Generally speaking, there are a great deal of features from DP that relate to film scoring that many of us would kill to see in Logic. And not just from DP, Pro Tools as well. Here are some examples:
Setting your song start in a Pro Tools session is as flexible as you want - meaning that the tempo map can begin wherever you want in the session, with minutes (even hours) of free-timed usable space
before you hit bar one and the metronome starts counting. This is invaluable for working on feature film cues. Say you are writing a cue that plays near the end of, say reel 4 of a feature. In Logic, you have a couple of choices.. You either import the video reel, get it to start at TC 4 hours (since it's reel 4), and then just spot the start of your cue way down later into your timeline, and start writing your music there. This is not too bad a way of working,
except that it means that when it comes to scoring, your cue starts at a ridiculous bar number, like bar 1356 or something. It's not an insurmountable annoyance, but it does unnecessarily overcomplicate the communication that follows
with the people doing the transcription of the scores, and also makes each master Logic project per cue have a confusing inconsistency with the eventual corresponding Pro Tools session you inevitably work with later to record the orchestra. It also means that using a feature like freeze tracks becomes very unwieldy, because if you want to freeze a track it will generate a file all the way from the song start, taking far too long and wasting way too much drive space.
The other option is to just use the video sync settings in Logic so that the video reel starts playback much later in the film, so that what is actually bar 1 in Logic actually is the start of the cue. However, when you do this, you can't watch the earlier parts of that reel within that Logic Project.. This can be a big hindrance, because when writing for features it's usually a really good idea to have all of the other cues you've written (or that are still in development stage) bounced as a stereo demo mix and placed in sync to picture so you can quickly jump around the reel and listen to them all in order to maintain coherency in your writing.
I've been asking at Logic Feedback for a long time for them to pleeeease consider making the Bar 1 start point as flexible as it is in Pro Tools, for just this reason. Or, to use their brains and come up with something even better, with the situations detailed above in mind. I know that myself and others also pestered them to bring 'import session data' to Logic, which has finally made an appearance in the new selective track import feature, so I hope this means they do eventually listen.
As for DP.. again, there are many many things film composers would die of pleasure to find in Logic, and probably they'd be of use to other users too. The hit point calculation functions seem very much like something Logic should have. I've never really understood any actual use of the create markers by scene cuts function in Logic, it still seems like a bit of a gimmick to me that I've yet to find a real use for. But that said, if they'd only take another look at that function, then actually talk to and listen to some film composers about what they could actually use.. there is probably the basis for making it into something useful. Logic already lets you set up several tempo variations, and switch between them.. so it seems to me that there is just a bit of work to do tying all of these almost-useful features together in order to finally make Logic as flexible for film work as DP is.
One other feature in DP that I've always been a strong advocate for in bringing it to Logic is chunks. I won't go into the details of it here, but some variation of that kind of functionality would be very very welcome in Logic. Yes, you can pack stuff in folders in Logic and build up an arrangement that way, but it doesn't quite get you there. If it were possible to have more than one arrangement per Logic project, each of them using the very same mixer with the same tracks and the same plug ins loaded in, you could work very efficiently on writing multiple cues that use the same sound palette, without wasting enormous amounts of time reloading your entire orchestra of sounds each time you want to work on a different cue. Folders don't cut it, because things like automation remaining the same across copies of different tracks means you can't really have a group of totally independent music cues within the one project.
In my view, Logic still has a fair bit to learn (or basically, just copy) from DP and Pro Tools.. Even if those features were brought to Logic in a fairly basic way, that would be great. But if they really took them on and implemented them in a sophisticated, freshly thought out way, we'd really have something.
