If you were starting a company what comp software would you buy and why? (I guess this should probably be a poll)

This is an odd question to ask people because I think everyone is going to answer something along the lines of what ever they are using at the moment and also what your using the software to do. I learned Digital Fusion and After Effects. I like how Fusion works on specific scenes and footage more then AE, but AE is better for general work and is a little bit more intuitive although I hate how constrained it is. The guys that did CGI used Lightwave for along time so when they needed to use Maya for a project they didn’t like it much. I did get one solid answer about Lightwave and Maya from them in that Lightwave is a little more restricted but also easier to use, where as Maya has no restrictions, but then becomes infinitely more difficult to use. I don’t know if this helped you much but good luck with getting answers to what I think is a philosophical question.

Nuke with AE and Imagineer for Support.

Nuke just rocks. It is the way of the future. I already own it with Furnace, Tinder and Keylight. But I also own AE, motor, mocha, combustion, and shake.

It is so fast and robust.

Yeah I've got heavily into nuke. (expensive though)  What is imagineer? I'll have to look into that.

If the machines are going to be Macs, and there's not a huge amount of money floating around, I'd still go Shake to start with, with a view to transitioning to Nuke. In London, at least, the vast majority of freelancers know Shake over anything else.

Are you speaking *hypothetically* there, Hugh... ;)

It's ... uh ... entirely hypothetical... I've never even ... ahem ... thought about it in practical terms.....

<cough>

Uhm...Nuke for comp + AE for motion graphics. I don't think you need anything more...
Cheers,

Alessio