loudness Equalization in the audio properties in Windows.
Thank god for Loudness Equalization.
Since I have found that, I changed it on every device I could. It is just so dumb how badly they mix the audio.
they mix audio for cinemas with 5.1 or 7.1 speaker systems. And then they take that version and smoosh it into stereo :) which then comes out sounding absolutely terrible because the mix was simply not made for stereo
Half the movies Ive seen in the last decade in cinemas still suffered from insanely bad audio balancing.
This problem goes beyond just lazy distribution.
I think the issue is with volume levelling; your statement implies the issue is channel separation. Listening in surround sound won’t mitigate the issue, unless you intentionally boost the center speaker
I mean, cinemas are also built to blow your eardrums out. As someone with hearing loss I avoid them.
Ohhhh neat. Now you can point out to this guy, and myself where we can find this on our televisions.
Someone sharing a solution for one platform doesn’t obligate them to support every platform.
That said, this kind of functionality is sometimes called “noise compression” or “volume normalization”. Guitar compressor pedals do this. So look for those in your TV audio settings or audio system settings, but I wouldn’t hold my breath that it will be there on most TV models.
Also, sometimes it can be due to the way the sound is mixed to however many audio channels the media uses and then how your setup remixes them for how many audio channels you have available. Check your settings to see if the speaker setup matches what you have. Also make sure they are all properly plugged in and actually driving audio through them.
Do they have something like that for Linux?
github.com/wwmm/easyeffects for pipwire
piped.video/watch?v=typM_AQUzi4 for pulseaudio
Thank you!
Thank you!
That’s the beauty of ✨️subtitles✨️
I was watching fallout and was pleasantly surprised that there where multiple dialog boosted audio tracks (medium and high boost).
The most notorious example for me is Spanish cinema, it’s like they’re rapid-fire whispering, then suddenly they burst out screaming. No middle ground. And just what the hell are film sound editors and mixers in Spain smoking, to think that this is the proper way to mix a film’s audio?
For anyone wondering why it is like that: I’ve read that movies nowadays are the same on disc and streaming service as they are in the theaters, meaning the voices are sitting on the central speaker. I’ve hat this a long time too and after I read that fact I went and bought a soundbar with center speaker and that solved this issue for me.
Your TV doesn’t remap it?
I call this Dark Knight Syndrome.
I have the same problem with ads being louder too.Also weirdly music in the radio compared to the DJ…
TL;DR quantifying volume is hard and ads can cheat.
Not even a new thing; I have no idea what the plot for Mission Impossible 1 was
Not sure hearing the dialog would help.
it do be like that with some of the audio mixing in games.
Sonic Adventure games come to mind as the most egregious examples of that.
“I’ll make you eat those words!”
Some tvs have volume leveling
It really shouldn’t be up to the TV do this.
It is if your not using a home theater setup
Oh, wow!Is it really you?
Love your comics, they make my day better :)
