Paul Maunder takes a look at Audio Design Desk’s DAW Bridge which syncs any DAW such as Logic Pro, Pro Tools and more to Final Cut Pro so editors can create professional audio within their video editing workflow.

The team at Audio Design have been hard at work recently. As well as winning Best of Show and Product of the Year awards at NAB 2022 for their Audio Design Desk DAW, they’ve also found the time to create an extension for Final Cut Pro called DAW Bridge. DAW Bridge syncs Logic, Pro Tools and other DAWs to Final Cut Pro.

Once installed, it’s a simple matter of enabling MTC in your DAW and Final Cut Pro, setting the MTC in and out and then checking that the frame rate and timecode start time match between Final Cut Pro and your DAW. The ability to synchronise a Digital Audio Workstation with Final Cut Pro is a great option for audio post on the same machine. Rather than having to export the video file and then import into your DAW, DAW Bridge allows you to just sync the two applications very easily. The timeline scrubber in Final Cut Pro will bring the Logic timeline to a specific frame and you can start playback either from Logic or from the DAW Bridge extension in Final Cut Pro.

With Pro Tools, the timeline won’t scrub in the same way the Logic timeline will but if you’re working on audio post, you will most likely be moving around the timeline and triggering all playback from within Pro Tools anyway.

DAW Bridge is a simple yet ingenious piece of software which can be a big time saver whenever you’re working on a video edit and post production sound on the same machine. It makes the most sense when you have a dual screen setup, running the video in Final Cut Pro on one screen and the audio in your DAW on the other. Check out the video to see DAW Bridge in action with Logic and Pro Tools.

What Is Audio Design Desk?

Audio Design Desk is part DAW, part sampler, part sound library which has been used on programs for Netflix, HBOMax, Hulu and more. This multi-award winning platform that lets you perform sound design on your QWERTY keyboard (or an external controller) as if it were an instrument – placing hits, rises, footsteps, punches, and gunshots to your project – all in real-time.

This intelligent approach to audio post-production provides a lightning-fast workflow for adding sound effects, foley, ambience, and music to your video sequence. It comes with over 45,000 royalty-free sounds, loops and music cues, which are all embedded with Sonic Intelligence and an embedded sync marker so each sound knows where it is meant to sync to video. You can try it for free by heading over to the Audio Design Desk website via the button below.