Do You Watch Movies With Close Captioning Turned on?

[iacas]

Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)

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/Film spoke with several Oscar-winning sound designers, editors, and mixers to learn why it has become tougher to understand what characters are saying.

 

[dennyjones]

The word "often" changed my vote.   I have watched movies with cc but usually don't.

[saevel25]

I voted No.  I never found it difficult to follow movies, but that could be that I do not focus on the dialogue much anyways. 

[boogielicious]

We did watch Hamilton with close captioning because the rap was so fast we couldn’t keep up. But otherwise, only the rare foreign film.

[imsys0042]

I do it with a number of shows from the UK because I haven't quite wrangled the accents, but in general no I don't.  And really with just modern stuff because the music and effects come through louder and louder.

[Yukari]

It is very distracting to have cc on. 

Only foreign language films do I have it on.

[Zippo]

I also tend not to watch when there’s a signing interpreter alongside the speaker. Not that I don’t think that’s a good thing but it’s just too distracting for me. 

[Vinsk]

I have them on quite often. Sometimes the conversations are a bit muffled and I have to pay more attention than I’m willing to follow. 

[nevets88]

I usually turn them on no matter what the language, but off if re-watching. The fonts on some set top boxes, they're so blocky is so ugly to look at, more likely to leave them off. Generally, I really don't like having the words in the frame, it takes away from the immersion. But it is what it is. It's better when it's part of the bottom letterbox. Kind of like when you watch an opera in person and there's the libretto shown on a device in the back of the seat or a little screen over the stage. Also, I would say at least 30 percent of the movies I watch are not in English. Probably 40.

Sometimes I'll download the captioning/subtitles from subscene, not exactly sanctioned by the media powers that be, and scroll along on my smartphone when I hit something I don't understand.

I think there's a lot of nuance in movies I would have missed have I not had captioning on.

Going off on a tangent, on subtitling, for foreign language films, a lot of the subtitling - it's just not good. Ask a native who knows the language and they'll usually say, yeah, I had problems with some of the translation. See Squid Game. Studios really skimp on paying translators, some look machine translated, but it can really enhance the viewing experience when done well but pretty much in the US, subtitles are frowned upon. I've watched movies where two languages are subtitled, so two lines of text in the frame. And then there's dubbing vs subtitling.

Recently, with Dune, I couldn't wait to see it in a theater, watched it as soon as it came online at home with the captioning and really got a better experience when watching it in the theater.

Streaming, the options to control the size and placement of text has gotten better and better and less obtrusive over the years. Like the text will be closer to the person speaking, you can change background color, opaqueness, etc... The small fonts are especially useful the bigger your tv.

I've been watching movies/tv with subtitling/captioning for a long long time, like since the early 1990s, so this is second nature for me. Also if you speak multiple languages, subtitles are second nature usually so it follows for captioning.

[nevets88]

9 hours ago, boogielicious said:

We did watch Hamilton with close captioning because the rap was so fast we couldn’t keep up. But otherwise, only the rare foreign film.

Yeah, if you're watching it the first time, imho it's way better with the captioning on.

[trombettista_vecchio]

I often do, perhaps because I'm so accustomed to watching subtitled foreign language films on Netflix.

Watching an English language film, I sometimes can't make out dialog otherwise.

[Hohjoe]

I don’t care for closed captioning in any TV show or movie. And I don’t watch foreign films because of CC.

I have a hearing problem, and I have a device I can place in from of the soundbar that transmits sound to my devices, I also take it to movie theaters and place it on the chair arm, and if I can’t understand the dialogue with that, I just ignore it.

I rented a Netflix movie A Man Called Ove by one of my favorite authors, Fredrik Backman, hoping for an English version, but it was closed captioned and I watched maybe 30 seconds of the movie, sadly sealed it up and mailed it back.

[Kaiju]

yes always. I got so used to it watching foreign movies that now it feels weird not having subs or closed captions on. 

[billchao]

I usually have them on for movies and shows. I’m used to watching tv with subtitles anyway.

[Strandly]

I'll have it on 99% of the time for movies I haven't seen before.  Can't stand mumbling dialogue, ugh.