How do Pro Tools & Logic work together?

[Klotzi]

Hi,

I'm working with Logic for years but since I'm studying Audio Engineer I'm very interested in Pro Tools.
Do they work good together?
Are there any problems or very good things about it?
How do you use them together?
Can you please tell me your experiences about this.

Thanks,
Christian

[daeron80]

A couple of years ago I worked regularly in a studio where Logic and PT were used together on almost every project. It worked very well. This was a Mac running system 9. Pro Tools version 5.3 24-MIX. Logic was version 6, IIRC. I'm afraid I have no experience doing it with LE or system X.

Generally speaking, sessions were started by building a MIDI track in Logic, maybe adding a few temporary audio tracks for reference. Then we'd bring in the session musicians and have them replace most of the parts by tracking into Pro Tools, muting tracks in Logic as necessary as we went. Often, there were 1 to 4 MIDI tracks that were not replaced, and I'd track them into PT during the mix session as their final sound(s) were determined. Sometimes, I'd export an audio file from PT and import it into Logic to use a VST plug-in or something on it. Logic's bit crusher was quite nice on drums, for example. I would get the setting I liked and then track it back into PT and disable it in Logic.

I found that switching back and forth between the two programs was nearly seamless as long as you did things in the right order. Since Logic was set up to use TDM as its primary audio program, I would quit Logic before launching PT, then relaunch Logic. It would automatically aquire only Direct TDM as its audio engine when PT was running. We used ESB TDM plug-ins to bridge audio from Logic into PT so we could hear it. I would have to reassign any TDM tracks in Logic to Direct TDM at that point.

The really sweet part was, it didn't matter which program was in the foreground, as far as transport was concerned. They automatically followed each other. It almost never crashed, no matter how complex the mixed sessions were, or how often we switched programs, or even switching programs during playback (although it might sometimes choke and stop playback at that point, it wouldn't crash).

I have used PT with other programs (anybody remember Opcode Studio Vision?), and there were always hangups with them. Logic worked far better with PT than anything else I'm familiar with.