I really appreciate that the app is just an up front price! I probably don't really need it but at that price and straightforwardness it's not really a big loss if I don't use it much so I grabbed it. I looked at the other apps and realized they had made Halide as well which I tried out for a bit, for some reason thought it was subscription only & decided I didn't want it that much while clearing out subscriptions, and just (re)noticed they say you can buy it outright too. Initially I probably saw a high price tag and wanted to see how long I'd really like it for but going back into the app I can't seem to find the straightforward purchase option (perhaps because my initial year subscription hasn't expired?) which means I can't find how much it is without searching the net.

Perhaps I'm just uneducated and there is a place to still see it in the app with an active subscription or see the IAP price on the app store but even if there were it'd all just be a pain compared to "It's $9.99, wanna buy?" in your face at the app store and anywhere you read about it.

The only other (very minor) thing that gave me a startle was the onboarding process asks if you want to go "starter" or some other more advanced category. I thought I missed that it would try to upsell you until I reread and saw it meant I could select either layout type out of the box. Not sure that's really the apps fault as much as my paranoia after having just checked through all the above and being left thinking I missed something.

As a long time amateur photographer (using physical cameras and lenses), I have Halide (by the same company) on my iOS home screen for when I need to take a real phono on my iPhone. I use it all the time without issue. And would recommend it to any photographer.

So I paid for Kino without hesitation. Just fired it up, set BNW grade, pressed record, and it immediately crashed. Tried again and it crashed again. Tried AGAIN and it worked... (iPhone 13 mini, iOS 17.4.1).

I have faith this will be worked out soon.

Looks very cool - but will be curious to see how the results from this end up comparing to Blackmagic's excellent (and free) pro iOS video app (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagiccamera)

"one simple principle: make good products and charge money for them."

Thank you for the one-time purchase option. It's a win already on today's software world.

Gotta love Apple's App Store. Search for "kino" and get a competing app as an ad, but then numerous other apps that aren't Kino including a variety of keno games. Search for "kino pro video camera", same situation, but finally find it in position #5 despite being an exact title match. Bravo App Store search team. (The same happened when Threads launched.)

It's refreshing to see you kept the website simple. No stupid scroll jacking or fancy (read distracting) transitions or scroll effects.

I like supporting independent software studios like yours who try not to sell out, so bought it without hesitation, even though I don't shoot a lot of video with my iPhone. This will probably make me experiment more with video.

I'm interested in the benefits of this app for anyone who doesn't have an iPhone 15 Pro that takes video in Apple Log. The post made it seem it seem to me like an iPhone 15 Pro was required.

I don't know much about the company and never used their products, but this article is such a delicious read: https://www.lux.camera/orion-from-idea-to-launch-in-45-days/

Really tells how much they care about their craft

I wish titles on HN would clarify the platform for limited releases like this. This is iOS exclusive.

"Now, it's not always possible for Kino to pick cinematic settings, such as when shooting in bright daylight."

Since the phone's cameras are fixed aperture, you lose one leg of the exposure triangle. Instead, they lean heavily on the shutter speed as ISO is also a function of the chip. Increasing the shutter speed also increase the jello effect from the rolling shutter. Using an ND filter helps. If you find yourself without an ND filter but you have your sun glasses, shoot your camera through a lens on your sunglasses. It'll be awkward but it will help. Bonus points if your sunglasses are polarized. You can rotate your sunglasses to "dial" in the effect similar to a circular polarizer. I'd assume at this point that there are a plethora of lens filters available for cheap.

For a video recording app, it's an interesting marketing decision that there's only one video on the page. And at least on my computer, it doesn't play, I only hear the audio.

These folks have a stellar reputation, and I'll be buying this app on that (and the I-was-expecting-more-digits price) alone, but I would have enjoyed seeing some kind of short film "shot on Kino". If only to see some professional work.

On Android there is https://www.motioncamapp.com/ which has been doing raw video for years.

This is great! Just yesterday I was looking for a way to get a daylight 5500k white balance on videos the same way I do in Halide but it seems there’s no way to do that in the built in camera app.

I know you can “lock white balance” but it is still nudging it towards neutral before locking.

Unfortunately there’s no white balance option in Kino, but I already love its Auto Motion and manual focus. Maybe you’d be open to adding a white balance control too?

I also think it would make sense to have an option to persist the chosen white balance even after the app is quit. Same on Halide. I prefer “daylight” on all my shots [1], but I have to switch from AWB every time.

Sorry for the premature feature request, Kino is awesome anyway, the UI is so so good! and thank you for launching it with 50% off!

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eQPPa_8Z13o

I just downloaded this and ran it on my iPhone 15 Pro Max and the video quality is incredible. I had missed that Apple even added LOG support in the past, and the quality of color coming out of this thing is incredible. This is the first time I've seen video (even just a small test) from a phone camera truly look properly "cinematic" without taking footage into Resolve to grade it manually, etc. Bravo.

> Speaking of accidental taps, when gripping the side of your phone to keep things stable, we found it too easy to accidentally tap buttons.

I have this problem CONSTANTLY with the iPhone 15 Pro Max, not when filming, but when doing everyday tasks. Something about the edge of the phone is such that a bit of my palm goes over just enough of the screen to trigger gestures, and now the YouTube video I’m watching is double speed or something I’m reading scrolls to the top for no reason.

I’m generally good about not dropping my phone (knock on wood) so I’d rather not get a case just to fix this weird touch sensitivity issue. As far as I recall this wasn’t an issue with my iPhone 12 Pro Max.

As a former happy Halide user, I bought their previous new app Spectre on launch, but sadly haven't found a good chance to use it.

(Why "former"? I switched over to Apple's Camera app for the bulk of my casual photography when Apple introduced Live Photos, since I really like the added vividness of having a video moment attached.)

I don't do many videos, and the Camera app (along with their Action Mode software video stabilisation) seems to do everything I need it to, so I'm not sure if I would be able to use any of the "pro" features here at all.

I wish they just said, "color grading made easy on the iPhone 15" in their copy. And then if they wanna dive in a explain it, fine.

This looks cool but the line about “show don’t tell” is followed by a LOT of telling.

I'm tempted to buy this while it's discounted, but if I'm a realist, I've taken 7 videos this year for a total of 2 minutes 47 seconds. I'm probably not the target market, but I'm glad to know options like this exist.

The editorialized title should probably be changed. I get that the original one (“Introducing Kino”) is not descriptive enough, but at the same time “Kino: Pro Video Camera” is misleading since it's not a camera (let alone a professional one) but a camera app for iPhone.

The original Matrix wasn't color graded like that! They only pushed the green levels in the subsequent home video release!

At the $9.99 price point, I'd buy an Android version in an instant.

At a subscription or a significantly higher price point, I wouldn't.

Plural of anecdote isn't data, but anecdote is better than nothing, so there you have it.

> With AutoMotion, Kino automatically choses the best exposure settings for cinematic motion blur.

The part I've italicized above should be "chooses".

Great looking app though!

I like the still from Con Air (sporting Cyrus 'The Virus'), but do people actually use a phone to shoot 'serious' movies? Even amateur, super low-budget ones? When so many cameras that can be bought used for dirt cheap, shoot D-Log, and many have interchangeable lenses, and an actual shutter button, and removable SD cards, etc.

Taking pictures with a phone is unpleasant enough, but shooting movies is another world of pain.

I purchased the app! I love the MF, and the grades look great. Can I make a feature request? One thing I have never seen on a camera app is a “record pause” button, like we used to have on old school video cameras (on pressing, it pauses the recording then continues when you press again, making seamless cuts in a single scene). IMO that would make this a killer app.

On graphene is so I'm unsure how well this could work...but I might recommend this to my family members that only buy iphones.

Question I do have though: is the purchase done through the app store or your website, and if its done via the app store or website, can I use it on as many of my own devices attached to the account? Or is it more of a 1 liscense per device?

Second: the presents you have sound nice and you mention that "Of course you can turn off Instant Grade to save the original Apple Log footage, allowing you the flexibility to change your look in our video reviewer. " does this support saving the original apple log footage, then opening that footage in the app and being able to preview how the different effects would look? And can I export the effected footage as a copy of the original that way I can have both the original and graded footage without overwriting the original data?

…app. Pro Video Camera App.

It's not in the title, but it really should be.

Unimpressed. It's just an adobe filter ported to a phone. Just found the equivalent of people who buy vinyl.

Hi, I’ve just bought the app, congratulations on your release! Wishing for real time de-squeeze for anamorphic lenses users. And one more thing. If there’s any way to make it compatible with various gimbals and I mean like actually compatible with zoom/focus controls etc, it’d be a killer feature.

If you want to say "lets you do color grading", then fine. But claiming/implying this can make "pro video" or stuff that looks like it came out of a cinema camera is absurd. I know they don't say that outright, but it is heavily implied that the only, or major, difference is just color space and grading. And the name is just...laughable.

> On a technical level, why does video shot on an iPhone look different than one shot on a big Hollywood camera?

...and then they launch into color grading and whatnot.

The real answer:

Because the pixel pitch on a cinema digital camera is four times the area of the pixels on an iPhone which allows for much greater light gathering which means lower noise, and the sensor is far less limited by diffraction.

Because the iPhone lens, being so tiny, has almost zero depth of field and that looks like shit.

Because the people operating the camera are very good at cinematography.

...not because of some software.

I’m glad the page does a call out to the Invisible CG series.

I know it’s a quick aside but it’s important for people in the trade to stand by each other.

On a different note, I am curious though how the page manages to use so much copyright content though. I always think that’s a risky move.

"Opening a LUT file directly from an app will give you an option to open in Kino...even works in Messages!" - Anyone able to test how tapping on a .cube in iMessages opens in Kino? Last time I tried to code something like this, Messages is the holdout in not working properly. This StackOverflow I found requires a QuickLook extension: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22826978/custom-extensio... So does Kino open directly or is there 2 taps to open from iMessage?

I didn't see it mentioned here, but is there any support for timecode?

Is it just me or does the marketing seem to disagree with itself a bit?

On the one hand it is talking about how until the iPhone 15 Pro one of the issues is that you were stuck with whatever version of the video your iPhone decided to record, but then it is talking about how this recording app is not just recording straight log and doing its own magic? What am I missing here, arn't they doing the exact thing that they were saying was bad in the first place?

Related to that, they seem to talk about LUT's but if with this we are saying that we can use these prebaked LUT's what exactly does that get me over using prebaked LUT's in my video editor?

I am curious how this compares to BlackMagic Camera.

Also curious how this will standup when Final Cut Pro Camera launches later this year (but that is obviously only valuable if you use FCP).

For $10, I may download it and give it a shot. But I am not fully sure I am seeing the value proposition here and I feel like there has to be something I am really missing here. If it isnt targeting the pro market as some commenters are saying, then what is the point of this over the built in camera app?

For context, I do my recording on an iPhone 15 pro max so maybe this isnt targeted at me?

Kino is also the german word for cinema

Just so you know: this app does not support zooming, it only switches between lenses. (This was a little surprising to me, but I'm not a video professional.)

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned that this appears to be a (very polished) "Hipstamatic for video" yet. I feel like Hipstamatic has been a zombie app for years now, but was once beloved and at one point in 2011-2012 people spoke about it alongside Instagram...

Obviously video is harder, but the "analog film" UI looks mighty familiar... ;)

Does it come with a gold plated audiophile quality cable i can use to tap my reticule? i don't know what any of that means, but i really, really want to feel like a big shot movie director. Where do i send my money? Is it okay if i tell people i work for HBO or Netflix while sticking an iPhony in their face, or should i tell them i am an influencer.

Insta-buy as soon as I saw the “Data not collected” privacy label.

Thanks for not bundling spyware like everyone does in apps these days. I’m happy to support anyone who isn’t spying on users.

I don’t use Halide specifically because it does phone home (and is IAP subscriptionware cancer).

Even though I shoot log and use Resolve, this might be fun for quick stuff without a round trip through the desktop computer.

Can we change the microphone source with Kino, to a specific iPhone mic or if we are using any bluetooth device, like airpods?

I bought the app right away when I saw it. I wanted it for its color editing feature. The app is nice and easy to use, and I didn't have any problems with it.

But when I started recording, the app crashed. It crashed again. It crashed again. It crashes while I'm still recording. This was very frustrating for me.

P.S –– I use iPhone 13

That animation with the comparison swipes below "What if you could use all that powerful extra color data and get a cinematic look with one tap?" looks highly misleading. I've never seen original videos as bad as the ones used in the "before"-state. Am I wrong? I'm not into filming, so I might be.

Just a future suggestion. Can you make the record button go on for a set time at set intervals. Would be useful when filming action or yourself but you just want to capture a variety of clips as you're progressing at doing something. Eg. 15 seconds every 5 minutes as you're painting a room.

A "filmmaking" app prominently features a camera turned the wrong way (for video) on its homepage.

Please enlighten me, how are the color "grades" different from just a bunch of filters? Granted they have sleek marketing. But why is this app supposedly worth $10 (or $20 when not on sale)? Don't all free camera apps support filters for hdr videos?

Why does it say it’s 4 years old? Is that just when you initially put it in there during development?

When I upgrade my iPhone I will buy this immediately.

It's unclear if you already support this, but I would love an option to automatically bake graded footage back down to HEVC. I will never edit most of the video I take, I just want to dial in the look I want.

I did some quick testing. On my iPhone 15 pro it did not crash as some reported.

But the app did create a video file that has audio backed in at 2x the speed. So halfway true the video the audio stops already.

I guess this is an interesting app to keep eyes on after a few updates.

Not sure if it's my setup or me or what, but the AutoMotion video makes me feel queasy when it switches to AutoMotion on. Feels like VR sickness.

(Stock old Lenovo laptop with Intel iGPU and stock base-model X250 panel.)

Thanks for the honest pricing, and letting people own your software. I have an iPhone 11 with which I probably can't make the best use of Kino, but I bought anyway just to support you guys.

Somewhat unrelated, but it is my dream to one day build a product for this segment of the market: passionate users in an interesting niche who are using my product in pursuit of what they love.

Has anyone used both Kino and Blackmagic? I have the latter so I’m wondering if there’s a reason for me to buy Kino. I’m on iPhone 12 Pro, so can’t use log iirc

Cries in Android.

Realistically I don't blame em, but it sucks to see IOS get all the cool apps. With emulators coming to iOS I know my next phone will probably be an iPhone

Complete sidenote but I'm an accidental fan of Sandwich (video production company) and the promo video in this did not disappoint.

I love this landing page, excellent work. Steps me through lots of examples with clean and efficient writing. Nice work!

Edit: i just bought it

Beautiful app. At $9.99 it was an instant purchase.

Seems nice upon first use but either way it’s worth the $10 as a lesson in beautiful UIs

A breath of fresh air when there's no "AI" mentioned in a product launch

Remember when Apple banned camera apps that used the volume button to take photos?

> let's walk through a few of the tent-pole features

Hehe nice job on the Apple lingo signaling

But blackmagicCam is free..

Literally every color grading example shows log footage as the "before". Of course this lacks contrast and vibrancy because it's not meant to be watched "as is". Please show me regular footage as a baseline so it's a fair comparison.

Long time ago, I bought Halide from them, then they stopped supporting my preferred iOS version. Good riddance, I'm currently daily driving an Xperia and compared to it, that iOS app kinda looks like a Fisher Price toy now… ^^"

Unfortunately iOS only.

What's the font they're using for the UI?

I’ve used FilmicPro for years until bendyspoons acquired it and made a mess out of it. From there I jumped to BlackMagicCam from the DavinciResolve team and never looked back.

I already had VideoLUT and LumaFX so any kind of grading can be done afterwards.

I never had Halide.

Just saying, I’m trying to understand how Kino improves on this?

Wonder if Kino is an homage to Stargate: Universe

is there something like this but for DJI action 4/pocket 3 camera? doesn't seem like this app will run on iphone se

Unboxing experience in an app is super cool.

Does it disable (or allow for disabling) iPhone's dreadful dynamic tone mapping? (It makes exposure-locked footage look like auto-exposure is on)

Great app so far. Only taken a couple test shots, but it's great to use. Highly recommend an iPhone 15+ for ProRes support.

Kind of a tangent but I'm worried that "Kodiak" is not going to pass the "a moron in a hurry" test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_moron_in_a_hurry) and could get them in trouble. I for one read it as "Kodak" the first few times. Hopefully they cleared it with the owner of the trademark.

Take my money.

Looks pretty good.

We'll have to see where it goes, from here.

ctrl-f android: 0 words. Really? Interesting choice not to even mention it.