A two-part TV special broadcast by ARD TV in Germany, Brüder (Brothers) is tells a harrowing story of indoctrination and terrorism, with Morocco substituing for Syria during filming. SWR engineer Peter Tielker handled the location recording, with the assistance of Cedar Audio’s DNS 2 on set.
‘You might ask what I was doing with a DNS 2 dialogue noise suppressor in Morocco,’ he invites. ‘When I got it for production testing, I was still in Stuttgart, and it justified its existence every day. I didn’t have to worry about refrigerators, air conditioners, blowers, exhaust ducts, or many other noise sources. The sound recordist encounters these every day on set and, while there are of course limits to what the DNS 2 can do, I could easily determine these and adjust things accordingly. I really liked that.
‘Once we got to North Africa, I was undecided about how to best use the DNS 2 in my set-up,’ he continues. ‘On the first test day, I tried routing the boom mic through Channel 1 and the personal mics through Channel 2. But I quickly realised that I wasn’t happy with that because I was aware that other signals weren’t benefitting.
‘So I changed the set-up to send my mix via an aux path through the DNS 2, which I then routed back into an input on my Sound Devices 688T. Due to the near zero latency of the DNS 2, there was no loss of synchronisation between the sound and the picture, and my cleaned version was later available as an alternative to the original mix. It’s not difficult to choose appropriate settings and, if the guys in post think that I’ve over-processed something, they can always go back to the original audio.’
‘Anyone who enjoys experimenting with the DNS 2 should try it on every shoot. I am thrilled with it and would not be without it.’
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