I watch a lot of movies and TV
on the train, at home
[overlapping] at the movies, while working out, while doing dishes
in the bath...
But no matter where I'm watching
I find myself constantly doing this one thing.
[unintelligible]
What?
[unintelligible]
[exhasperated sigh]
[unintelligible]
[exhasperated sigh]
[unintelligible]
Oh.
It turns out this isn't unusual.
We polled our YouTube audience
and about 57% of people said that they feel like
they can't understand the dialogue in the things that they watch
unless they're using subtitles.
But it feels like this hasn't always been the case.
So to figure out what was going on, I made a call.
Hi, my name is Austin Olivia Kendrick.
I am a professional dialogue editor for film and TV.
I basically perform audio surgery on actors words.
Do you watch with subtitles?
I–
I do, actually.
I do a lot of the time.
So...
Why do you think that we all feel like we need subtitles now?
I get asked this question all the time.
All the time.
It's something that is...
It doesn't have a simple, straightforward answer.
It's very layered and very complex.
And after talking to Austin for almost 2 hours, it's true.
It's a very layered and complex topic.
But everything kept pointing back to one main thing.
Technology that got us from this...
–I'll get you, my pretty. –You should be kissed and often.
No, Richard, no. What has happened...
To this.
Mom, I just woke up.
...little slim-waisted birdy...
[unintelligible]
Let's start with microphones.
I'm going to use this clip from "Singin in the Rain"
to show how mics used to work.
Here's the mic, you talk towards it.
The sound goes through the cable to the box.
A man records it on a big record in wax.
This scene illustrates some of the difficulties and intricacies
early sound recordings.
Mics were big, bulky, temperamental
and required creative solutions to be hidden.
They were wired and recorded onto hard memory
like wax and eventually tape.
No matter how many actors were in a scene
all sound got recorded to one track.
So performers had to be diligently focused
and facing a certain angle
so that their words could be picked up.
Otherwise...
[muted noise, as if from far away]
[sudden sound up]
[muted noise, as if from far away]
[sudden sound up]
You couldn't hear a thing.
But technology's improved to the point where
microphones don't impede performance as much anymore.
They become better, smaller, wireless...
and we use more of them
to ensure that performances get captured.
What we typically are working with from production dialogue
is 2 boom microphones
and then every actor has at least one lavaliere microphone
hidden somewhere on them.
These shrinking mics have given actors the flexibility
to be more naturalistic in their performances.
They no longer need to project
so that their words reach the mic.
They can speak softly, knowing that the tiny mic
hidden on their body will pick up what they're saying.
And my personal favorite example of this performance shift
is Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock.
In a 2011 speech slash roast,
Tina Fey says that "He speaks so quietly
that she can't hear him when she's standing next to him."
"And then you play the film back and it's there somehow."
Just listen to this whisper off between him and Will Arnett.
I'm not afraid of you.
Yeah.
Well, you should be.
Let's just see how it all shakes out in the meeting.
Naturalism isn't always the best for intelligibility, though.
Take Tom Hardy, an actor that I personally love
but who famously is a mumbler.
????????????
I mean...
the mic picked that line up fine.
Like we can definitely hear that he's talking
he's saying something.
But once that mumble gets recorded
it's on to a dialog editor's shoulder
to make it as intelligible as possible.
And that was a lot harder when everything was analog.
While you could pick the best takes
and physically splice them together.
If some piece of dialog was truly impossible to understand
then actors will come in and rerecord those specific lines
in a process called ADR or automated dialog replacement
which you can see Meryl Streep do in this scene
from "Postcards from the Edge".
There isn't enough money in the world to further cause like yours
That still gets done today, but..
ADR also costs money
because you're not only paying for the actors time
you're paying for the engineer's time
and then the editor's time.
So we try to do ADR, frankly, as little as possible.
And so a lot of her job is making words sound better.
The show I'm currently working on
I remember in the middle of this one word
there was just this loud metal clang
that I couldn't remove.
So I had to go in and I had to find an alternate take of it
that fit and then I had to fit it...
to the movement of her mouth in that moment
and then push it in.
And once she's done with it it's sent off to a mixer
who works to make sure the frequencies of the sound effects
and music don't overlap
with the frequencies of the human voice
something that's only possible now that the world
has moved away from tape
and into digital recordings.
That is a big challenge.
Carving out those frequencies, that space...
amongst every other element of the mix
for the dialogue to be able to punch through
and not be all muddied up by any other sounds
that exist in that band of frequencies.
But even with all that work
lines of dialog can still be hard to understand.
The kind of feeling has been
if you want your movie to feel quote unquote cinematic
you have to have wall-to-wall bombastic, loud sound.
A lot of people will ask like
"Why don't you just turn the dialog up?"
Like, just turn it up.
And... if only it was that simple.
Because a big thing that we want to preserve
is a concept called dynamic range.
The range between your quietest sound and your loudest sound.
If you have your dialog, that's going to be at the same volume
as an explosion that immediately follows it.
The explosion is not going to feel as big.
You need that contrast in volume
in order to give your ear a sense of scale.
But the thing is, you can only make something so loud
before it gets distorted.
So if you want to create that wide dynamic range
you have no choice but to push those quieter sounds lower
instead of pushing the louder sounds louder.
So explosions go up and dialog comes down.
Which brings us to the Christopher Nolan of it all.
[loud music layered over] A seperate structure within the others—
[Tom Hardy mumbling into a face mask]
[rocket blasters layered over] Pushing out of orbit!
Nearly every film of his has been criticized
for its hard to hear dialogue
that essentially begs for subtitles.
But as as this headline explains, he likes it that way.
According to an interview in a book called The Nolan Variations
he said that he gets a lot of complaints.
Even from other filmmakers who would say
"I just saw your film and the dialogue is inaudible."
"The truth was it was kind of the whole enchilada
of how we had chosen to mix it."
And in his 2017 interview with Indiewire, he said
"We made the decision a couple of films ago
that we weren't going to mix films for substandard theaters"
And this is kind of the crux of the matter.
The content that we watch here
and here and here
is not mixed for us, primarily.
Rerecording mixers mix for the widest surround
sound format that is available
typically like big release films.
That is Dolby Atmos....
which has true 3D sound up to 128 channels.
The thing is, if you're not at a movie theater
that can showcase the best sound Hollywood has to offer...
you can't experience all of those channels.
So after the movie is mixed for the 128 Atmos tracks
somebody has to create a separate version of the film's audio
where all those same sounds live on one or two or five tracks.
This is called downmixing.
Downmixing is the process of taking that biggest mix
and folding it down into formats
with lesser channels available to it.
So say Atmos down to 7.1 or 7.1 down to 5.1
or 5.1 down to stereo
stereo down to mono.
Unlike old TVs that were gigantic and had a ton of space for speakers
TVs today are super thin
like this one that I have in my living room
is about the same thickness as my iPhone.
So even though it's outputting the same mono or stereo sound
that an older TV might, it's still going to sound worse
because you have to have tiny little speakers
to fit into this tiny, sleek form factor.
These tiny speakers are also usually on the back of the TV.
So the downmixed version of this movie that went from
128 channels down to just 2
is going to sound even muddier when it's pointing away from you.
And when you're watching on your phone or a laptop...
it's generally not much better.
When you combine not great speakers, naturalistic mumbly performances
dynamic range featuring bombastic sound over dialogue and a flattened mix...
It's no wonder we have trouble hearing
what's going on.
And it seems like the industry knows this because TVs today
are shipping with all kinds of settings
built in like this intelligence mode.
You can put on active voice amplification
in hopes of making that dialog track
come through just a little bit clear.
But of course, that's more band aid than it is solution.
The way movies get mixed likely isn't going to revert back to
super pristine dialogue.
So the solutions we have are, one: Buy better speakers
and only go to theaters that have impeccable sound.
Two: take a chill pill
and try to just worry a little bit less
about picking up every single word that gets said.
Or, three...
Just keep the subtitles on.
For people who are deaf or hard of hearing
subtitles make movies and TV shows accessible
and this accessibility has just expanded in recent years.
Laws have been passed to ensure
that movie theaters have at least a few screenings a week
with captions.
Pretty much every streaming service has standardized them
and speech recognition technology
has made them accessible in pretty much
every YouTube video and TikTok. [Which is partially how our subtitles are made!]
Plus, they're super easy to toggle on and off.