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 $9.99, wanna buy?" in your face at the app store and anywhere you read about it.
The only other (very minor) thing that gave me a startle was the onboarding process asks if you want to go "starter" or some other more advanced category. I thought I missed that it would try to upsell you until I reread and saw it meant I could select either layout type out of the box. Not sure that's really the apps fault as much as my paranoia after having just checked through all the above and being left thinking I missed something.
Give enough time (1-2y) and they will charge a subscription from you and lock you away from the app you've purchased.
I'm not a video editor so I can't speak to that but here's one example:
Most calorie counting apps want ~16AUD a month from me. That's what Disney+ costs and they spend billions of dollars making content. It's 3$ more than Spotify charges and they have almost every song ever made. It doesn't have to be free, or even a one-off cost, but it has to be reasonable. I'd pay 4$ for calorie counting features. 16? No.
People can only afford a limited number of subscriptions at a time, and with an ever-increasing number of companies putting their hand into that pocket, there is less to go around.
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.
Unfortunately, while we had a QA person on this, and nearly 100 beta testers, the iPhone camera APIs are a mine field. We’ll get a fix out as soon as we have details.
I did also find manual focus produced odd green visual artefacts in the live view as you move the focus control.
With that said, it’s a nice UI, hopefully the bugs can be ironed out!
It's the only app I've ever bought whose developer has done that bullshit.
I won't make that mistake again.
The alternative would have been to just release a separate app called Halide 2 and stop updating Halide 1. In that case, version 1 would probably fall apart pretty quickly due to OS and camera changes year to year.
I’m genuinely curious if you’d have preferred we stopped updating Halide 1, because we’re always trying to find the best way to support users while keeping the light on.
Could be related to the 13 mini cameras specifically.
Would hope to see them address these missing features in future updates, but at the moment there's nothing here to make me move away from Blackmagic for "serious" iPhone videography.
Thank you for the one-time purchase option. It's a win already on today's software world.
Putting on my Older Person hat for a moment, software from indie publishers used to cost in the ballpark of $40 in the late 1980s (that's ~$100 in 2024 dollars after adjusting for inflation). $100 for a single version of a single app. When the next point release comes out, the publisher might give you a discount of 50%, so it might only cost you $50. A major release was often required for compatibility with a new OS version.
All the software we used back in the day? We spent significant money on it.
Do you think apps like these pomodoro apps would sell in sustainable quantities if it were $100 for major releases and $50 for point releases? What if it were $100 to get the current version every time iOS did a major version upgrade?
Or is it more likely that these apps would simply not exist?
People say they want one-time purchases, but the small $ subscriptions are more consumer-friendly than is immediately apparent. And they support a vastly more comprehensive software ecosystem.
Software costs time and money. People complain that they don't want the same uninspired corporate created junk – and then they balk at paying indie developers a reasonable amount for apps.
So much work goes into this stuff! It's so tempting for indie devs to just take the high paying job, and then congrats – no more unique and interesting apps like this.
> People are greedy af
I hope the irony of these two statements isn't lost on you
Personally, for smaller developers, I attribute this more to ignorance than malice (greed). Pricing is hard so they just look around and pick what they see happening around them without taking a moment even to think, forget about doing actual research.
Whether it's ethical for developers to cater to that kind of helpless behavior is another question.
I see cases where it makes sense...but I also see the need for development to get paid their salery, and once you have reached all the users you can....their is no new user growth....and if your just selling based off a one time fee then that means you got very little income except the random guy who might donate, but a company shouldn't rely on donations to keep products alive.
If the thing needs updates or changes regularly say once very 6 months....due to changes in standard or just keeping things updated....this stuff costs money to keep developers paid.
My crude C program I wrote that converts an input between celcius or Fahrenheit is not really going to change. Unless I want to also support data inputs other than floating point numbers, I don't need to update or modify anything. But other stuff is more complex and might change due to standards, advancements, and the needs of the users.
Just this morning I searched for "Strava" and the top result was some random hiking app.
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.
The main site doesn't use scroll-jacking, i.e. scrolling feels like walking through a muddy swamp.
The other effects are subtle enough that they don't make me want to leave the site, i.e. make my laptop fan spin more violently.
Really tells how much they care about their craft
Also not mentioning the platform anywhere in the title or even article body itself is inheritly deceiving.
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.
Surely that would only affect polarized light, like glare from reflections, no?
Possibly that's all you're saying (I understand the general purpose of polarized lenses) but it sounded like you were suggesting you could make the whole scene darker -- and thus improve the motion blur effect -- by rotating the lens.
That would be true if the iPhone's lens also has polarization...
https://www.seattleu.edu/scieng/physics/physics-demos/optics...
Did you read over this "Bonus points if your sunglasses are polarized."? I'm not talking about regular polarized lenses in your glasses. I specifically said the world sunglasses multiple times. The entire point of sunglasses is to make the whole scene darker. I really don't know how to describe this any more plainly.
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.
However, the advertisement in the blog post made by Sandwich Video was entirely shot on Kino.
Funny enough, the website for the app is https://www.shotwithkino.com/, but it also doesn't have feature any videos shot with Kino.
The name they've chosen for the app, Kino, is a bit weird to me. When I hear the word Kino, I immediately start to think about lighting as that's how people refer to lights from Kinoflo which gained popularity from their fluorescent lights in the years before LEDs took over.
Borrowed from French cinéma, clipping of cinématographe (term coined by the Lumière brothers in the 1890s), from Ancient Greek κίνημα (kínēma, “movement”) + γράφω (gráphō, “write, record”). Compare German Kino (“cinema”), ultimately from the same Greek source.
Example: Movie XYZ is pure kino
The UI on the iOS Kino app is beautiful, crafted, and elegant. The UI on MotionCam (even after the update) is functional, brutalist, and purely an engineering driven, unstyled Android 4.4 UI elements style.
But MotionCam Pro gives full control, and even a RAW mode which wouldn't be possible on iPhone. You can even do ProRes (but it doesn't work very well for long unless you have a new phone with good cooling).
For the purpose I use it for (magnifying glass/telescope, using S23 Ultra), it's wonderful. But I always wished that the two worlds of Android and iOS development styles would collide for a moment....
Hopefully Flutter will fix that because the difference in usability is night and day. It's just a shame the Dart ecosystem is so dead.
My Thinkphone has a pretty awesome camera and native camera app with integrated RAW output, but these apps do often provide some features and polish beyond what's available in that tool. For example, I was just trying to take a long-exposure photo of the aurora (visible a couple weeks ago here in Michgan) and the limits on even the manual controls had ranges that limited what I could do. Spectre (or its equivalent) would have been awesome to have.
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!
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.
(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.
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.
The part I've italicized above should be "chooses".
Great looking app though!
> For one, there are artists who sculpts the contrast and color
emphasis mine
Taking pictures with a phone is unpleasant enough, but shooting movies is another world of pain.
Instead, I think the overall goal is to increase the video quality for times when you don’t have the chance to carefully consider which camera to use from a large selection of available cameras. Your iPhone is already in your pocket.
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?
It's not in the title, but it really should be.
> 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 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.
Are you referring to the shots from the Matrix and Blade Runner? In this case, I think we’re commenting on the source material, which falls under fair use. I think the imagery is iconic enough that it feels a bit silly to say “this is from The Matrix,” but I could be convinced otherwise.
Of course it’s obvious that the Matrix isn’t shot with Kino , but I think it’s still good form to caveat that it’s there for illustrative purposes.
It's called fair use. They are static shots and not even close to the magical "8 seconds" rule. They are providing dramatic examples that many people are familiar with. Showing the before/after of something your mom shot means nothing to people. Showing extremely famous examples immediately lets people know what is possible and to what extent.
I see nothing wrong with any of what was used or how it was used but especially why it was used.
Even with fair use, it’s still good form to attribute it. But more importantly , those images are intermixed among product clips/videos which can fall on the other side of fair use because it may give the impression that they are associated with the product.
That can be a tight line to walk and so it’s again usually best to specifically call out that they are there for illustrative purposes.
Again, PITA, but given the iOS infrastructure, I'm surprised it works at all.
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?
Obviously video is harder, but the "analog film" UI looks mighty familiar... ;)
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.
The only time Halide communicates with a server is when we do a controlled rollout of a feature, and anonymized reporting when a capture fails. I’d prefer we didn’t need either but 1) the App Store model doesn’t accommodate safe rollouts and 2) iPhone capture and photo library frameworks regularly break, and sometimes the only way to get a fix escalated is to have numbers in hand.
If you don’t want to subscribe to Halide, though, there is a one time purchase option in app.
What you want is the Privacy Policy, which links to https://halide.com/privacy/, which is a 404 page.
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
Yes, it's because you haven't seen raw log video before. It'll look very washed out when filming in log (and typically when previewing recent shots) but then in post-processing you'll actually tune the colors (called "color grading", in case you wanna seek out more about it).
That's only because it's not viewed in the right color space? (I'm using color space in the ICC sense to also include the transfer function).
For some reason video folks seem really intent on creating their own terms for everything that photographers already standardized with ICC. And to make things worse they decided to make the EOTF and OETF not be inverses of each other.
Of course things will look off if you display a log-encoded image on a display that uses a power-gamma. You have to linearize the input (invert the log-encoding) then delinearize (inverse power) before sending it to the display. With ICC-aware tools (that most photographer uses) this conversion is done automatically for you (e.g. colorsync on mac).
But for some reason video workflows are not icc color managed. As I understand the oetf is basically unused entirely: since edits are made under bt1886 conditions, effectively baking in this bt1886 assumption on the viewer side as well. This seems to be the exact opposite of how ICC workflows work, where regardless of the monitor color profile the editor uses, all edits are transferred to the underlying source color profile of the image.
The only page I've ever seen which actually acknowledges that "log encoding" is just an alternative to gamma encoding is https://imatest.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KB/pages/114161421..., as I discussed in an earlier rant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37877599
> Out of the box, Apple Log footage looks really flat. It's not meant to look good. It's meant to be edited later.
The before/after is about how you can apply each of those different prebuilt LUTs immediately with a tap, not about comparing how much better edited log looks than unedited log.
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.
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.
(Stock old Lenovo laptop with Intel iGPU and stock base-model X250 panel.)
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
I myself feel the same, with emus on iOS the only missing class of software at this point is like... Blink+V8 instead of WebKit+JSC as a browser choice.
Edit: i just bought it
Seems nice upon first use but either way it’s worth the $10 as a lesson in beautiful UIs
Hehe nice job on the Apple lingo signaling
normal iPhone output is great looking just not "the look"
I prefer without a comparison of iPhones version.
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?
We'll have to see where it goes, from here.
