I’m constantly having to turn the volume up and down depending on the what the scene is. It’s not just me either. A lot of people I know have resorted to just turning on the closed captioning so they can hear what they’re saying. I don’t remember this being an issue before.
In: 2005
There are a lot of comments here but I don’t feel like anyone has quite put of this way that I’ve seen. Think of it more like the difference between Pop music and classical music. If you look at the wave forms of both of them, classical music is highly dynamic, the quiet parts are very quiet and the loud parts are very loud and having that range gives more artistic options. But then when you look at Pop music usually it’s just a solid bar of full volume compressed audio, it’s not that it’s less artistic it’s just that it has a different purpose it needs to be some thing that is always audible in the background where the volume is up or down, whether people are paying attention or not.
Videos are like this too. commercials, Reality TV and kids shows will have things at a consistent volume because of the way they’re meant to be enjoyed. They are meant to be less fussed over, and it’s something that can be on in the background but still stand out without being distracting. Whereas some thing like movies and scripted television have a different artistic purpose and way that they are meant to be experienced. When a movie wants to be quiet it is very quiet, and when it wants to be loud it is very loud. It’s just the way that it’s been done for decades and decades and I don’t think that any filmmaker is going to give that up now just because it makes it tricky for some people to watch it if they need things to be quiet in their house, and part of that is because there are options to mitigate it. People can use headphones, most receivers and sound bars have options to essentially compress the audio more so that all volumes are more normalized. Since it’s a bit technical to understand what it’s doing every audio manufacturer seems too frustratingly have different names for settings that perform that function. But Since those options exist, filmmakers don’t have much of an incentive to try to give up their artistic freedoms/choices.
That said, sometimes mixes are just bad; and quiet stuff is too quiet, or loud stuff is too loud, even under the best presentations. It happens.
Some people in this thread have alluded to the idea that the movies are being mixed for theaters, but others have pointed out that this doesn’t exactly make sense because of streaming. But I think that the logic does carry over because home theaters are so affordably high quality now. For less than $1000 you can get a 65 inch TV and a decent sound bar. And for about $1500 you can instead get a mid tier TV and a surround sound system that quite frankly rivals many theater experiences. There is still value in mixing movies and TV shows under the assumption of a theatrical-level experience.
Credentials: I am a career video producer and filmmaker
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