Ugh, I hate that so much! Especially since I sometimes like to fall asleep to a movie I’ve seen many times before and at the end just drift off to the sound of it.
“Whisper whisper whisper EXPLOSIONS AND YELLING whisper whisper whisper” is probably my least favorite style of sound mixing.
I like to be able to hear the quiet parts without the loud parts bursting my ear drums, thank you very much!
You may want to see if your TV has a “night mode” in the audio settings. It’s basically just an audio compander, (combination of compressor and expander.) It expands the quiet parts to be louder, and compresses the loud parts to be quieter. It destroys any kind of dynamics that the director intended, and can cause some difficulty with intelligibility if there’s lots of background noise, (because the noise is getting expanded too!) But for watching things at night, it’s almost a must for dynamic movies.
Some brands call it headphone mode, because headphone users also frequently complain about dynamic audio too; They turn up to hear the quiet parts, then get their ears blown off during the loud parts.
You’re talking about a regular compressor with make up gain. An expander makes the quiet parts even quieter. Compressors compress the dynamic range (which is what you’d want in this scenario), expanders expands the dynamic range.
Ugh, I hate that so much! Especially since I sometimes like to fall asleep to a movie I’ve seen many times before and at the end just drift off to the sound of it.
“Whisper whisper whisper EXPLOSIONS AND YELLING whisper whisper whisper” is probably my least favorite style of sound mixing.
I like to be able to hear the quiet parts without the loud parts bursting my ear drums, thank you very much!
You may want to see if your TV has a “night mode” in the audio settings. It’s basically just an audio compander, (combination of compressor and expander.) It expands the quiet parts to be louder, and compresses the loud parts to be quieter. It destroys any kind of dynamics that the director intended, and can cause some difficulty with intelligibility if there’s lots of background noise, (because the noise is getting expanded too!) But for watching things at night, it’s almost a must for dynamic movies.
Some brands call it headphone mode, because headphone users also frequently complain about dynamic audio too; They turn up to hear the quiet parts, then get their ears blown off during the loud parts.
You’re talking about a regular compressor with make up gain. An expander makes the quiet parts even quieter. Compressors compress the dynamic range (which is what you’d want in this scenario), expanders expands the dynamic range.