Comments on: I Heart ProTools VCA Faders!

By: Chuck Russom

Chuck Russom — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 08:00:16 +0000

Hey Tim,

Thanks for sharing. I love seeing/hearing others break down their work. Always educational seeing how others are doing things.

-Chuck

By: acoosticzoo

acoosticzoo — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 01:57:45 +0000

Thanks for the neat explanation. It’s amazing you’ve been using Protools since day one literally.

Regards
Josef Horhay
Mixing Engineer.

By: Designing Sound » 100 Articles/Tutorials about Sound Design, Film and Recording, Plus Wooshes Sound Desing

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:58:59 +0000

[...] I Heart ProTools VCA Faders! [...]

By: tim

tim — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:17:48 +0000

For most films we do seperate predubs of each component, so on a typical film mix schedule:
Dialogue predub = 5 days
Ambience predub = 2-3 days
Foley rpedub = 3 days
FX predub = 1-5 days

So for ambiences, I will take this session to Park Road Post, boot it up & assign all the tracks to direct outputs which feed into the Euphonix desk & the mixer then works through the film, scene by scene premixing the ambiences. So he will route all my source tracks from what I’ve labelled as Ambience A out to a recorder, which will record a 5.0 stem… ditto for source tracks B-> I

If the dialogue predub has been done before ambience, we will play it into the desk monitoring system so we can work in context & make sure the ambiences sit with the dialogue & feel real/appropriate… but even if the dialogue predub hasn’t happened, we would still use a dialogue guidetrack of some sort…

By: Nick R

Nick R — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:11:19 +0000

Pardon me for being a little OT, but I have a bit of a beginner question for Tim. Do you take this whole session to the Mix Stage,with the FX-A, B etc stems being simply submixes of live individual tracks, or do just separate out pre-mixed stems and combine them with Dialogue and Music into a mix session?

By: Enos Desjardins

Enos Desjardins — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 05:08:07 +0000

VCA’s in ProTools are nice indeed.

“Me ‘hearts’ too!

By: Tweets that mention the music of sound » I Heart ProTools VCA Faders! -- Topsy.com

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:23:17 +0000

[...] this page was mentioned by night bird (@thenightbird), Joe Griffin (@toxicbag_joe), Miguel Isaza (@misazam), tim prebble (@timprebble) and others. [...]

By: Cormac

Cormac — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:49:30 +0000

Nice one Tim, I’m just getting in to VCA’s for the short film I’m working on and it is, as you say, a bit of a revelation not having to suspend groups and worry about automation being lost.

By: Joe G

Joe G — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:14:26 +0000

This is a fantastic explanation! I had been using Aux channels to submix my groups, and eating up all sorts of processing power to accomplish it. I’m going to start incorporating VCAs on my next project…which as it happens, starts this weekend!

Thanks!