@Greg Andonian; @Jeremy Garchow

Good point Greg,

Probably didn't get mentioned because we tend to focus on the 3 main candidates, but I for one being an old Flame and Inferno guy think Smoke is quite a powerful tool and certainly has its place. There exists a nice workflow between Avid to Smoke and in fact that is the primary delivery process requirement for shows at Fox Broadcast. With that being said, note that Smoke is really being used for final conform, color and perhaps some final comps and gfx, but not the core creative editing. I tend to agree with Jeremy that it probably isn't the best tool for features.

Now that Speed Grade is part of CS6, that and my Magic Bullet Plug-ins are really more Color Correction than I wish to handle, and for my colorist friends for most of them it's not about the software, but the panel. Give them a full Da Vinci 2K Panel and it could be hooked up to a melted box of crayons and they'd take that over a mouse, trackball, wacom or even a tangent wave panel hooked up to the best software that existed.

Ultimately I hope we as an industry and even as a society at large that is embracing media as part of its every day language and interactions, will reach a point that the "craft" of editing or ultimately that of "story telling" will be the primary discussion; with the tools continually improving, getting cheaper and basically staying out of the way of the creative process. If our discussions can focus on technique over tool, than whether we are handed a sharp rock and celluloid, or a holographically captured image emulated directly to the neurological synapses, we will just look for where the button is that accomplishes the feature we want.

Lightworks is an amazing FREE open source tool, Sony Vegas has some great 3D capabilities, and go to the developers link on YouTube and check, out some of the features available in the editing tools online, all that to say, "have a big tool box, for there will always be something new and improved to accomplish certain tasks, but sometime going back to that trusty old philips head and a claw hammer are needed to finish the job."