German production sound mixer Matthias Richter has worked on many successful cinema and TV productions – most recently alongside Oscar-winning director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck – and is now shooting the first German Netflix series, Dark. The shoot finds him using Cedar Audio’s DNS 2 dialogue noise suppressor for the first time.

‘Like many of his colleagues, Matthias was initially very critical about using dialogue noise suppression on set, and we discussed the pros and cons at length before the first test’, says Uwe Seyfert from Cedar Deutschland. ‘But having tried it for the first two days of shooting, his reaction was, ‘how did we ever cope with recording location sound without Cedar?’.’

‘We had to shoot near a transformer station and normally, without the DNS 2, I would have rated that sound recording as a guide track, meaning that this scene would have required full ADR,’ Richter says. ‘Using the DNS 2, I could reduce the noise floor to a level that was just about acceptable. But even in quieter places I now use the DNS 2 – for example, to reduce the fan noise of our two Alexa 65 cameras – providing a noise free dialogue recording.

‘While mixing, I sometimes switch between the Cedar mix and the pure PFL signal without noise suppression,’ he continues. ‘My boom operator still doesn’t believe that this is the real sound on set. The director also preferred the sound of the processed audio after an A/B comparison. Nonetheless, to keep all of the options open to the postproduction guys, we also record the individual tracks unprocessed so that they can be used if they prefer.

‘The DNS 2 is really worth every penny, if only for giving my ears some relief on the set and me the confidence to know that the audio is going to be usable.’

More: www.cedaraudio.de