On Fri, 3 Oct 2003 18:34:40 -0700, Robert Orban wrote
(in message ):

There seems to be an absolute plague of unintelligible dialog in
current feature film mixing, and one suspect is the various dynamic
noise reduction processes that are popular. I started to doubt my
hearing, except that older films seem to sound just fine.
-----------------------------snip----------------------------

There's a trend in modern feature film sound recording today to try to use
the actual production sound dialog as much as possible. I think in the old
days, at least half of the dialog would be looped; in action films (like STAR
WARS in the 1970s), probably 3/4 of the dialog would be looped, maybe more.

But it's a lot different today. Part of it is a creative trend, where the
directors know that the performance from a line looped in an ADR studio will
be markedly different than what was done on location. You can make a good
argument that great actors can actually improve performances this way, but I
suspect that actors are losing this ability as new generations come and go.
And it's hard to argue with the fact that a looped line never sounds quite
the same as one done on location, no matter how much EQ, reverb, or
processing is done to the sound.

And another part is that the equipment has improved to the point where small
microphones, digital wireless transmitters, and digital recorders have made
it much easier to get good dialog quality on location. Multi-track recording
makes it possible to use a plethora of wireless mikes, shotguns, and hidden
mikes, even within the same scene, so that no actor is ever out of range.

But the real problem (IMHO) is speed and lack of post-production time.
Movies are being rushed through so quickly, there often isn't time to bring
an actor in and re-record the dialog. So the poor mixers have to basically
just make do with what they have, even if that means subjecting the location
sound to massive amounts of digital processing to remove generator noise,
clothing rustling, wind noise, etc.

Lastly, there are problems where some inexperienced directors ignore warnings
from experienced mixers and demand excessive levels, sometimes at the expense
of dialog intelligibility. There's no easy answer to this, but well-recorded
movies do still exist, and not all movies sound bad, even today.

--MFW