Taming Dialogue with RX 10 and Cedar DNS One

Working on a vérité documentary recently, we faced the common issue of inconsistent dialogue levels and omnipresent location hum, captured on a boom with an MKH 416 into a MixPre-6 II. I tried a two-stage approach in post: first, a pass with iZotope RX 10's Dialogue De-noise module to specifically target the persistent low-end rumble and general room tone. This worked wonders for cleaning up the core noise without introducing too many artifacts, especially on less problematic takes.

However, for some trickier scenes with very uneven speech and noticeable background chatter, the RX 10 alone started to sound a bit 'processed' when pushed hard. So, I then layered in Cedar DNS One, using it more subtly as a broadband de-noiser, but critically, as a dynamic, reactive gate. Its ability to adapt to changes in the noise floor and attenuate only when dialogue was absent, or very low, maintained a natural feel much better than a standard expander.

What didn't work was trying to do too much with just one tool; pushing either RX 10 or DNS One too aggressively on their own definitely degraded the dialogue quality. The sequential, complementary use of both, one for precise noise reduction and the other for transparent ambient gating and level smoothing, yielded the best results. It's still a constant battle to preserve naturalness while eliminating distractions. Does anyone have a go-to methodology for handling heavily ambient dialogue where a single tool just isn't cutting it?