Speaker 1: I watch a lot of movies and TV shows on the train, at home, mostly in the afternoon when I'm exercising or doing the dishes, but no matter where I'm watching, I sometimes need to do this one thing.

Speaker 2: As I told the dreamer.

Speaker 1: What?

Speaker 2: As I told the dreamer.

Speaker 1: It can't be.

Speaker 2: As I told the dreamer. Ugh.

Speaker 1: It will always be hard. Now it is. It turns out this is not as unusual as you think. We surveyed our YouTube audience and about 57% of people said they can't understand the dialogues unless they're using subtitles. But, apparently, this hasn't always been the case. So I called someone to find out what was going on.

Speaker 3: Hi, my name is Olivia Kendrick. I'm a professional dialogue editor for movies and TV. I basically do audio surgery for the actors' dialogues. Do you use subtitles? The truth is, yes. I do use them most of the time.

Speaker 1: Why do you think we all need to use subtitles now?

Speaker 3: A lot of people ask me this question all the time. It's something that simply doesn't have a simple, straightforward answer. It's very complex.

Speaker 1: It's very layered and very complex. And after talking to Austin for almost two hours, I can assure you it's a very clear and complex topic. I'm going to bet on one main thing. The technology that got us from this.

Speaker 2: I'll get you my original origin. What has happened to your love to this? Oh, I just woke up. A little slim waisted, baby. Why don't we better put a hat on?

Speaker 1: Let's start with the microphones. I'm going to use this clip of me singing in the rain to show you how they used to work.

Speaker 2: Here's the microphone. You have to talk to it. The sound travels through the cable to the box. And then someone records it in a big wax cylinder.

Speaker 1: This scene shows some of the difficulties of early sound recording. The microphones were big, voluminous, defective and very difficult to hide. They had cables and the sound was recorded in physical storage, like wax and then tape. No matter how many actors were in a scene, all the sound was recorded on one track. The artists had to be focused and looking at a specific angle so that their words could be picked up. Otherwise... You didn't hear absolutely anything. But technology has improved and luckily today microphones are no longer a big problem in acting. They've been perfected. They're smaller, wireless and we use more of them to make sure that the performances get captured.

Speaker 3: What we normally use for the production dialogue are two microphones and then each actor has at least one microphone, hidden somewhere in their body.

Speaker 1: These small microphones allow the actors to be more spontaneous in their performances. They no longer need to project the voice so that their words get to the microphone. They can speak in a low voice and know that the microphone hidden in their body will pick up what they're saying. And my favorite example of this great change in the world of acting is what happens with Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock. This is Tina Fey's speech in 2011. She confesses that Alec speaks so quietly that she can't hear him when she's next to him. And then you watch the movie and somehow you do hear him. She only listens to the whisper of between him and Will Arnett.

Speaker 3: I'm not afraid of you. Yeah. You should be. Let's just see how it all shakes out in the meeting.

Speaker 1: But nature isn't always the best for intelligibility. A good example is Tom Hardy, an actor that I really admire for being this famous for being a great whisperer. Her ass is still be floating around in Surrey right now if it wasn't for me. I mean, the microphone caught that line. Like, we can definitely hear him talking. He's saying something. But once that murmur is recorded, it's ultimately the dialogue editor who's supposed to make it as intelligible as possible. And that was a lot harder when it was analog. Although, if you could pick the best statements and put them together, if some piece of dialogue was truly impossible to understand, then actors would come in and record specific lines in a process called ADR or Additional Dialogue Recording, as we can see in this scene of Meryl Streep in The Edge.

Speaker 3: There's not enough money in the world to make causes like yours. That's what they're doing today.

Speaker 1: ADR is expensive because

Speaker 3: not only are you paying for the actor's time, you're paying for the engineer's time and then in the editor's time, so we try to use ADR as little as possible.

Speaker 1: So a lot of her job is to make the words sound better.

Speaker 3: I remember in the program I'm working on right now, in the middle of a word, you could hear a strong metallic bang that I couldn't remove. So I had to go back to that part to find an alternative take that would fit, and then I had to fit it to the movement of her mouth at that moment, and then push it in.

Speaker 1: When the track is ready, it's sent off to a mixer, who works to make sure that 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 left the tapes behind and digital recordings are used.

Speaker 3: That really is a big challenge, having to polish out all those frequencies, all that space that's in between every element of the mix, so that way the dialogue can stand out, and not be all muddied up by other sounds that occupy that same frequency range.

Speaker 1: Even with all that work, the lines of dialogue can still be hard to understand.

Speaker 3: The idea of feeling content, if you want your movie to feel cinematic, you have to have all types of bombastic sound from start to finish. A lot of people will ask, why doesn't it just increase the volume of the dialogue? Why doesn't it just increase the volume of the dialogue? And they say it's because it's something that's easy to do. Because our big goal is to preserve what we call dynamic range, which is the range between the softest sound and the loudest sound. If you have a dialogue that's going to have the same volume as an explosion that immediately follows, then the explosion isn't going to feel as loud. You need to have that contrast of volume, so that way you can give your ear a feeling of scale.

Speaker 1: But the thing is, if it sounds too loud, there's going to be a distortion.

Speaker 3: So, if you want to achieve that dynamic range, the only choice you have is to lower those softer sounds instead of putting the louder sounds louder.

Speaker 1: So, the volume of the explosions goes up and the dialogue goes down, which brings us to Christopher Nolan's whole issue.

Speaker 2: A separate structure within the other. You understand that, do you, right?

Speaker 1: But you can add more of it. Nearly every film has been criticized for its hard-to-hear dialogue, that essentially requires a yes-or-no subtitle. But as we see in this headline, he likes it that way. According to the book, The Variations of Nolan, he states that it's audible. Even from other filmmakers, who would say, I would just say that Nolan's dialogue is inaudible. And the truth was, we can find the whole explanation of how he chose to mix it. In an interview in 2017 with IndieWire, he said, we made the decision a couple of films ago that we weren't going to mix films for low-quality films. And this is kind of the crux of the matter. The content that we see here, and here, and here, it's not mixed up for us, precisely.

Speaker 3: Recording mixers mix for the widest surround sound format available. In general, in big films, this format is Dolby Atmos, which has a real 3D sound of up to 128 channels.

Speaker 1: The thing is, if you're not in a movie that can play the best sound Hollywood has to offer, you can't experiment with all these channels. So after the movie is mixed for the 128 channels of Atmos, somebody has to create a separate version of the audio of the film where all those same sounds are in one, or two, or five channels. This is called channel mixing.

Speaker 3: Channel mixing is the process by which you take that larger mix and you begin to reduce it to formats with fewer available channels. So, for example, if you convert Atmos to 7.1, or 7.1 to 5.1, or 5.1 to stereo, and then from stereo to mono.

Speaker 1: Unlike old TVs that were gigantic and had a lot of space for speakers, today's are super thin. Like this one I have in my room, which as you can see is about as thin as my iPhone. So, even though it's outputting the same mono or stereo sound as an old TV, it's still going to sound worse because it requires tiny speakers to be able to adapt to this elegant, small device. These tiny speakers are also usually in the back of the TV. So, the down-mixing version of this movie that went from up to 128 channels to just two is going to sound even more distorted when it's pointing away from you. And when you're watching something on your phone or a laptop, it's usually not much better. When you combine accurate speakers, neutralized, non-modulated voices, dynamic, rich-picturing-bouncing background sound over a flat mix, it's no wonder we have trouble understanding what we're seeing. And it looks like the industry knows because today's TVs come with all kinds of built-in settings, like this intelligent mode. You can select the active voice amplification function and hope to make that dialogue track sound a little bit clearer. But of course, that's more of a patch than a solution. If we think about the way movies are going to arrive, it's probably not going to be super-perfect dialogues. So, the solutions we have are, one, buy better quality speakers and then go to cinemas that have better quality speakers. Two, take a little time, try to just worry a little bit less about capturing every single word

Speaker 2: that gets said.

Speaker 1: Or three, just keep subtitles on. For people who are deaf or hard of hearing, subtitles make movies and TV shows accessible, and this accessibility has just increased in the last few years. There are laws to make sure that movies have at least a few shots a week with subtitles. Virtually every streaming service has standardized them, and voice recognition technology has made them accessible in virtually every YouTube and TikTok video. Plus, they're super easy to activate and deactivate.