Sling Blue which I use went up $10 in the last 6 months, sucks.
$45 a month now, was $25 back when I first signed up I think 2 years ago.
A meta thread for video streaming services - Netflix, Hulu, Disney, HBO, Warner, Prime, AppleTV, etc
Buckle up
Good.
What terrors will come from this?
This post brought to you by The Apprentice.
Without writers we would never have invented phrases like “Buckle up, fucklehead”.
Maybe we can have a reality TV show where people compete to write a prestige drama. Winner gets their show made.
Doesw an infinite room of chimps at typewriters get to compete?
I guess this is the closest thing we have to a general TV thread, so I’ll put this here. A fascinating look into something I knew nothing about before I read this article. That includes shows on The Disney Channel, its stars and wand IDs.
Even after skimming through the article I still didn’t have a good sense on what the heck these Wand IDs they were talking about were. If anyone’s curious, here’s what they’re referring to:
I have to admit, after reading the full article I thought I had a pretty good idea what the Wand IDs looked like, but I have to admit, that’s a bit different from what I imagined. It’s quite a bit bigger of an image than I imagined, and can now see why some of them had trouble with it.
So it is basically just bad CG?
With Prime Video, Amazon has decided to do something about this dilemma at the software level. Today, the company is introducing a new Dialogue Boost mode that can be toggled on
“Customers can now access Dialogue Boost on select Amazon Originals including Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan , The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel , and Harlem , as well as movies including The Big Sick , Beautiful Boy , and Being the Ricardos,”
it’s some sort of remix that’s “AI-enhanced”
Related: this massive and terrific documentary from a few months ago on who wrote the theme for those Disney Channel station ID spots. It’s from Kevin Perjurer aka DefunctLand, so like all his documentaries it’s really about something else.
On the one hand: great!
On the other, most (all?) of those are Amazon produced shows. Rather than implementing an AI tool to remix the audio so the dialog is audible, why not just have the folks making the show initially mix the audio so the dialog is audible?
i saw a video a while back outlining the main reasons audio is so muddled these days. I wrote up the major bullet points. You may find the video interesting.
Yeah, I saw that one too. Good stuff. Definitely recommended viewing for anyone wondering why dialog sounds so crappy these days.
Yeah, I’ve not only seen that, I posted it in another thread. :)
But having watched it my question stands, because the general sense from that video is that they’ve just decided not to give a shit whether you can understand the audio if you don’t have a theater sound system, which is so stupid I don’t even know what to do with it.
Actually from what I’ve heard, industry folks think Christopher Nolan doesn’t give a shit if you can’t understand what the actors are saying even if you’re in a movie theater with an excellent sound system.
Heh. So if you’re an older person like me with some hearing loss, Nolan is basically saying his movies are like silent movies with a live orchestra playing the music, sort of.
One thing movie theaters could do is have early day screenings running subtitles for retired people. I’m not quite there yet, but give me a year or so and I’ll eat that stuff up. I love subtitles. I’ll pay for that in a movie theater and a 3pm movie is fine for me once retired. I don’t go to 9pm movies anyway. They last past my bedtime.
I hear you. I just turned on the Zoom accessibility feature on my iPads which zooms things in if you double tap three fingers on the screen. I’ve got progressive bifocals and am fine with most websites and apps, at least on my 12.9” iPad, but some websites and apps lock out my ability to pinch zoom and are just too damn small. On my iPad mini a lot of stuff is too damn small.
I’ve been reluctant to do it, but at this point, I figure the added aggravation isn’t worth my admitting that yes, I’m getting old and I really need a bit more help reading sometimes.
Believe it’s been mentioned before, but to corroborate Nolan’s decision that you’re not supposed to hear the dialogue, I’m pretty sure even when you turn on closed captions/subtitles, they simply say something like “indecipherable dialogue.”