Question on making a DCP from Blu-Ray

[Marcel Birgelen]

You want to know what "Near-Field-Mixing" actually is?

You want that crap on your BluRay?!
They literally optimize the movie for puny TV speakers. They push up the dialog and tone the music down. They put on the midnight mode at the studio.

Any somewhat beefy home cinema system will be perfectly fine with the original theatrical mix. Any system that's not fine with such a mix, can easily downmix and add emphasis on dialog/center channel their own, but please give the end-user the possibility to disable that junk.

What gives me hope is that he said: If I have the time... So, I guess there are plenty of BluRay releases that just end up with their original theatrical mix instead of a castrated version of that same mix.

[Carsten Kurz]

You want to know what "Near-Field-Mixing" actually is?


They literally optimize the movie for puny TV speakers.

Yes, that's exactly the idea. 1cm deep flat screens with smartphone earpieces in them. That's why it's necessary.

[Bruce Cloutier]

You know we are all aging...

My wife's hearing is declining. I added a soundbar to my otherwise surround based large flat screen for her to use because it has the capability to bring out the dialog. It does work. Plus, it saves power since she doesn't run the surround to watch The View. It sounds like this near-field-mix would be helpful to her. Now we also run CC routinely. I still prefer the full audio experience and CC can be distracting. There are movie mixes where I have noticed the dialog being unnecessarily overpowered by the sound effects. Not all are mixed with care I don't think.

As an aside, I knew when my Netflix account was hacked when the CC suddenly switched to Arabic in the middle of a show.

[Steve Guttag]

Again...if you want to have a "near-field mix" let it be a choice, not THE mix. Let it be 2-channel (matrixed, if you like) to have the widest acceptability. But let the theatrical mix always be present on the release too so we get what was actually recorded in the first place.

[Frank Cox]

One of the old ladies in the senior's apartment building where my mother lives now has told me that she doesn't watch movies any more because there's too much music(?) and she can't hear the dialog.

I wonder if it's something to do with hearing aids.

She must like movies, though, because she told me that she named her son Wade after Errol Flynn's character in Dodge City.

[Marcel Birgelen]

You know we are all aging...

My wife's hearing is declining. I added a soundbar to my otherwise surround based large flat screen for her to use because it has the capability to bring out the dialog. It does work. Plus, it saves power since she doesn't run the surround to watch The View. It sounds like this near-field-mix would be helpful to her. Now we also run CC routinely. I still prefer the full audio experience and CC can be distracting. There are movie mixes where I have noticed the dialog being unnecessarily overpowered by the sound effects. Not all are mixed with care I don't think.

As an aside, I knew when my Netflix account was hacked when the CC suddenly switched to Arabic in the middle of a show.

Like I said, almost any AVR out there and many modern audio devices like soundbars support a setting like "Midnight Mode" (sometimes labeled differently) that does just this. It emphasizes dialog and it reduces "ambient sound" like surrounds, effects and music. It works for practically all sources.

It's not the 1980s anymore, real-time sound processing is cheap and effective, so a "near field mix", optimized for the setting at hand, can easily be rendered on-demand.

[Jim Cassedy]

she doesn't watch movies any more because there's too much music(?) and she can't hear the dialog

Interesting you say that Frank. My mom, (who passed away a few months ago at age 99) was in a "senior care center"
and I often got the same comment from her, and some of her friends there, all of whom wore hearing aids.
In fact, my mom once told me that there were some things that she could actually hear BETTER without her hearing
aids in. So I'm guessing it's either something to do with the EQ and/or Amplification curves programmed in the hearing
aids, or perhaps when you get past a certain age, you just start hearing music in your head. (Sort of a 'tuneful tinnitus')

[Randy Stankey]

We used to get that comment a lot at Mercyhurst where the primary audience was made up of more “mature” people. There was much gnashing of teeth over this problem.

Our solution was to make sure that the processor and amps were getting/giving the right dynamic range and fine tuning the EQ and channel balance to emphasize dialogue in the front/center channel. Beyond that, the only thing we could do was to keep a close watch on the volume level, possibly changing it during different parts of the movie in order to account for sections with loud music and effects versus sections with sensitive dialogue.

We got the most complaints where characters had heavy accents. (From the American English perspective, that is.). The worst accents which got the most complaints were heavy British accents with Irish or Scottish accents being the worst of all.

Once we did everything we could think of, the only thing we could do was apologize and explain that we were aware of the problem and that we would do our best to keep dialogue intelligible.

Like others have said, hearing aids don’t seem to make a lot of difference. Some people thought hearing aids made it better. Others thought it was worse.

One of our patrons was an E.N.T. doctor who had a cochlear implant. For him, there was little we could do by adjusting the system. We did install a hearing impaired headphone system which did help a little. Of course, we did make sure that the headphones emphasized the dialog as much as we could reasonably get away with.

That solution wasn’t ideal because many people don’t want to wear headphones while watching a movie.

After a while, all we could do was throw up our hands and say, “It is what it is...”

[Bruce Cloutier]

"That solution wasn’t ideal because many people don’t want to wear headphones while watching a movie.
”

Or likely masks I would think. Ugh!

[Marcel Birgelen]

Our solution was to make sure that the processor and amps were getting/giving the right dynamic range and fine tuning the EQ and channel balance to emphasize dialogue in the front/center channel. Beyond that, the only thing we could do was to keep a close watch on the volume level, possibly changing it during different parts of the movie in order to account for sections with loud music and effects versus sections with sensitive dialogue.

I've done something similar at several locations when Interstellar was playing back in 2014. Many people complained about the dialog being almost completely intelligible at moments.

I think we're somewhat lucky that most movies here happen to play with subtitles and people generally accept those captions being there.

[Randy Stankey]

Many, at least half, of the movies we played were foreign languages with subtitles. That helped, a little. Being a college, though, we had a substantial population who spoke or understood the language.

By far, the worst were movies in British English where the characters spoke with heavy accents and used a lot of British or Irish figures of speech.

One that I remember the most was the Irish crime drama, “The General.”

I don’t know how many times I had to explain to people what the word “bollocks” meant!

[Frank Cox]

I don't really know anything about hearing aids, but they must do something odd to certain sounds.

One of the other women who lives in the same apartment building as my mother isn't actually all that old but she is... umm... what's the politically correct wording these days... mentally disabled?

Anyway, she also has hearing aids and one day last week when I was there helping my mother with some walking (we walk in the hallway every day) some guys showed up with chain saws to cut some tree branches in the yard. As soon as they started cutting this woman started screaming. I asked her what happened and what's wrong and she said, "Noise! Noise!!" I told her to take her hearing aids out and then took her to a storage room at the back of the building away from the chain saws. As soon as I got her into the back of the building she calmed right down and said "Nicer. Nicer here," so that was the solution to that problem.

I guess it worked out well in that I was there to lead her off to a far away room and tell her to take her hearing aids out. I don't know if any of the old ladies could have done much for her. But I take it from that that hearing aids must do something really unusual to certain sounds. Like chain saws.

[Randy Stankey]

The doctor I was talking about had a really fancy wireless remote control to operate his hearing aid.

He could adjust the volume and put it into different modes like Indoor/Outdoor or Music/Voice at the click of a button. It could also be reprogrammed if he needed to tweak frequency response and such things.

If he wanted to ignore you, he could turn the whole thing off without anybody knowing. He would just reach into his pocket and click the remote.

He talked with me about how it worked and all the tweaks he had done to try to hear movies better but he was only able to make nominal improvement. He said something about the number of microscopic electrodes implanted into the cochlea being too few. Where a normally-hearing person has thousands of active nerve cells, the implant only had a hundred or so.

Even though he could hear things with sufficient loudness, the system didn't have enough resolution and, sometimes, things sounded kind of like an AM radio that's tuned part way off a station.

Probably the only thing that really worked for him, even close, was a neck loop... which we did buy one receiver with a loop but he was the only one who ever used it.

[Steve Guttag]

When I have "difficult" rooms. They are typically multi-purpose types, semi-large, very reverberant and often play "art" films which will get you European, Australian and New Zealand English. As Randy discussed above...Accented English can be the toughest for English speakers...heck Yankees...er northern US can have trouble with with the southern accents too. Any way...some things I've done in rooms where the room itself hurts spoken word dialog is to:

• Choose your speakers CAREFULLY. Think horn loaded to keep the energy off the walls. You want the audio to be primarily direct because the reflected audio is going to work against you. I have used old Altec stuff (A5 and, though it's been awhile, A4) and modern JBL PD5300/PD6300 (flown) as well as the Mid/Highs from some modern 3-way/4-way stuff. Other people I know have done similar with EAW's QX series. Now, if your room is decent, you need not change out your speaker to something like this. They are not necessarily better speakers (they may be, depends on what you are using) but they will help in an overly reverberant space.
• Drop Left/Right by 3dB relative to center. Center is where the dialog is and that one channel is competing with the music/effects coming from Left, Right, the Surrounds and Subwoofers. In "Art" films, the subwoofers are rarely the problem but in other movies, they might be. You'd be amazed at how big a difference the relatively small change of lowering Left/Right can made to a difficult to understand movie. Depending on your room, you might find you need to drop them a bit more or a bit less.
• If you have 3-way speakers...I'm sorry. They are probably hurting your cause. 3-way speakers are more difficult to get right for dialog. Their crossover points are typically right where dialog is happening and getting the timbre right so all three drivers match at crossover (timbre and Directivity Index) is not an easy task. Having EQ around the crossover point to overcome mismatches, just exacerbates the problem but now you've thrown time domain issues into an inherently flawed design. A good 2-way system that crosses over at 500Hz beats medium 3-way that is crossing over at 300Hz and 1.5KHz. If you ever look at human speech on an RTA, you see two distinct areas and they are above/below 500Hz so a 2-way crossing over there has the crossover "miss" the dialog reasonably well and though it doesn't help with a mismatched DI, the timbre issue is less apparent (you're trying to match the timbre characteristics of an aluminum or other metallic diaphragm with a paper cone woofer...what are the odds both sound similar?). So, 2-way speakers...big 2-way speakers...sorry, you can't beat physics. Shallow 2-way speakers are not going to realistically be able to get down to 500Hz with any pattern control...regardless what the manufacturer may claim.
  
  This is not to say that there aren't good 3-way (and 4-way) speakers that can do a great job...there are...they are just more rare and typically more expensive. They are still trying to match timbre and DI. I can tell you that the QSC SC-423 and SC-424 (my personal favorite cinema stage speaker, by far, in its price range) can do an incredible job despite its crossover points but they are the exception more than the rule.
• Watch your EQ. Dialog is in the 100Hz - 4KHz, primarily (think telephone frequency response). If you do a lot of EQ in that range you are doing a lot of harm to the dialog too. If you do have 3-ways, and happen to have parametric EQ (the ones with "Q", Level and Frequency), consider making a "Mid Range EQ" ...shallow Q (wide bandwidth) around 500Hz. Knocking down an aggressive mid range in a 3-way just a little bit can do wonders to tighten dialog if you find it a bit aggressive and strident. Or if it is the other way...a bit muffled...a little boost. Different room/speaker combinations are going to behave differently. Well built rooms (for cinema) with good speakers beat the heck out of "fixing" electronically. You also can't fix a bad mix.
• Pay attention to the bass...if it is over done, it will detract from dialog...you don't want anything booming during dialog. Again, think telephone...ma bell (in the US) didn't put subwoofers in there for a reason.
• If you have a good trailer with an English accent that isn't yours (the more difficult to understand the better)...carry it with you and play it with your eyes closed (don't look at people's lips) to hear how intelligible it is. Ask someone that isn't familiar with the trailer to do likewise since you will learn the dialog.
• With the DSP processors out there, like QSC's Q-SYS, you have a lot more tools to work with a hearing impaired output to get them very dialog centric...band limit the audio (have I mentioned telephone yet?), compress it some to get rid of the dynamic range and ensure it is very center-centric for the dialog.

Depending on your particular situation, some of the above may or may not apply but those are the things I've found to help the situation.

[Carsten Kurz]

For those with impaired hearing, it is certainly best to listen to a mono sound source for the dialog. Many of todays flatscreens have multiple speakers, arrays, etc., to make up for their small dimension speakers, and to create stereo, virtual stereo, 3D sound, even consumer Atmos, whatever. These all work with phase shifting, multipath, reflections. They may create a more impressing music or soundscape receiption, but the intelligibility suffers.
The 'old time' TV sets with a single larger wideband speaker in a large enclosure made more sense for dialog intelligibility.