This free video tutorial from Avid is designed to demonstrate the power and efficiency of the VCA fader workflow in Pro Tools with EUCON-based control surfaces.

VCAs can be an incredibly powerful way to help manage sessions, especially ones with a significant track count. Surprising VCA Master Faders were added to Pro Tools in v7.2 and were made available to Native users in Pro Tools 12.2. VCA Group Spill and the Layouts feature on Eucon control surfaces can give you speedy and easy access to every channel of your mix helping you to save time. It also makes it easier to manage increasing large sessions with relatively small control surfaces.

You can create a VCA channel from the Hew Track menu or use the shortcuts Command+Shift+N on a Mac or Control+Shift+N on a Windows Pro Tools computer or use the soft key on the Pro Tools Control app.  Remember that VCAs don't use any voices and are a convenient low impact way of managing and controlling your sessions.

You can also add a VCA fader to existing groups by assigning a VCA fader in the Modify Group window using the VCA drop-down menu. Adding a prefix 'v' can help identify VCA faders more easily. If you have a lot of groups, you could use the Batch Renaming feature added in Pro Tools 12.8.2 to quickly add the 'v' prefix to all your group VCA faders.

VCA Group Spill is now possible even with the smaller control surfaces like the Artist Mix and Avid S3 as well as the Avid S6 of course.

Using the Layouts function in the Pro Tools Control app gives you up to 48 user-defined layouts to help you quickly show and hide the different elements of your session.