And he’s married to his aunt!
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That’s why I love opera. There’s like a two line libretto for a five minute aria.
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I got into opera because my daughter decided at age 4 that opera (particularly opera with very very high soprano parts) was girl music. She could not read. So, I had to read out the subtitles to her. And she would always see the subtitles coming and ask, “What is it saying now?” “It’s still saying I love you I love you I love you I love you.” It was pretty tedious. I also learned SOME opera is not for children. Don Giovanni for example. Not a good kid pick.
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I would say most of it isn’t
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For Netflix specifically, there’s a clear policy in place about what gets translated in the captioning. If a character is speaking a foreign language that we viewers aren’t meant to understand (e.g. our protagonist is kidnapped by Romanian or Russian or Dothraki or Klingon kidnappers who bellow incomprehensibly in the poor victim’s uncomprehending face), perhaps because the protagonist doesn’t understand it and we are meant, at that moment, to identify with the terror of not knowing exactly what those nefarious reprobates want, then Netflix will instruct the captioner to employ the {speaking Russian} or {bellowing in Dothraki} captions. In most other circumstances, Netflix’s policy is to include translation, and often that shows up in subtitles which show up whether or not you have captioning turned on; that’s called “forced narrative subtitles” by Netflix. In fact, when watching an English-original show in another dubbed language, any onscreen text that’s dramatically relevant or otherwise meant to be understandable by the viewer (signage, posters, onscreen text messages, etc.) will be translated in the forced narrative subtitles.
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They should switch fonts like Asterix books.
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Sometimes when the lyrics were:
I want to kill myself I want to kill myself I want to kill myself I want to kill myself myself myself
I would reinterpret it to be something like
I am really upset…
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Most people do need them nowadays since Hollywood forgot how to mix sound properly long ago.
DRAMATIC MUSIC “dialogue that sounds like whispers but shouldn’t, might even be shouting” BOOMING EXPLOSIONS
I started turning on subtitles a few years ago and at first my family complained, but they quickly saw the light and now turn them on for everything and complain if they can’t. You just miss way too much without them nowadays, even if your hearing is normal.
In terms of what ‘normalize’ means, I’d say giving them the priority that they deserve and treating them as a normally expected part of a production. Any audio or audio/video production should inherently include a transcript and/or subtitles; that should just be normal and expected.
Instead, they’re often tacked on after the fact, awful, poorly timed and placed, or just plain unavailable. Example of where normalization could help - a movie has built-in subtitles for foreign language bits that everyone sees (even without subtitles) but if you turn on subtitles, those existing bits get covered up by the subtitles that don’t have the foreign language bits - that’s something that could be easily fixed by normalizing locations. Another - treating the people who make them as valued members of the production instead of unwanted minimum wage contractors that are just an unfortunate expense.
And the AI-generated auto-subtitles… they can be hilarious but also pretty obscene. I had to post a video for work last week and Youtube automatically generated subtitles, which I normally wouldn’t have noticed, but I just happened to and luckily caught and edited out an instance of the n-word, which was in no way whatsoever what was actually being spoken. If subtitles were more ‘normalized’ (given higher priority) the auto-generation systems would be given more budget/priority and produce better results.
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Nah. That sounds fine if you’re in a cinema. However, what Hollywood doesn’t do is remember that not all of us have home theatre setups complete with large, echoing rooms.
So the sound mix is horrid for the average living room with the perfectly-fine-but-not-audiophile setup, but great for the family that shelled out for the eight speakers cleverly hidden around the room etc.
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You can mitigate a lot of that by making sure the audio source matches your speaker setup. The reason that a lot of the speech sounds muffled is that it’s supposed to be coming out of the centre speaker in a 5/7/x.1 system and that signal doesn’t go to the speakers in a two-channel stereo set up without some post-hoc audio mixing of the original signal.
Most TV sets and hardware media players have a setting somewhere that will downmix a 5.1 source to 2-channel stereo but it almost always defaults to a straight passthrough. 
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Yep. I have no problem with that and agree that it would likely be a good thing, and not just for strictly deaf people.
The point in the OP that I took issue with was that they should show up in the theater, essentially making subtitles mandatory for everyone. And honestly, I’m not sure why that got my goat so much, but I was sufficiently annoyed by the thought that I probably shouldn’t have posted a reply. 
I was going to say that I never seem to have that problem in a movie theater even though it’s annoyingly pervasive at home. I just assumed it was because the base volume in theaters is SO LOUD to begin with. I didn’t even think about the mix.
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I must pipe up because this stuff here is part of what I do for a living. I started working in post production on Season 3 of Will & Grace, way back in the year 2000, and so far every last one of the sound mixes I’ve attended (151 episodes of W&G, 7 episodes of Traveler, 9 episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, 151 episodes of The Mentalist, 10 episodes of Clipped, 13 episodes of Fuller House, 20 episodes of Pretty Little Liars, 6 episodes of Shrill, and at least a half-dozen pilots) have been on the Warner Bros lot in Burbank. All those shows were mixed in 5.1 surround on really big speakers, and at the end of every mix, without fail, we play back the entire show in stereo on small consumer-size speakers, and a consumer-size monitor, to make sure that what most people hear at home is clear and understandable. I can’t speak for shows on which I did not work, nor for other sound facilities since I’ve only ever mixed at WB for the past 20 years, but I’m pretty sure that’s the industry standard practice: you mix your TV shows with an ear toward the big, fancy, loud, expensive sound systems, but not at the expense of the people watching on a 19" Sony Trinitron with a single monaural speaker. I can’t guarantee that a particular network or cable/satellite provider will actually use the LT/RT tracks we helpfully provide on the broadcast master tape or file (in fact we discovered about halfway through The Mentalist’s run that CBS was not actually using the LT/RT tracks provided (and contractually required!) on our delivered Air Master, but were actually mixing down their own stereo feed from the 5.1 tracks, totally unnecessarily and also totally unsupervised by the show, which once resulted in the entire dialogue track being wiped for ten seconds at the start of an act. (Long story, but our producers were pissed.)
Anyway, it’s been a couple of years since I delivered a show’s air masters on tape; it’s always file delivery now, often a JPEG 2000 file embedded with both stereo LT/RT tracks and discrete 5.1 audio tracks. If you have a 5.1 system, you certainly should make sure it’s dialed in correctly, since nearly all the dialogue will be coming out of the center speaker only, and there are a great many presets and settings on both high-end and low-end surround amps, not all of which will be conducive to watching TV shows and movies.
But if you’re watching on just a regular stereo TV, or a simple 2-speaker stereo setup, the TV or satellite box or DVR should know to switch to using just the 2.0 (LT/RT) tracks, which will send dialogue, music, and effects to both left and right speakers in a well-mixed manner. Sometimes, the user may have to select the 2.0 stereo audio tracks manually, if their setup is not the sort to automatically switch to it. Sending the Left and Right channels of a 5.1 mix to the Left and Right speakers of a stereo-only amp is no good; there won’t be any dialogue at any legible level. (LT/RT means Left Total and Right Total, not just Left and Right, which essentially means the LT channel contains all the Music and FX that normally go to the Left channel of a surround mix, PLUS the dialogue that typically goes to the Center channel. Similarly RT gets the Music and FX from the Right channel of the surround mix, plus that same dialogue from the Center channel. And that way, you get to hear everything in your 2-channel stereo setup.)
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Thank you for explaining all that! It’s reassuring to know people do check.
I’ve noticed it as an issue intermittently. I know I have DVDs people have complained about, and I’m reasonably sure we have the same edition DVD, but things have seemed fine on my system.
I have audiophiles in the family but don’t consider myself one – I’m of the “set it up how you like it and then stop fiddling” school of audio. I have a bottom of the line, old NAD amp and bottom of the line Tannoy bookshelf speakers – underpowered but fine for my little apartment. I only use them for music or older movies that need the “woody” speaker sound though.
Where I do notice I have to ride the volume button a lot is watching Netflix. I’ve tried different audio settings both with the Netflix app and with my TV, and the dynamic range is just annoying. It seems to be worst of all for the stuff actually made by Netflix. Not sure what choices they went for there, but it seems odd given they have viewers watching shows on headphones and tablets more than other sources.
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Yeah, that’s weird. And they have the most stringent delivery requirements and QC processes of any studio or network I’ve worked for. Their standards should be tightest for their original content, because those are the shows over which they have the most control.
That said, they generate a LOT of content, and I don’t think they send execs to every single mix. Still, their delivery requirements are what they are, and they will reject a show over and over again if it doesn’t meet those strict requirements, and dynamic range is definitely part of that.
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