Hi Fred, welcome back! I knew you'd return.
First complain: It's good, but still requires a roundtrip. No matter if easy, still is a roundtrip like AE is with PP. And IMO, this is a type of workflow that really needs to disppear, and will disppear.
Now that Smoke 2013 is at less than 4.000 bucks (yes they cutted 11.000), it's to date the only high-end software in the industry that really is a game changer in the sense that it's the only all-in-one
app capable to operate at the highest demanding levels as well as suitable for some indy and small prod-houses.
Actually After Effects does all that and more, with perfect integration with Prelude (On set), Premiere, Audition, Photoshop, and most of the web-based apps. In this regard it has no equal, for any work on this planet. You can even edit with it if you want!
Second complain: The interface is toyish and the nodes are badly implemented IMO.
Color grading apps are built to interface with hardware systems, similar to audio DAWs. It is a fast way of working proven by the rigors from the days of tape in broadcast.
The algorithms are pretty basic - there's only so much you can do with color.
Third complain: it's a computer performance eater software. I results to me amazing that I can put an all Nuke 6 app into a old laptop and one of the most advanced compositing application this planet has ever seen works perfectly fine without a crash while Resolves sucks so much power just for a color correction tool. Something's not good the way the engineers have designed the program. It's over complex, sucks too much power for what it really does.
The developers at Nuke are geniuses beyond compare. I don't use Nuke any more, but I find its color grading interface better than any grading app. The only thing better than Nuke is AE.
I'm very curious to have informations about the Speedgrade integration in Adobe suite. If the tendency is really towards an all-in-one super app like Smoke, I think it's worth to consider. If some of you have info on speedgrade, I'd read it with interest.
I would avoid Speedgrade for now, even though it is as capable as Resolve. The future belongs to Speedgrade, as soon as Adobe integrates it with Bridge, the playback engine and so on. At $50 a month, how can one compete?
In the end, most editing and grading systems are already better than the average person using them. The basic tools are all there, and the only thing they can do is make it faster with wider codec support. Adobe has a huge lead in three areas: After Effects, Photoshop and Flash (which is making a comeback). On the other hand, Autodesk has Flame, but for how long?
An interesting experiment - until last year, I was still using CS3 on an old Core 2 Duo laptop to edit DSLR video in 1080p, with no lags whatsoever. In that respect, CS3 runs much faster than CS6!
There's a reason Adobe made CS2 free and not CS3.