We watched EVERYWHERE EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE last night. It was okay. I didn’t like the multilingual thing, either. It seemed perfectly realistic, but there were two sets of subtitles (one had cues like “speaking Mandarin” and the other had the actual translation) and the first set overlapped the second, making it very hard to read the translation and follow the movie. I suspect my screen is smaller than they expected or something. But it was really annoying.
On top of that, i didn’t love the movie, although the mother-daughter bonding was thematically nice, as we were watching to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. But i found it visually extremely “busy”, which is unpleasant. And the plot was…not strong enough to make that much work worth it.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here, two sets of overlapping subtitles? The first time I saw the film was on the largest screen in the country, but the second time was on a tiny airplane seatback tv and I had zero issues reading the subtitles.
The movie decides what, when, and where captions appear on the screen. For example, the latest Black Panther movie, which has many subtitles, made sure the captions never overwrote the subtitles.
The streamed Black Panther movie is my cite, so at least one studio takes care to do it well. I don’t know how a movie’s production system puts captions in, but the end product is their responsibility. The words spoken are under copyright, so any captioning is by permission or in violation.
I’ve watched many other movies with both captions and subtitles for the other languages, and never had this problem. But I wasn’t really blaming the movie so much as explaining why I found watching it unpleasant. My guess, as I said, is that my screen is smaller than they expect, and the formula for “where is the caption” has something to do with the screen dimensions.
Not sure if I’m following your reasoning. Did a very quick search and found this article that talks about Amazon changing the closed captions in Black Panther (I think. They call them subtitles.) Which would be weird if they were already part of the movie.
There may be settings (just like font and size) on her TV that determine where the CC is positioned on the screen. The words will be consistent from TV to TV, but not what they look like or where they are positioned.
Nope. No settings. I’ve never seen setting, and all my friends watch with subtitles (closed captions, if you prefer.) They always show up near the bottom, centered.
Right but if the captions showing the translated foreign language are being obscured by the closed captioning, you might watch the scene again with the closed captioning turned off.
That movie is NOT good enough to watch again. Maybe I should have turned off the subtitles. (which are called “subtitles” in most of the interfaces, and often come in more than one language.) I didn’t think of it at the time. anyway, it turns out you CAN read words even when part of the word is obscured, because there’s a lot of redundancy. It’s just annoying.
The captions are encoded into the movie stream, as are the video and the audio. The encoding includes the letters, their color, location, timing, etc. It’s up to the device to decide how to display the captions (as it does for the video and the audio). If it is done well, the captions and subtitles work together well. We watched the Black Panther movie on a large television via the TV’s Disney+ app, so it’s not surprising everything worked well.
Other studios might not put as much care into the encoding, and other apps on other devices might not do as good a job decoding and displaying, either. Diagnosing where the problem is requires some effort, but from the viewer’s point of view, I’m not sure it really matters–the movie had a problem.
It is definitely a problem I’ve had now that it’s fashionable to watch with the closed captions on. Pretty frustrating if there are subtitles when actors are speaking unfamiliar languages and there’s a closed caption right on top of the subtitles that says, “Speaking Mandarin” or whatever.
Then your TV has a default position. The position of the CC can vary from TV to TV, some which have the option to move them). In other words, it’s your TV that is positioning the captions over the subtitles; not the filmmakers or streaming platform.