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Forum - View topicAnswerman - Are Subtitles Getting Smaller?
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2561 Location: Online Terminal |
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This is not meant to be critical, but as an American, I just find it amusing that instead of any of their dramas or internationally successful quiz shows, ITV was associated to Love Island.
Demand for anime is increasing, but supply of people working in anime seemingly keeps decreasing. On its face, switching to an industrial solution from a FOSS solution makes sense (aside from potential stigma, you are getting what you pay for with a lot of FOSS), but the realm of accessible video has gotten worse as new technologies replace things like physical media and cables. AI is also a troubling sector to be in, as it looks more and more like the major players are just passing the same $100 bill around and saying they're making money from it. I don't think there's a lot that could be done outside of a fundamental and wholesale change in how we all govern ourselves, but spotlighting it does help. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 5365 |
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It's a symptom of what happens when the decisions are made by "business types." What their product or service is doesn't matter compared to the question of how to make line go up. The problem with growing through acquisition is that it isn't repeatable unless you keep shelling out for it, so that naturally means trying to find new customers and taking your existing ones for granted. From that perspective, simpler methods that cater to business partners that get you in front of their audience makes sense.
This is why it's important do something about it when stuff like this happens. Some sub-licensed show is nothing to Disney, which is already too big to care, but higher-ups at Crunchyroll are still going to chase it to get some more eyes on that license they paid for. We've seen it plenty of times where a bigger player in the general entertainment industry assumes it can toss an anime out there with as much care as they do anything else, only to quickly exit the market when it flops hard because the anime customer expects better. |
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mdo7
 Posts: 8233 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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I don't think subtitles are getting smaller nor they're getting bigger. That depends on how you set up your CC aka closed captioning on your TV or how you set it up on your devices (ie: smartphone, video game console, blu-ray/DVD players, streaming). If they're getting smaller or too big, that's probably because whoever encoded the subtitle/SDH probably screw up the coding or the embedding (usually rare on BD/DVD when it comes to SDH subtitles, not for closed captioning).
But, I'm going to say this. There's been more people turning on CC/SDH subtitles even when the dialogue is spoken in English (yep, you're reading it right, more Americans are now watching same-language English spoken dialogue with CC/SDH subtitles turned on). It's been like that for the last I think 10-15 years and the reason for that is a bit complicated and not 1 big reason overall. The dialogue problem gets worse if you're watching any of Christopher Nolan's films to the point where you have to watched any of his works with the CC/SDH subtitles turned on because you can't make out what they're saying in them. So, I don't think anyone would intentionally make the subtitle smaller or larger unless they want to frustrate the audience or the person setting and encoding the subtitle was new to the job or a rookie. |
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Greed1914
Posts: 5365 |
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I have a friend who always has CC on with his TV, but I don't use it and he hasn't ever asked me to use it at my house. I might ask him sometime why he does that. I do use same language subtitles for games, but it's for pretty utilitarian reasons. I'm more likely to keep track of things like when a character says to go to a location if I hear and see it. Sound balancing would make sense as a reason for it. I've certainly played the game of turning it up to hear characters talking and then jumping for the remote because something ramped up and now it's too loud. |
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glitteringloke
 Posts: 163 |
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I noticed this in games too. i got a bigger tv so I could see the game dialogues better and the fonts just look even smaller. but in regards to subs, I miss the funimation customization of subs. more often than not, backgrounds that are very light wash out white subs. This is across all streaming platforms and I'm kinda over it. Let me have my yellow subs back!
ok, done being old lady shaking fist at clouds |
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mdo7
Posts: 8233 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Did you had any problem watching a film or TV series (where English is spoken aside from British or Australian one) where you have to turned on the CC/SDH subtitles because you couldn't understand what the character(s) were saying when even if they spoke in English? Because as I said, that has been going on for the last 10-15 years for both films and TV shows, and that problem is not going away. As long as the actors/actresses speaking in a hard to understand dialogue, and the fact Christopher Nolan is continuing to direct films where any dialogue spoken are going to be overshadowed by loud soundtrack and sound effects in the film, don't expect people to turn off CC/SDH subtitles anytime soon. So yep, that's the main reason (as in majority of the time) why people turned on CC/SDH even if the spoken dialogue is in English. |
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Zendervai
 Posts: 263 |
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When it comes to games, it is actually a thing that a lot of game developers are really bad at doing subtitles. They put way too much text in them, they disappear too quickly and the default sizes are extremely small. If the subtitle is two lines long, it's too much all at once. Part of the problem is that a lot of developers work on computers, so it can be quite a while into production before they actually test how it looks on a TV...and sometimes they don't even test it at all. Because if the screen is a foot away from you, you can get away with it being smaller. Valve's source engine has some very strange subtitling rules built in and a lot of others aren't much better. |
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Cardcaptor Takato
 Posts: 5973 |
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On the subject of smaller subtitles I notice lately the closed captions are very tiny on Disney+ on their browser player and they seemingly have done away with any option to change the subtitle font or size. The subtitles are still the same on the Roku app however.
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mdo7
Posts: 8233 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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What, really??? When did that started to happen? Because I stop subscribing to Disney+ due to the price hike back in January, if they did away with modifying CC/subtitle font and size, that would be very disturbing to me as someone who used CC/SDH when I watched any program on streaming in general. |
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Cardcaptor Takato
Posts: 5973 |
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Dr. Wily
Posts: 868 |
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Modern sound balancing/sound mixing is total ass (it's not just a "Nolan" problem) and I don't know why it seems like such a lost art. Also maybe it's just me but it feels like as TV images get even better it seems like the speakers are sucking more and more? Perhaps it also has a little to do with the fact that bigger TVs mean that people are sitting further away from the TV. Or perhaps it's just because I'm becoming an old man so my hearing is objectively worse. |
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mdo7
Posts: 8233 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Well, how old are you anyway if I may ask? If you're around the same age as me, I don't think you have a hearing (or even a hard of hearing) problem/issue. Beside the sound balancing/mixing issue, I mean if you watched any of the video I linked, it's the dynamic range and the contrast thing that is also contributing to the inaudible dialogue problem, I mean you can't turn the dialogue audio up because it would lead to audio distortion, and also the explosion seen in film and TV shows/miniseries would not feel as powerful if you put it on the same level as dialogue. As I said on my previous posts, the actors/actresses naturalistic acting style is making dialogue much harder to hear because they're purposefully whispering, mumbling, talking too fast and not clear, or saying something unintelligible that we can't make out what they said. I mean the microphone used in film and TV shows have greatly improved since Hollywood's golden age (where there's only one mic back then and actors/actresses have to speak clearly and at the mic out of camera hence why the audio back then was clearer compared to today) and audio going digital and not analog has made the audio richer and livelier (ie: having a 5.1, or 7.1 audio mix), but the trade-off is that it allowed actors/actresses to go naturalistic hence whispering, mumbling, talking too fast and not clear, or saying something unintelligible on screen. So that's why people have to turned on CC/SDH subtitles for that situation. BTW, I've always turned on CC/SDH. The first time I watched my first program with CC/closed caption was when I got a new TV back in 1995/1996 as a kid with the TV having a built-in closed captioning system and I was able to watch TV (including VCR) with the CC turned on. Since then, I always turned on CC (& SDH subtitles) on TV even to this day when I watched TV for both movie and series/mini-series no matter what language they speak in. Even older movies (including movies from another decades), I turned on the CC/SDH subtitles for all of them. The older movie's spoken dialogue maybe much much clearer compared to the dialogue coming out in recent films and TV series, but even older movies from another decade, there are area where I couldn't make out what they said because of the accent, or they said a word too fast for me to make out what they said hence why I'm thankful for CC/SDH subtitles for in this day and age. |
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IchiroFox
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I'll make some guesses here, as someone who has worked in video software.
OOONA's website lists support for myriad subtitle and CC formats, including .srt and .ass. I suspect that the recent degradations are not a technical limitation of the new workflow per se, but may be attributed to two scenarios: A. The staff have not yet fully gotten used to the new system and, under the time constraints, were forced to cut corners. B. Management has mandated to use an automatic transcription feature. Basically. a system on the OOONA platform reads the video and produces subtitles automatically by transcribing what is being said. The transcriptions are then auto translated by machine into the various languages, and then these can simply be edited by localisation teams. This means the translators are only looking at what is being said, not by whom, and the extra context needed for say, subtitling secondary dialogue at the top of the screen for example, is lost. I would guess that a bit of A and B are both at play here, given the recent layoffs. As for the font issue, it is carelessness, pure and simple. Far more importance (read: time and resources) should be placed on getting it right. There is no good reason why users shouldn't be able to easily customise the appearance of subtitles -- we have the technology, but do these corporations have the consideration and competency? |
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Vulcannis
Posts: 42 |
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I too assume the switch to OOONA was a typical clueless dictate from upper management, to align with what's in fashion in other companies that the managers chum with, and not due to some lack of features in Aegisub. As mentioned Aegisub is open-source (BSD license, so very flexible), so there's nothing stopping Sony from paying for some development to add a better ASS->SRT pipeline, integrated chat or version control or whatever features are insufficient in their view. Chances are they could get the work done for far cheaper than whatever the licensing costs of OOONA are. But arguments like this fall flat when a manager just wants to look like all the other "real" streaming companies.
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6921 Location: Kazune City |
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Same idea as above -- people pushed for CR to be a global service on the grounds that "English is a global language so ubiquitous that no minor-language local services can get off the ground," while also requiring that CR provide subtitles in multiple other languages for some reason. So maybe if CR had remained as an exclusive licensee focused on English-speaking regions, we wouldn't have seen this kind of subtitle depreciation. (Not to mention the burdens of getting entangled with various parochial regulations.)
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